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The Silverlight 4 beta came with a version of MEF that had 3 catalogs – namely AssemblyCatalog, TypeCatalog and AggregateCatalog . They’re pretty easy to understand and I made a screencast on the topic here . The Silverlight 4 preview toolkit came with a PackageCatalog that is really useful as it works with another class Package to download separate XAP files and expose their exported components to MEF. The new MEF drop on codeplex has an evolution of those classes called the DeploymentCatalog. I wrote about it here and here . It’s really easy to use but when I encountered the PackageCatalog I felt like I wanted something “bigger” and wrote a bit of code back here that wrapped up the PackageCatalog into a component that knew how to download not just one additional package but a number of them. I wanted to do a similar thing with the DeploymentCatalog and so I put together a few simple classes to let me do that. Here’s a resource from an app.xaml file showing how the classes that I knocked up might be used; <Application...

I posted about the DeploymentCatalog in the new MEF preview the other day and I got a question or two along the lines of “show me an actual example rather than snippets” and so I thought I’d walk through a simple example here. Let’s say that I want to build a Silverlight application that has a need for a photograph to be provided by a user and I don’t really care how this photograph is captured. It might be captured from the webcam, it might be captured from the file system or drag-drop or anything. I don’t mind, I just want to host a plugin that is happy to gather a photo from the user and then hand it to the rest of my code. I started to write this up as a blog post but I realised it would involve so many steps that it’d take a long time so I quickly recorded it as a screen capture. Note that this is one of the roughest screen captures I’ve ever made as I largely just pressed the “record” button and then made stuff up on the fly but I hope it still captures the essence of things. And here’s the code that I just...

I’m doing a half-day “bootcamp” session with John Papa at MIX 10 and wanted to publicise that again here – if you’re already signed up for MIX then you can still revisit the pre-conference workshop registration and register for our session. If you’re not registered for MIX then registration is still open ( and reduced by $200 ) so that you can still grab a flight and come and get the detail on the Windows Phone developer story ( amongst many other things ) in person. Hope to see you there :-)

I’ve been putting together a session around networking in Silverlight and I wanted to get a little more re-use out of the work that I’d put into it so I thought I could quickly turn some of it into screencasts that go onto Channel 9. In Silverlight, applications are browser-initiated and ( usually ) have limited access to the local machine so being able to work on the network is key; whether that be ( as the picture suggests ) going to the site that the application came from ( the “site of origin” ) or to some other website or maybe even just on the intranet to talk to some local server. I’ve made a few screencasts. I’ve not yet decided how/when to publish them because I’ve found in the past that if I publish a lot in one go then people tend to watch the first few and then drop off so I’m trying a new tactic here of publishing them one at a time. You can find them all by clicking the image below; and I’ll add explicit links to the series below; Silverlight 4 Beta Networking. WebClient and XML . Silverlight 4 Beta...

Just a quick plug for a talk I gave last week at the London Silverlight User Group on the Managed Extensibility Framework in Silverlight 4. Ian Smith kindly recorded this with great skill and speed and has the video available if you click the picture below; The Silverlight User Group is growing really quickly – I’d say about 100 people turned up on the night which is all the room could take so I guess bigger venues are going to be called for in the future and it’s great to see so many people building with Silverlight and keen to get out and chat to others about it. On the same evening, Johannes Kebeck also presented on the Bing Maps Control for Silverlight and you can find his talk via Ian’s link here as well so it’s “2 for the price of one”.

I’m excited as it’s looking pretty likely that I’ll be able to get to my first ever MIX conference – MIX10 in March, Las Vegas. The current plan is that I’m going to pitch in and deliver the Silverlight Bootcamp;   with “Mr Silverlight TV” himself, John Papa . I’m looking forward to it – hope to catch you out at MIX if you’re heading out there. The way the agenda’s shaping up, I think I’ll be lucky in that my first MIX will hopefully be the best MIX so far :-)

There’s an ad over on MSN UK for the new “Mass Effect 2” game and it’s very distinctive as it’s done in Silverlight and has some really cool aspects to it such as making use of Smooth Streaming and DeepZoom. It’s not often ( well, ever ) that I’ve linked to an ad before or suggested that someone watch one but I think this is really worth a look at to see the sort of quality that you can get from Silverlight in an ad like this. It’s also worth going full screen with it and experimenting with the navigation system. Click the image below to jump to the page ( although, of course, ads run for a duration and so I guess it may not still be there if you get to this post in a few days/weeks time ). You can find more detail on the ad from the guys at Metia ( ooh – nice Silverlight home page too :-) ) who put it together. Steve Ellis has a post over here about it and Dean Gifford has one here which spells out a little more detail about what you’re looking at. I don’t know whether it’s a “true first” for Silverlight or not...