Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Update (0-Jan-2015): Chrome Developer Tools provides a way to throttle connection speed / bandwidth & artificially limit the maximum download throughput (rate of data transfer) In the Pluralsight Silverlight 3 Fundamentals video course , the instructor suggests a tip to test a custom progress bar by mimicking a slow web server on the local computer. This can be done by generating modem speeds with Fiddler, a HTTP proxy, using the menu option Rules > Performance > Simulate Modem speeds. The speed can also be customized . This technique is more convenient than using the System.Threading.Thread.Sleep method to create an artifical delay with code. Firefox Throttle plug-in also allows you to cap download/upload rates and monitor current bandwidth utilization. This plugin seems to be currently removed from the Mozilla add-ons directory but as per this Firefox support Forum its available on the Mozilla FTP server(direct link to .XPI) . Also see: FiddlerCap make...

If you are a developer & kept away from Silverlight, there is no time like now to start playing around with it. There have been a lot of interesting announcements at MIX10, an annual conference for web developers & designers. Silverlight is going to be at the heart of Windows Phone 7 Series development . Silverlight 4 RC ( What's RC? )  is out as well with a host of improvements (including Indic Support!) . The Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP has also been released. It consists of: * Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone * Windows Phone Emulator * Silverlight for Windows Phone * XNA Game Studio 4.0 CTP So you now have all tools needed to build an app for Windows Phone 7 (the actual phone though will come later in the year) & prepare to submit an application to the Windows Phone Marketplace. Alongwith the motivation & free tools, there are also some great learning resources .

"...many of the sciences are so abstract, and the amount of things you have to learn before you start connecting to those practical issues can be very daunting." - Bill Gates Microsoft Research has been releasing a lot of interesting projects this year - Songsmith , an improved Translator , WorldWide Telescope (WWT) and now Project Tuva . Some of them are offbeat and path-breaking. Project Tuva is an interactive educational video application built with Silverlight. Project Tuva is an interactive video experience that makes learning about science relevant and exciting through annotations authored by researchers and subject-matter experts. Project Tuva is launching with Richard Feynman's Messenger Series lectures, a cornerstone set of seven talks at Cornell University in 1964. These videos are enhanced with a number of different layers of contextual information: full transcripts and captions, fully searchable transcripts, time-synchronized contextual "extras" th...

Some answers from the Silverlight 2 FAQ that I found insightful - What is in Silverlight 1 that is not in Silverlight 2? Nothing. Silverlight 2 is a full superset of Silverlight 1.0. It is 100% compatible with Silverlight 1.0 applications and provides more powerful features and functionality. Silverlight 1.0 applications even benefit from improvements in media playback and performance characteristics of Silverlight 2 without any additional changes needed. When would a customer use Silverlight instead of ASP.NET AJAX? ASP.NET AJAX and Silverlight are designed to be complementary technologies. Because Silverlight can talk to any AJAX application, both client-side and server-side, customers can enhance existing ASP.NET or ASP.NET AJAX applications by integrating Silverlight media experiences and RIAs into their Web applications. Conversely, ASP.NET AJAX can additionally be used to control Silverlight-based visualization of data or the delivery of rich experiences. When would a customer u...

You can utilize the Silverlight.isInstalled helper method in the Silverlight.js file as beautifully explained in this article in Silverlight Developer Center on Yahoo Developer Network (!!) or adapt Nikhil K's plain Javascript code snippet . The YDN article has a couple of other interesting points about developing with Silverlight: An easy way to test the experience users without Silverlight will get is to use Internet Explorer 7's add-on manager to temporarily disable the Silverlight "AgControl Class" add-on. It is important to provide users who don't have Silverlight installed the best possible user experience. This includes providing the user with a preview of the content they will get in return for taking the time to install, keeping them within your page and automatically showing the Silverlight enabled content once the installation has completed. Unfortunately, currently all other browsers except Internet Explorer on Windows will require the user to restart ...