Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man. - Mark Twain At the MVP Summit in March, Scott Guthrie and friends previewed the 1.1 Alpha of Silverlight (named of course, after my good friend David Silverlight , who runs XMLPitstop.com and other fine sites). We weren't allowed to talk about it until now - and the 1.1 Alpha is now available - along with some nice Quickstart SDK samples . Among other fine features, this offers a reduced-set WPF runtime hosted in Internet Explorer, streaming video, and - SURPRISE - Managed code in the browser -- including Javascript access to managed code! Get it while it's hot! Now the big question you'll hear is whether this is going to be a "Flash killer". I don't think that will happen right away, but when you look at the streaming video codec and DRM support, support for managed code, dynamic XAML loading and much more, it certainly repr...

Microsoft is apparently moving forward as fast as it can with the integrated "next gen" tools like Expression Blend that are XAML - compliant. XAML has a lot of promise, expecially because of it's high level of adaptability to animation, Windows Forms - like controls, play stuff in the browser, and so on. I do a lot of work with Maya on the side. Mostly, I take my digital photographic work and do "digital photo collage" by overlaying photos as the material attributes of various shapes, often 3D replicated with MEL scripting, setting raytracing, refraction, reflection, lighting and other features then doing a master render to a large TIFF file (sometimes 65MB). I have a friend who runs a studio here in Deland, FL and he has an expensive giclée printer , so he can put these out on large - format prints on expensive paper for me (that is, the "good ones", 'cause this can cost $100 a print -- here is a link to a small size one ). At any rate, Thomas ...