Monday, 23 November 2009

Silverlight in General & Silverlight 4 Beta

I was both surprised and impressed to see Silverlight 4 Beta released at PDC09.

I have been highly impressed with the development speed and features of Silverlight.
As you will see from my other posts I have been developing with Silverlight since Silverlight 1 where we just have JavaScript as a client programming language.

We currently run all of our web facing applications with Silverlight 3.
As we are serving external users we are still maintaining a "static" (as in not evolving) ASP.NET version of some of our applications such as the Web Cameras so that users don't miss out because they don't want to, or, due to IT policies, they cannot install Silverlight.

I am impressed with users visiting from countries other than New Zealand, and major corporations, as they, in most cases, have Silverlight already installed and can enjoy the latest fully functional version of our web applications.

There are many people whom refuse to install Silverlight purely because it is a Microsoft product, we have to respect this decision, just like people still wanting to use IE 6 :-)

Looking at the capabilities of Silverlight 4 Beta I look forward to upgrading our applications to take advantage of the new capabilities.

Congrats Microsoft Silverlight Team

Thursday, 22 January 2009

iMap going Live

The 3D campus map Silverlight website I have been working on is going live tomorrow with a story in the staff buletin.

The website has been named "iMap" meaning interactive map.

I have moved to writing my own 3D engine as it allowed access to all the objects I require and I can quickly and easily change the colour of models as compared to Kit 3D which can take a while to change.

If you have the appropriate access rights the building floor plans can be viewed in full 3D you can rotate it and view the building as a full stacked building.

If you would like to view the iMap then goto http://www.propserv.otago.ac.nz/web/iMap

Let me know what you think by using the iMap feedback link at the bottom left of the website.