Curved Scrollbar

Charles Petzold did a simple implementation of a curved scrollbar in XAML.
Nevertheless its probably more cool than useful, I have decided to do an implementation in Flash to match...



However... check the original posting by Charles...
http://www.charlespetzold.com/blog/2008/08/Curved-ScrollBars.html

Google Trends of XAML and MXML

Despite the huge momentum Adobe Flex have gained the last year or so, its clear that XAML still have more momentum overall, according to Google Trends.

XAML is the markup language from Microsoft to create RIA's and one of the cornerstones in Silverlight, MS's "new" primary RIA platform. MXML is the markup language used in Adobe Flex, Adobe's primary RIA platform and has been around for quite a shorter time than XAML.

Here is a direct link to the comparison I did:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=xaml%2Cmxml



An interesting observation is related to the geographical distribution of the searches, seeing that India is top-ranking in regards to Country, however in regards to City its Redmond, VA (The home of Microsoft).

Another interesting point is that Denmark and Danish is at the time of this comparison (it's off course subject to change, partly due to the dynamics of the Google indexing system based on statistically enhanced numbers and off course due to the fact that the numbers eventually do change over the course of time) ranked 10 and 6 respectively, positioning the Danish RIA community high on the international rank.
Combine this with the positions of our brothering countries, Sweden and Norway, Scandinavia is definitely in the super-liga of RIA regions.

Silverlight Tour Workshop

If you are keen on getting up to speed with Silverlight 2, there is a chance with the Silverlight Tour Workshop orchestrated by Wildermuth Consulting Services.

The Silverlight Tour Workshop is a three-day course on Silverlight 2. It divides the content into three distinct areas: Design, Development and the Server-Side. Students should be able to develop Silverlight 2 applications once attending the workshop. The Workshop is structured with a mix of didactic lessons, demonstrations and hands-on labs. Each student will leave the workshop having created several small Silverlight 2 applications. This variety of learning techniques will ensure that all students become proficient in the technology quickly and in an exciting way.

Silverlight is about building Internet applications so experience building web applications is encouraged. In addition, since Silverlight utilizes .NET to build online experiences, familiarity with .NET is suggested. No specific experience with WPF or XAML is necessary.

The schedule is as follows...

* June 16-18, 2008 Washington, DC
* June 23-25, 2008 Toronto, ON
* July 14-16, 2008 Chicago, IL
* August 6-8, 2008 Melbourne, Australia
* August 11-13, 2008 Boston, MA
* August 27-29, 2008 Toronto, ON
* September 1-3, 2008 Denver, CO
* September 22-24, 2008 New York, NY
* September 24-26, 2008 Toronto, ON
* October 22-24, 2008 Atlanta, GA
* October 29-31, 2008 Sydney, Australia
* November 3-5, 2008 San Diego, CA
* November 19-21, 2008 Seattle, WA
* December 1-3, 2008 Dallas, TX

Check it out...
http://www.silverlight-tour.com/

Silverlight 2 : Attached Properties

Attached Properties are an effective and quite neat way obtaining flexibility without sacrificing any means on encapsulation. Attached Properties are the ability for a nested control in a layout control to use the layout control's property from within a control, this is referred to as an Attached Property. For example, the Button object might use the Attached Property Canvas.Left to position itself with respect to the left border of a surrounding canvas.