Starting to feel a bit like all I’m doing is posting about the work we’ve been doing, but truth be told, we’ve been quite busy as of late!

The silverlight.net customer showcase, built using Silverlight 1.0, enables users to rate , sort and browse Silverlight applications by category, country/region, tag and free search terms. Additionally, members of the Silverlight community can submit their applications for inclusion in the Showcase, and rate others’ work.

The previous Showcase had reached its breaking point and wasn’t scaling to keep up with all of the applications being developed. We architected an additive filtering system that disables any selections that would return an empty set of results — all of the filtering happens on the client side, not on the server. Microsoft was also very interested in highlighting the global reach of Silverlight, so countries and regions receive prominent display and filtering UI. Users can rate applications using a familiar rating paradigm.

Once again, the Step Change Group were rockstars on the backend, while we tackled UI design and all aspects of Silverlight development. We spent a good amount of time getting to know the Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX library, leaning on it quite heavily to provide a solid infrastructure for development. All good things, expect more notes on our learnings and findings very soon.

The Microsoft Expression Feature Browser is a Silverlight-based RIA that provides a simple way for users to compare the highlights of the tools in the Microsoft Expression Suite.

This is our first Silverlight 1.0 project in the wild, executed in conjunction with the Step Change Group in Portland, OR. The app is completely data-driven, allowing Microsoft to use the same Silverlight application across all four product pages in the Expression Studio. The app parses runtime configuration variables passed in on the query string, and pulls from the very same XML data source used to build the non-Silverlight version of the page. In this way, the site can downgrade gracefully for platforms that don’t have an available plugin. All assets are shared with the HTML version as well, further lessening maintenance overhead.

We were particularly impressed with the butter-smooth framerates in the native Silverlight animation engine. Turns out it’s pretty straightforward to execute programmatic animations without a lot of code. It was also really quite simple to implement a full-featured, reskinnable, inline video player. No complaints with Silverlight, though it’s definitely taken some serious gear-grinding to switch from C# to JavaScript!

I’ve been digging in to Silverlight 1.1 lately, and I came across an issue where I was unable to load XML from a local (i.e. a “file:///”) URL. (I’m still unable to, by the way — trying to figure out if it’s a sandbox limitation or an incorrectly formed URL). Regardless, I was a little miffed that my Silverlight 1.0 apps automatically launched in a dynamic VS web server, and my Silverlight 1.1 apps did not. I found a great post by Peter Kellner that explains exactly how to set this up.

For my needs, I created an “Empty Web Site” instead of an ASP.NET site. After following the instructions on Peter’s page, be sure to configure your new website as the startup project in VS. Now, when I need to load XML content, I use the code from the Manipulate XML Data in Silverlight HowTo, except that when I determine the correct URL, I add in the port from the DocumentUri:

private string GetUrl()
{
    string path = HtmlPage.DocumentUri.AbsolutePath;
    int lastSlash = path.LastIndexOf( "/" );
    path = path.Substring( 0, lastSlash + 1 );
    string port = ":" + HtmlPage.DocumentUri.Port;

    return "http://" + HtmlPage.DocumentUri.Host + port +
        path + "path/to/file.xml";
}

Even if you’re not running your deployment web server on a non-standard port, the port will resolve to “:80″, which is completely legal.

Back from a 2 week hiatus in Nicaragua and I’m feeling refreshed and rejuvenated (and only a touch rum-soaked )

Some cool Silverlight demos and meta-sites I’ve stumbled upon since my return:

• Chris Craft is compiling a very comprehensive list of Silverlight links
• Chris Cavanagh has a port of the Managed Bullet physics engine for Silverlight 1.1, complete with source code (nice!)
• A whole stack of how-to videos at Silverlight.net

Tim Sneath posted up a high-res version of the WPF Momentum video that was shown at the MIX07 keynote, hosted via the new Silverlight Streaming service. The North Face kiosk shares airtime with a host of other cool WPF applications.