scorbs

While I was in Florida. I was able to see some of the local sites in Orlando & Miami. 

Here are a few of the photos.

my first time at Disney World.  i have to say, I like Disneyland better.

balloons on main street

princess for the day

waiting for tea cups
 

finally, a day at the beach:  my feet in miami.

the great art deco sign at the park central hotel

rooftop party

me = tan = success

Silverlight Beta2 is officially out in the wild! 

All the required download links to get started are here:

• Silverlight 2 Beta 2 runtime
• Visual Studio 2008 Silverlight Tools 
• Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview
• Deep Zoom Composer

Also, for the feature areas I drive, here are the major Beta2 updates:

Networking

• Wider API set for WebClient
  • Upload methods for streams and strings
  • Set request headers on uploads
• Threading Updates
  • HttpWebRequest & WebClient are callable on a background thread
  • HttpWebRequest’s delegates are called on a new non-UI thread.
    • Delegates were previously always called on the UI thread.
    • You must invoke back on to the UI thread if the data you’re retrieving will be consumed by a UI element.
    • For an example, see the updated networking post series (part one).
• Progressive download support
  • When AllowReadStreamBuffering is set to false on HttpWebRequest and WebClient, the returned request stream supports progressive Stream.BeginRead() calls.
• Cross domain URI & path character restrictictions
• The allowed characters in cross domain paths has been expanded to include "=" and ";".
• For more details, see the updated networking post series (part two).
• Cross domain policy files
• Cross domain policy files do not allow you to send request headers by default.  You must explicitly opt in to request headers in the policy file.
• For more details, see this updated networking post series (part three).

Control Model Customization

• Easier control subclassing when you don’t want to change control visuals
  • The DefaultStyleKey property indicates the type that should be used to look up the built-in style (e.g. MyButton.DefaultStyleKey = typeof(MyButton)
    • The runtime looks up the generic.xaml in the assembly where the DefaultStyleKey’s Type value was defined.
    • It also uses the DefaultStyleKey to look up the built-in style w/in that generic.xaml’s ResourceDictionary
  • DefaultStyleKey should be set in the control’s constructor
  • If you sub class Button and do not set the DefaultStyleKey, you will "inherit" the Button’s built-in style
• Expansion of the Parts and States model with VisualStateManager
  • This is a big one!  Look for a new post coming soon explains how we’ve made control visual state & transition management easier.

Thanks everyone who attended my TechEd talks last week!  As promised, here are the decks and samples from each session.  When the videos get posted, I will add links. 

Also, for fun…. I’ve uploaded my WeatherControl sample app to play with!