Snowball - The Blog

Just a small reminder that this Wednesday, I’m doing another SilverlightShow webinar titled “Switching on the cloud for Silverlight”.

What happens if you combine 2 of the hottest technologies for your applications? Find out in this very session!

If we combine the capabilities of Windows Azure with the rich UX of Silverlight, we are capable of building great... what am I saying: exceptional web applications. We'll look at building an app in Silverlight running from Azure and we'll look at the topics of interest that you'll encounter when hosting services in the cloud to be consumed from Silverlight, considerations for Windows Azure Storage if used from Silverlight etc.

Webinar agenda:

1. Parts of Windows Azure

2. Why does a Silverlight developer need to care?

3. Developing for Windows Azure

   • Required tools

   • Emulators (“local cloud”)

   • Azure Portal

4. Moving Silverlight applications to the cloud

   • Database only

   • WCF

   • REST

   • Entire Silverlight applications

   • RIA Services

   • Azure as intermediate layer for Twitter

5. Using blob storage

   • Silverlight/Azure video player

6. Windows Phone and Azure

   • Accessing services in the cloud

   • WP7 Push Notification services

As always, these webinars are free and you can register here: http://www.silverlightshow.net/news/Upcoming-Silverlight-Show-Webinar-Switching-on-the-Cloud-for-Silverlight.aspx

In my busy time (see previous post), some really interesting case studies were released.

• On iis.net, a huge white paper was posted on the Sunday Night Football site. This site, which may not be known to European readers as much, is now built entirely on Silverlight 3 backed by IIS Smooth Streaming. The latter, an ability to dynamically adapt the bit rate of the video stream, is unique in a RIA technology: for example Flash does not have this on board. This way, viewers with lower bandwidth or slower PC processors frequently experience long periods of video buffering, stuttering, and degraded picture quality. Silverlight solves this. The white paper can be read at http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/808/sunday-night-football-live-in-hd-with-microsoft-silverlight-3-and-iis-smooth-streaming/
• The second interesting case study can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=4000005861%0d . This case describes the use of Windows Azure by Outback Steakhouse. Outback was looking for a social networking presence but did not know what to expect in visitor numbers. Windows Azure offered them exactly what they needed.