Well…this is new to me. Maybe its not new to you, but I’ll gladly share anyhow.

I was watching a talk given at MIX by Mike Harsh on Building Windows Phone Applications with Silverlight and I was intrigued by his first demo where he showed the effects of applying an InputScope definition to a TextBox control and how it effected what implementation of the Soft Input Panel (sip or keyboard) was shown. InputScope has existed in the .NET Framework since v3.0 but I’ve never had cause to use it, or run across it for any purpose for that matter. After watching Mike’s presentation, I’ve come to the realization that all of us building Windows Phone apps will soon become very intimate with InputScope.

As opposed to spending my time writing up what I’ve learned, I decided to take a crack at producing a quick video walkthrough of InputScope, in its simplest form, as it relates to Silverlight for Windows Phone 7.

I highly recommend watching Mike’s talk as well as the Part 2 follow-up by Peter Torr to learn more about building Windows Phone 7 applications with Silverlight. Mike was kind enough to provide all of the source code for his demos as well as the slide deck over on his blog.

What other samples would you like to see? What questions do you have for building Windows Phone 7 apps with Silverlight?

I would like to thank everyone who came out to the first Chicago Silverlight user group meeting last night. We had a great turn out with some excellent dialog on the new features of Silverlight 4.

As stated, I borrowed from Karen Corby’s session at PDC as it provides a nice roundup of some of the great new features in Silverlight 4 including drag/drop, right-click handling, printing, web cam integration, network multicast support, as well as new rich text and Bidi support. Not to mention the new out-of-browser support for COM integration!

You can grab all of the resources used in last night’s presentation from Karen’s Blog as well as the PDC website. I sprinkled a few others in as well…

• Microsoft Silverlight 4 Overview from PDC2009
• Slide deck (PPT)
• Samples
• http://silverlight.net
• Get Started with Silverlight
• Silverlight 4 Beta Information
• A guide to Silverlight 4 (Tim Heuer)

A received a note from Anthony Handley a few weeks back feeling out my thoughts around renaming (and re-chartering) the Chicago Designers and Developers User Group (CD2) to the Chicago Silverlight User Group. I thought it was a great idea as it provided a directed focus on what the topics and general direction of the group would be. It would only help the community at large understand the conversations that were taking place.

The intention of the group from the beginning was to bring the conversations between designers and developers closer together from a platform agnostic approach. As Anthony expounds on below, the group started to gravitate to more discussions focused on a particular area – Silverlight. Changing the name only solidifies the charter of the groups intent to the community and provides a means to bring more people together around a common cause (a “community”).

We are still able to facilitate conversations and idea sharing between designers and developers through events such as RIApalooza. Myself, along with the leaders of the Chicago Silverlight user group and the Chicago Adobe user group are currently in the planning stages of RIApalooza 3. More details to come.

Here is Anthony’s message…

In the past 18 months, the Chicago Designers and Developers User Group has sought to walk the lines between design and development while remaining platform agnostic. We’ve had some great presentations and speakers in the past; however, it has become increasingly difficult to find and schedule topics that appeal to designers and developers in both the Adobe and Microsoft worlds. After careful introspection and evaluation, the CD2 leadership team have chosen to clarify our place in the community and focus on Microsoft Silverlight & WPF.

And so, we’re extremely excited to announce the creation of The Chicago Silverlight User Group. The core purpose of the group (better designer/developer collaboration) hasn’t changed, but includes a renewed focus as we concentrate on all that Silverlight and WPF have to offer as a rich platform. We invite all of CD2′s members to continue to join us in this new and excited SIG in the coming months.

In effect, this is the sunset of CD2 as we know it today. We realize that some of the content we sought to bring to CD2 is already capably provided by the likes of IxDA and the Chicago Area Adobe User Groups. We believe these groups also add value to the designer and developer communities.

The new user group’s inaugural meeting will be at 6PM on Wednesday, March 3rd at The Illinois Technology Association (ITA) 200 S. Wacker Drive, 15th Floor | Chicago, IL 60606

We will be launching a new registration website in the coming weeks. If you have any questions or comments about The Chicago Silverlight User Group, please contact us at the email addresses below.

I am happy to report that I will be speaking at the (re)inaugural meeting of the Chicago Silverlight user group on March 3rd. We will be discussing the new features of Silverlight 4.

Today at the PDC conference, Scott Guthrie announced the release of the Silverlight 4 Beta. Scott announced some amazing new features as part of Silverlight 4 including webcam support, printing support, clipboard access, right-click and mouse wheel control, implicit styles, drop/drop, HTML rendering, commanding, and on and on.

My good friend, Tim Heuer, provides a comprehensive article on the announcements around Silverlight 4 including a feature review with links to videos and sample code as well as a list of all the bits you need to get up and running with Silverlight 4.

We mixed up the process of recording the Thirsty Developer episode this time around. We’ve been wanting to get our good friend Tim Heuer back on for a discussion of the recently released Silverlight 3 and the future of Rich Internet Application development. The problem was, we weren’t going to see Tim anytime in the near future. All of our previous shows have always been recorded live. This time around, we went with a Skype hook-up with Tim across two time zones. You can certainly tell, but for what it was I think the quality sufficed to give you the opportunity to listen in on a great conversation with Tim.

With opening the possibilities of Skype, we have the opportunity to open the list of potential guests on the Thirsty Developer. If you have a technical topic that you’re passionate about and would like to share with the audience, let us know. Send an email to thirstydeveloper@live.com.

Thirsty Developer #71: Talking Silverlight with Tim Heuer

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