Johan Van Hoye (member of BESUG) and two friends has participated the Summer Silverlight Coding Competition organized by CompenentArt.  To get through the first round they need community points which can be earned by voting.  The only thing you have to do is creating an account at ComponentArt and vote for their project.  You can vote until the 23th of October.

So please vote for their project and support the Belgian Silverlight community!

BESUG organized a workshop on Silverlight 3.0 yesterday at the buildings of Boulevart in Schelle.  First of all, I like to thank the people of Boulevart for the nice welcome and all the catering they provided!! You can check out the pictures at http://www.flickr.com/photos/boulevart/sets/72157622332029860

For the workshop, I’ve created a Silverlight Twitter client which shows some new features of Silverlight 3.0.  This application uses a WCF service which communicates with Twitter.  The following Silverlight 3.0 features are used in this application:

• Resource Dictionary
• ChildWindow and WrapPanel (from the Silverlight toolkit)
• Blur effect
• Behaviors
• Out of Browser

You can download the source code here.

What’s it all about?
ReMix brings the best of MIX09 in Las Vegas to Belgium: it bring us international speakers presenting on the best of MIX09, as well as local cases, with a story focus on User Experience (UX). Since last year’s first MIX event in Belgium there have been enormous advances in the web and RIA space at Microsoft. This is your chance to get a closer look at the new stuff as well as deepen your current skills.
Did you hear about UX@Vitra in June this year? This event will bring what you asked for: more in-depth sessions focused around RIA and web design and development.

At REMIX09 you can:

• Learn about what Microsoft is bringing in terms of new user experience and technologies for building rich web applications and web sites.
• Attend sessions on Expression Blend, SketchFlow, Silverlight, Surface, User Experience and Natural User Interface.
• Attend technical sessions on Silverlight 3, building RIAs and ASP.NET.

Who should attend?
REMIX draws together web developers, creatives, information architects, visual designers, UX professionals, and digital marketers who all SHARE AN INTEREST ON WHAT IS COMING NEXT ON THE WEB.

It is possible to print reports or other things in Silverlight when you use the new features of the Silverlight 3.0.  The feature you need is called WritableBitmap.  Gill Cleeren wrote a nice sample about how to print in Silverlight 3.0.  You can read and test it on his blog.  You can also do other nice stuff with a WritableBitmap like creating your own flashy bitmaps.  René Schulte has a good blogpost about creating effects and doing a performance test.

I also created an application to take screen shots using the WritableBitmap class.  I showed this demo on the Community Day 2009 and you can download it here.

I’ve just finished a Silverlight 3.0 user control which is a menu.  The concept is very simple:
Several items are rotating in a circle.  The items are buttons by default, but you can change the ControlTemplate and use an image, mediaelement, rectangle,… as an item.  When you click an item, they will stop rotating and be placed in one line.  If you click an item again, they go back to their previous status. 

The control has 2 public properties:

1. Radius: sets the radius of the circle.  How bigger the radius, the bigger your circle
2. MenuItems: this property asks for a collection of MenuItems.  These MenuItems are just buttons with some extra properties.  If you change the ControlTemplate of the MenuItem control, you can use anything as a menu item.

You can download this control and the source code from the Expression Gallery.  Feedback to improve this control is welcome or let me know if you did some improvements.

The countdown for the release of the new Belgian Silverlight User Group [BESUG] website has started.  The new website should be up and running tomorrow 24th july at 6pm.  Check it out at http://www.besug.be

This website uses some new Silverlight 3.0 features like pixel effects, deeplinking, perspective 3D and validators.

The beta of Silverlight 3.0 was unveiled at Mix in March this year and has a lot of new interesting features.  BESUG organizes a workshop to introduce you to these features.  The workshop will take place at the Boulevart buildings in Schelle at the 10th of September and endures two hours (from 19h till 21h).

During this workshop we will build a small Silverlight application, showing some of the new concepts like out of browser, animation easing, deeplinking, pixel effects, importing Photoshop files and perspective 3D.

You need to bring your own laptop with the following installed:

• Visual Studio 2008 SP1
• Silverlight 3 beta tools for Visual Studio
• Expression Blend 3 preview
• The Silverlight 3 toolkit

You can download all these tools from http://silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight3.  Be sure to subscribe fast at http://www.besug.be because places are limited to 30 people.  This event is free of charge and is organized in cooperation with Boulevart.  Hope to see you there!

As I promised in my session at Community Day, you can download some of the demo’s I’ve showed here.  Other things about Community Day:

• my slide deck: http://www.communityday.be/cd/tabid/130/Default.aspx
• some pictures: Flickr
• My complete presentation on MSDN Chopsticks: http://www.microsoft.com/belux/MSDN/nl/chopsticks/default.aspx?id=1303

Thanks to everyone who attended this session!

I’ve created a Silverlight application that makes a ball bouncing against the borders of a canvas using gravity and friction.  This is how it works:

Step1: create the user interface
I’ve created a new Silverlight project with Visual Studio 2010 and changed the root element of Page.xaml to Canvas.  After that I’ve created a usercontrol named Ball that contains an image and a storyboard.  The storyboard will be used as a timer.

Step2:  create a new Ball instance
After the main page is loaded I’ve created a new instance of the Ball class and added it to the surface on a certain position.

Step3: writing code for the bounce
I first created some global properties in the Ball class like xSpeed, ySpeed, gravity and friction.  These properties will be set in the constructor.  I also start the storyboard in this constructor.  The duration of this storyboard is 0.03 seconds.  So, the completed event will be executed about 30 times per second.  In the completed event, the current x and y position of the ball are increased with the xSpeed and ySpeed.  There is also a check if the ball collides with a border.  Finally I multiply the xSpeed and ySpeed with the friction and add the gravity to the ySpeed.  After this, the storyboard is restarted.

Step 4: add drag & drop 
In the last step I added drag & drop functionality.  First listen to the MouseLefButtonDown event and start the capture of the mouse.  In the MouseMove event the ball is moved to the position of the mouse and I calculate a new xSpeed and ySpeed which is depending on how fast you move the mouse.  In the MouseLeftButtonUp event I release the capture of the mouse and restart the storyboard so the ball can start bouncing again.

You can download the sample code from here.  Enjoy!

Are you a web developer, web designer/integrator, project manager, account manager or own a web agency? Well, we have an event for you.
In June, in four different locations you’ll get served a ‘cocktail’ of a unique location, a nice atmosphere, cool demo’s, loads of useful information, food and drinks for people involved into web design and development.

The unique locations are the Vitra showrooms. If you don’t know Vitra, check out their site and get an idea on the type of furniture they offer.

Several people from Microsoft will be there to meet you, show you demos around the MS web and UX technologies, talk to you and answer your questions.

It’s also a great chance to mingle amongst your peers in an informal atmosphere and do some networking.

The dates and places are the following:

• 2nd of June – Vitra Antwerp
• 4th of June – Vitra Diegem (close to Brussels)
• 10th of June – Vitra Gent
• 11th of June – Vitra Liège

Check out the site for a few more details (it’s worth it), and register in Dutch or French: