• Module 1: Getting Started – Architecture / framework
• Module 2: Movement and collision detection
• Module 3: Design – Sprites, boards and dialogs
• Module 4: Animations and sound
• Module 5: Initialization and Deployment
• Module 6: Advanced concepts (Physics, Multiplayer, Optimization)

Make sure to check out the article at http://www.microsoft.com/expression/news-press/newsletter/

Code: COMING SOON

Presenter: Scott McAndrew, Director of Strategy, Terralever
When: Tuesday, November 18, 2008, 2:00pm Eastern (11:00am Pacific)
Duration:  60 minutes
Includes Live Q&A

As the world of marketing continuously changes, organizations of all sizes must take a critical eye on where their prospects and customers get information about the industry, your brand and how they make buying decisions on the web.

Customers and prospects want to be reached with new marketing tools that involve the use of social networking sites and Web 2.0 technologies. Bottom line: businesses that have online marketing strategies have an edge over the competition.

Join Scott McAndrew, a strategic marketing guru with Terralever, an interactive marketing agency who’s clients include Red Bull, NBA, Facebook and Microsoft. In this webinar, Scott will help lay out your Marketing Playbook with the 7 Online Marketing Methods that will give you competitive advantage and change the way customers find you online.

During the webinar you will learn:

• Key challenges facing marketers today–and how to navigate the many options out there for you
• Tools you can start leveraging today in Social Media and Social Networks to build a community of brand advocates
• Demystifying vertical search. What is it? And how B2B, B2C and niche marketers are seeing benefits
• What’s possible–what is the benchmark
• How to measure, test and mature your online marketing program
• And much more

A few weeks back around PDC, Microsoft released the Silverlight Toolkit a collection of Silverlight controls developers and designers can use in there Silverlight projects. What is really cool about the way in which Shawn Burke’s team is working on control development, is this idea of releasing controls on Codeplex to get them quickly into the community.

If you play around with the toolkit you will quickly stumble on a new assembly called: “Microsoft.Windows.Controls.Theming”.  In a nut shell what this class does is give control developers access to the ability to theme their controls.  One of the key elements of this assembly is the “ImplicitStyleManager”. This class exposes some attached properties that allow designers to specify an external resource file (.xaml) containing styles which can be applied to a control and each of the controls children.

Here is what i did to get my RatingControl to use the implicit style manager. First I added a reference in my page.xaml to the Theming namespace.

xmlns:theming="clr-namespace:
Microsoft.Windows.Controls.Theming;
assembly=Microsoft.Windows.Controls.Theming"

Next I inserted a a few attributes into my rating control declaration to specify the location of my theme and how I wanted my theme applied.  I choose “Auto” which applies the theme immediately when the control is loaded.


Lastly I copied my generic.xaml file into a new themes directory located in my test Silverlight project and renamed it to “themeA.xaml”. Just to prove that the theme was loading I changed my RatingButton style to display an ellipse instead of the default star’s I had used in my original example. Below is how it all turned out.

Code: Rating.zip

Microsoft Corp. will hold a teleconference with Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Division at Microsoft. Guthrie will make a significant announcement related to Microsoft Silverlight. A recording of the call and additional information will be available for 30 days on the Microsoft Silverlight PressPass Web site: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/silverlight/default.mspx.

• Module 1: Getting Started – Architecture / framework
• Module 2: Movement and collision detection
• Module 3: Design – Sprites, boards and dialogs
• Module 4: Animations and sound
• Module 5: Initialization and Deployment
• Module 6: Advanced concepts (Physics, Multiplayer, Optimization)

Make sure to check out the article at http://www.microsoft.com/expression/news-press/newsletter/

Code: Game.zip

• TransformGroup
  • RotateTransform – Rotates by an angle
  • ScaleTransform – Scales by a a given X and Y
  • SkewTransform – Skews an element by an X and Y angle
  • TranslateTransform – Moves and object by a specified X and Y

As an alternative, you can use the MatrixTransform as a way to manipulate a matrix directly.

What is a Matrix

In Silverlight a matrix is a 3×3 array of numbers used to define affine transformations.  Here is a great definition of a Affine transformation taken from an excellent tutorial on using matrices in Flash.

Affine transformations are transformations that preserve collinearity and relative distancing in a transformed coordinate space. This means points on a line will remain in a line after an affine transformation is applied to the coordinate space in which that line exists.

Silverlight uses row-major matrices, such that vectors are expressed as rows and not column vectors.  Here is what the matrix structure looks like.

Since Silverlight only supports affine transforms, the values in the right column are always 0,0,1.  Below is an example of a Silverlight UserControl that demonstrates how manipulating each of the matrices values, will transform a rectangle.

In my demonstration, using the appropriate TextBox  you can rotate, scale, skew, and move the rectangle. For example, if you set M12 equal to 0.5 and M21 equal to -0.5 you will rotate the rectangle 45 deg.  If you set M11 and M22 equal to 1.5 you will scale the rectangle proportionately to approximately one and half times its original size.

Procedurally, these values can be set by defining a Matrix struct and setting the appropriate property (M11, M12, M21, M22, OffsetX, OffsetY).  The matrix can be applied to an objects RenderTransform by simply setting the MatrixTransform.Matrix property.

Matrix martix = new Matrix(1.5,0.5,-0.5,1.5,0,0);
MatrixTransform transform = new MatrixTransform();
transform.Matrix = matrix;
rectangle.RenderTransform = transform;

Later in the week I will post an example that uses a MatrixTransform to demonstrate an animation that reacts to mouse movement.  Nothing crazy, but a nice example of where a Matrix can create an interesting effect with very little code.

Code: MatrixExample.zip

The control I choose to create is a Rating control .  The goal is to display a series of Stars that both visualize an overall average score, and allows a user to submit their own rating.  Here is what the control looks like.

RatingControl

The control is comprised of two components: RatingControl and RatingButton. The RatingControl is derived from ContentControl and can either be given an explicit set of RatingButtons, or can automatically create them based on a user setting. Here are the properties I have chosen to expose in RatingContorl:

• Max (Int): The number of RatingButtons to display
• Total (double): The number of votes that have been cast
• Score (double): The average rating across all  submissions
• UseIndicators(bool): Determines if we will display indicators for what each star represents.

There are two ways in which you can populate the rating control.  The first is to set the Max property and allow the control to add the appropriate number of children.  This works great if you don’t need to specify an individual Indicator (ToolTip) for each RatingButton.  The second approach is to explicitly add RatingButtons to the content property of the RatingControl.  Here is what that would look like in Xaml.

By choosing to have our RatingControl inherent from ContentControl it takes care of giving us the ability to set the children of our Content property.  In this example I am assuming a FrameworkElement derived from Panel (Grid or StackPanel) is placed inside of Content.  This makes it very easy to iterate through the panels children and identify each RatingButton.  The following shows the code I used to make the decisions if I would create my own RatingButtons, or use those specified in the RatingControl.Content element.

Since I was allowing this control to be templated, I choose to do this setup in the controls Loaded event handler.  This allows me to set the controls Content property equal to my manually created StackPanel, prior to the controls ApplyTemplate method being executed.  This ensures that any special formatting around the panel is applied after the RatingButtons have been added.

RatingButton

To minimize the amount of code I needed to write for this control I decided to build my RatingButton control on top of the System.Windows.Controls.Primitives.ToggleButton.  If you are not familiar with this control it is a very flexible Button that supports three states (Checked, Uncheked, Null).  This is perfect for my example where I will need my star to be visualizes as either filled, empty or half filled star.

For all extensive purposes I left the ToggleButton alone and only overrode OnToggle, OnMouseEnter and OnMouseDown.  Here is what that code looks like.

Since each RatingButton needs to behave as a group, I had to circumvent how the ToggleButton would change visual state, and allow RatingControl to manage this process.  The first method UpdateChecked, simply iterates over each rating button, and based on the Score, determines which ones would be checked.  For my visualization I decide that an average score > N.3, but < N.7 would visualize a half star, where as anything above or below would visualize a full or empty star.  I allow the IsChecked property of ToggleButton to switch to the appropriate visual state (Checked, UnChecked or Intermediate).

In the event that a user is hovering over the rating control, I want to visualize a different color of filled star.  Once again I need to allow the RatingControl to determine which RatingButtons need to react to the hover.  The following demonstrates how I achieved this effect.

Since once again we choose to circumvent how the ToggleButton switches state on hover, we must  use VisualStateManger.GotToState to trigger the appropriate state of the RatingButton we are evaluating (MouseOver or Normal).  

To  customize the visualization of the this control you can either edit my default style in Blend 2.5, or you can clone it and make your own changes. The Control template is as simple as I could make it to allow users full control over how the RatingButton icons look, and how the states are visualized. 

Code: Rating.zip

• How I Use Social Media to Make Real Money
• New Media Interchange Meetup
• Using Web 2.0 Tools in Education
• Improving Your Online Video
• How to strike a balance between sharing information freely and making a living using New Media
• The Strange and Wonderful Adventure of NewsGangLive Social Media… The Impact On You And Your Business
• 5 Reasons Your Podcast Sucks
• Building a podcast from the ground up
• Bottoms Up Leadership- Why are the most effective organizations leaderless?
• Developing Community Around Your Podcast
• Video on the Net: what should you be sending through the pipes?
• Getting Big Media Coverage Using Social Media
• Video on the Net: what should you be sending through the pipes?
• Exergaming: Health Outside the XBox
• So you want to make money with your podcast? Now what?
• Podtaint: Fame in the New Media World
• Saving the World with Social Media
• Intro to Lighting for Video
• Resident Feminist: Alice in the Wonder of Web 2.0 Technologies
• Is Video Conversation Going to Thrive or Fade Out?
• What’s involved in going from blog to book?
• Starting it up Quick- How to start a startup and not make the classic mistakes quickly.
• More than podcasting: It’s a Many-to-Many Media World
• Real World Example: How to record and edit a remote tape sync show
• Left brain, Right brain, Cyber brain…How to get clear on your specialized topic for fun and profit!
• Healing Arts & New Media
• Web Marketing from Overwhelm to Clarity - Building a Foundation to Monetize Your Web Business