Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Is Here!

Get it from http://silverlight.net/GetStarted, along with the developer tools, documentation and the June update to Blend 2.5.

Lots of new goodies – as ever, Scott Guthrie’s blog has a comprehensive guide. I’m not going to try and compete with him today: my family tell me it’s time for the weekend to start!

If you’re looking for something to try out, there’s an updated version of Hard Rock’s Memorabilia site, but the really cool new site out there is a graphical adventure called Buddy Knavery, written in the style of old-school games like Zak McKracken and Maniac Mansion. I’ve already wasted far too much time playing with it instead of updating this blog post! There’s some amazing work here – hard to believe that it was all written by one guy in his spare time…

50 New Silverlight Screencasts - Short and Snappy

I haven't seen these training videos receive nearly the coverage they deserve, so I wanted to try and "bump" them onto the radar.

My erstwhile UK colleagues Mike Taulty and Mike Ormond have been hard at work over the last few weeks recording an amazing series of Silverlight 2 training screencasts. All free for the taking, these fifty videos provide a comprehensive guide to all matters Silverlight: from basic topics such as layout, controls, data binding, and styling to advanced topics like sockets, cross-domain requests, multi-threading and HTML interop. If even that's not enough, there are some great tips and tricks that go beyond the documentation: loading assemblies dynamically, embedding fonts and creating custom splash screens.

Many screencasts are too long or too ponderous - they don't suit the rapid-fire medium of the Internet. These are all short - mostly just a couple of minutes in length, and they're well edited to remove anything extraneous. Highly recommended - please produce some more, Mike and Mike!

Check them out here: http://www.silverlightscreencasts.com. Oh, and of course, you'll need Silverlight 2 Beta 1 to watch them!

Great Silverlight 2 Demo: Healthcare Demonstrator

Congratulations to Martin Grayson and team for building one of the smartest Silverlight 2 demonstrations I've seen to date. I saw parts of this demo a month ago when I was in the UK, and I'm delighted it's now released.

Whether or not you're involved in the healthcare sector, this demo does a great job of showing how Silverlight 2 can transform web-based application development. We're already starting to see many real-world applications using Silverlight 2, even in its beta 1 stage; I'll post a list of the best ones I've collected before the end of the week. With a beta 2 release not far away, momentum is continuing to grow. And keep an eye on this blog first thing Friday morning for a separate exciting announcement (he said elusively)...

Uploading Silverlight 2 Content to Silverlight Streaming

Following on very nicely from my last post on deploying Silverlight content to your own production server, I'm pleased to announce that Silverlight Streaming has added full support for Silverlight 2 applications. As well as adding the basic support, the team have put a lot of work into simplifying the process of uploading and validating your application. Here's a basic walkthrough:

1. Create your Silverlight 2 application using Visual Studio or Expression Blend, do all the usual test / debug steps, etc.
2. Create a manifest file named manifest.xml, that describes how you want the control to be hosted. Here's a simple sample you can use as a template:

   <SilverlightApp>
   <version>2.0version>
   <source>PopTheBubble.xapsource>
   <width>400width>
   <height>300height>
   <background>whitebackground>
   <isWindowless>falseisWindowless>
   SilverlightApp>

3. Zip your application .xap and manifest.xml files together into one file.
4. Go to silverlight.live.com and upload the application.
5. You're done! Now you can embed the resulting content in any web page with an iframe or the sample code provided.

As a small example, here's a mini-game called PopTheBubble that you can learn to build by following the Silverlight 2 fundamentals hands-on lab. Click on as many bubbles as you can before the timer runs out - have fun!

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=108731

Configuring a Web Server to Host Silverlight Content

Deploying Silverlight content to a production web server is a pretty easy process. Despite occasional misconception, Silverlight doesn't require a Microsoft-based web server: Apache can host up Silverlight content just as happily as IIS.

But there's one little gotcha: web servers are typically configured to only serve up a limited set of known file extensions as static content. That's all well and good, but Silverlight introduces two new file extensions (.xaml for loose XAML files and .xap for the zip-based binary packaging format). As a result, you need to add the MIME types for those file extensions to your web server so that it recognizes Silverlight content appropriately. Here are the MIME types you need to add to the server configuration:

Extension	MIME Type
.xaml	application/xaml+xml
.xap	application/x-silverlight-app

That's all you have to do. Unfortunately, it's not possible to provide generic instructions for how to add MIME types, as it varies from server to server, but here are some links for various common web servers:

• Apache (2.0, 1.3)
• IIS (7 / 6.0 / 5.0 / 4.0)
• lighttpd
• Sun Java System Web Server

While you're updating the list of MIME types served, you might want to also add the relevant types to your web server to support WPF and ClickOnce applications. Here are the additional items you'll need:

Extension	MIME Type
.manifest	application/manifest
.application	application/x-ms-application
.xbap	application/x-ms-xbap
.deploy	application/octet-stream
.xps	application/vnd.ms-xpsdocument

But what if you're hosting your Silverlight application on a shared hosting service and your hoster doesn't give you access to change these settings? The good news is that there are two options available to you. Obviously, you could take advantage of Silverlight Streaming, our free hosting service for up to 10GB of Silverlight content.

Alternatively, you can "cheat" the web server by renaming the XAP file extension to a compatible MIME type. The XAP container is ZIP-based, so you can simply rename the output file from .xap to .zip and change the source param within the object tag contained in the HTML file to point to the new file location. Click on this hyperlink to see the technique in action - it's a plain HTML file that points to a ZIP file (containing the Silverlight content).

One last piece of good news: IIS 7, included in Windows Server 2008, already includes all the relevant MIME types for both WPF and Silverlight, including both .xap and .xaml extensions, so if you're using Windows Server 2008, you're all set. (The same applies to a clean install of Windows Vista SP1, although if you upgrade from the RTM to the SP1 release, your settings will remain unchanged until you uninstall and reinstall the IIS feature).