Ian Blackburn

Bart Czernicki had good post recently titled Silverlight 3 - Where is Silverlight Mobile?

I thought a lot of the comments he made were spot on.  We have been lead up the garden path by the mobile team and in particular Amrit Chopra who has been announcing Silverlight for Mobile for 3 years now.  In fact I was expecting that he would announce it again at Mix year and then deliver nothing again!  Turns out he took a back seat in the 6.5 overview instead and no significant news on Silverlight Mobile was forthcoming.

In my opinion though, Microsoft are playing with smoke and mirrors… [read full post]

Just a quick shout out to this conference – just booked my ticket- looks like a very interesting day.  Thanks to Mike Taulty for highlighting it in his blog.

I have grabbed a screen shot of the agenda below, but you can visit the site here for full details of speakers etc.  Fee is a reasonable £99+vat

Cheers

Ian

Just a quick note to point you towards a little app I have been playing with to keep track of Silverlight news on Twitter.  Thought it might be interesting to keep an eye on this week with all the Silverlight announcements.

This is a very early attempt at some ideas I have for a richer Silverlight Twitter app – [read more] 

Cheers

Ian

Robert Hess has a interesting chat with Brad Adams about silverlight 3 – this is a sneak peak of Brad’s session for Mix09, without, as he calls “the super secret stuff”.

[read full article]

The Model-View-ViewModel pattern has been gaining a lot of popularity for WPF, and there have been a growing number of posts and resources about adapting it for Silverlight.

This is a short summary post of some of those resources.  I will follow this up later with a detailed post on M-V-VM where I will also explore the business case for adopting such a design ..

[read more]

Cheers

Ian

This example was produced rather quickly in response to a challenge by Tim Heuer and shows the energy consumption of US households over the last few years and then predicted to 2030.  I was inspired by an article in National Geographic that I was reading, and it highlights I hope, the rather dramatic amount of energy is wasted through “electrical loss” (though I was a little disappointed from the visualisation point of view, how little the data changed in the prediction, made for a less dramatic animation!). 

[read more]

In Silverlight 3 we have seen that the Alexandria Framework will have a rich validation and business logic framework that is really very powerful and productive.  Silverlight 3 is due to be announced at Mix 09, and I would expect a CTP or Beta to be available then.

But what can you do now?  Even if we get a go-live license on a SL 3 Beta it will be too early for many corporate teams to adopt.  This post will look at using Silverlight 2 and: ...

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Ok – that’s a bit unfair – I do like IE8 but the amount of sites that are broken until you switch compatibility on is quite startling!

Developers don’t need to do much to fix it, just add the following header to force IE8 to enter IE7 compatible mode automatically (or change your site to be IE8 compatible of course ;-)

<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=EmulateIE7″ />

Note too that in the dialog above Microsoft are creating an updated list of sites that need compatibility mode, so perhaps we won’t need to be so drastic in displaying everything in compat mode.  In fact it’s actually quite a bad idea, because IE8 is standards compliant where-as IE7 isn’t (so much), and so IE 8 is the way forward.

For a deeper understanding read here: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/08/27/introducing-compatibility-view.aspx 

Cheers

Ian

[cross posted from: http://blackburnian.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!FB8B852EF1AB0B35!1917.entry]

In the UK the DDA (The Disability Discrimination Act, 1995) makes it a legal requirement for service providers to ensure access for disabled customers and if necessary make reasonable adjustments to the way they deliver their services; this includes web sites (see Part III, 2.2, 4.7, 2.13-2.17, 5.23 and 5.26). 

This almost certainly isn’t news to most of you, but I think there is a large degree of confusion about what creating a DDA Compliant site actually means, if not among the legal profession, it certainly appears to be among the development teams I generally come across.

It seems that in order to be able to claim that a website is DDA compliant, it must be tested against the three checkpoint levels laid down in the WAI guidelines issued by the World-Wide-Web Consortium (W3C). These are of course the commonly quoted A, AA and AAA (levels 1, 2 and 3).  Level AA is recommended and level A is the minimum acceptable standard for accessibility.

However I believe that most developers look at the A, AA, and AAA levels against WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) version 1, which were published in 1999 and required sites that contain no CSS or Script.

Importantly, it seems that DDA compliance could be based on either WCAG Version 1 or Version 2

Version 2 was published on 11 December 2008 and “applies to more advanced technologies, and is more precisely testable” than the previous version. For example, scripting is not forbidden and is even included as techniques to enhance accessibility. And where WCAG 1.0 essentially did not allow flashing or other movement, WCAG 2.0 allows it within defined parameters that won't cause seizures.

So WCAG version 2 opens up the ability to build compliant applications using Silverlight 2, and I have it on good authority that “you can build a WCAG 2.0 acceptable experience using Silverlight”.

So that means:

You can build DDA compliant application in Silverlight 2 by following the WCAG version 2

I will post further on what you will need to do in terms of your Silverlight app to achieve this, but for me at least this is a significant realisation, and I know of at least one client where not being able to do this would have been a show-stopper for Silverlight adoption in their new product.

Perhaps too, with the more realistic WCAG v2 now published, we can start developing web applications in general that are useful, accessible, and legal without resorting to producing a “fall-back WCAG v1 compliant version” and that the majority of web sites that are currently in breach of the law, and have been for over 6 years, can come into line.

Cheers

Ian