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Over the past few months, I have been working on a Silverlight kit for Photobucket's API . I have used this sample to demonstrate a few things: How to build an API kit for a REST Library How to adapt existing .Net code to Silverlight (OAuth Library)...( Read More...
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Last year I created and uploaded a demonstration project to Popfly that converted a Word 2007 Document to a WPF FlowDocument. The best example of a FlowDocument can be seen in the New York Times Reader , an instance of Syndicated Client Starter...( Read More...
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Next week I will be in New York City meeting customers and I will be holding a free half-day mini-workshop at the Microsoft office on 6th Avenue to teach people about building Silverlight and WPF applications with Expression Studio and Visual Studio. ...( Read More...
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One of the challenges with creating online documentation is readability, especially with long documents. Most of the time, we end up printing out documents instead of attempting to read them online. One we print them out we lose the ability to easily search for text, one of the great aspects of online documents. Creating a great online reading experience was one of the major goals with the WPF FlowDocument, a XAML element that can put into any WPF application as well as being natively hosted by Internet Explorer. To see an example of a FlowDocument, take a look at a whitepaper that I recently wrote on Silverlight and Web Analytics.
In their most basic form, FlowDocuments are XAML markup, similar in form to XHTML documents. In addition to HTML, FlowDocuments add automatic column flow, search, scaling, readability enhancements, and hyphenation. Indeed it would be conceivable to transform XHTML to FlowDocuments using XSLT, because both formats are XML. I started looking around and I couldn't find any tools for creating FlowDocuments, especially with the authoring tool that I use (in addition to Windows Live Writer), Microsoft Word. Wait! Can't I just transform the Word Open XML into the FlowDocument XAML using XSLT? I sure can. In a few hours, I built a sample Word 2007 Ribbon Add-in that transforms the Word Open XML (WordML) of any Word 2007 document into the FlowDocument XAML. I will be sharing the source code for this Office Business Application (OBA) solution as well.
On November 29th at 11:00 AM PDT, I will be presenting in a live Webinar on how I built this solution with Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2(Orcas). Here's what I'll cover:
- Show how to use Visual Studio 2008 to create Office 2007 (and 2003) Add-ins.
- Show how to use the new visual Ribbon Designer in Visual Studio 2008 to craft a ribbon interface for Word
- Show how to to use WPF windows within a Word 2007 Add-in
- Walk through the transformation code
- Demonstrate the FlowDocument format
If you are interested in coming to the webinar (it will be recorded if you cannot make it) please register here.
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As many of you may know, I have been working to understand how Silverlight applications can best integrate with Web Analytics services. Web analytics is the field of understanding and quantifying how people interact with web sites in order to align the site's design with business goals. One of the challenges of Rich Interactive Applications (RIAs) today is equating the traditional measure of web usage, the page view, with the way people interact with RIA applications that exist on a single page. Interestingly, most of the major players in web analytics today use JavaScript page tags to track usage and engagement on web sites. Since Silverlight's programming model is also JavaScript, these systems can work very well together to track RIA interaction. You can then start to track the usage of your Silverlight RIA with your existing web analytics service. Once you are tracking usage, you can start to see some very interesting applications with Silverlight-integrated web analytics: because of Silverlight's separation of design (in XAML) and client code (in JavaScript) it's easy to try different designs with A/B testing to see if new design ideas get the business results they were aiming for.
Today (10/16/2007 - 11:00 AM PDT) I will be presenting my findings in a webinar with two partners, Omniture and WebTrends, and in a whitepaper co-authored with Clayton Moore of WebTrends.
Register for the free webinar: https://www112.livemeeting.com/lrs/microsoft1/Registration.aspx?pageName=x128cqqmmz47ndcf
You can download the whitepaper in various formats from a demo site at http://xmldocs.net/Analytics/. The source code for the site, a simple HTML page with a Silverlight application. is also available on the site as well.
The whitepaper is at (same document, different formats):
If you want to learn more about Web Analytics, go to Eric Peterson's site Web Analytics Demystified and read his book of the same name. He got me hooked on the subject when I went to a panel discussion on Web Analytics in March.
I would love your feedback on these whitepapers as I see them as living documents.
