After the LiveFX application I showed yesterday, I will now do the same but for a Silverlight Mesh App, so this would actually appear in your Live Desktop. Like yesterday’s tutorial, this is only really for those who have been given access to the LiveFX and Mesh SDK ‘bits’ at the moment, but when it does eventually go live for all developers, then you’ll be able to use the same tutorial.

In this article I will show you how to use a combination of free tools and services to produce and host a high quality panorama. You will render this using Silverlight2 and display it geo-referenced on Virtual Earth. The combination of hosted storage and services from Windows Live gives us a powerful Rich Internet Application from a basic HTML page. The tools and services you will use are:

• Your digital camera
• Windows Live Photo Gallery
• Deep Zoom Composer
• Silverlight2
• Silverlight Streaming
• Virtual Earth

The final result below is made from eight photos taken of the Story Bridge in Brisbane, Australia at 6am.

If you head over to Codeplex you will find a number of Contoso Quick Applications posted there. Each one demonstrating various aspects of the Windows Live platform and showing you a "real world" style application that makes use of them, along with the source code so that you can easily apply the various techniques to your own web site.

Today another web application has been released. The focus of this application is Silverlight and Windows Live Search. This short article will give you a quick overview of it's main features without doing a "deep dive" into exactly how it works.

The Context

Most people that I've known can relate to this.  You come across a problem and you need to do some online research, say for example, how to integrate Windows Live ID in with your web site. So you hit the Internet and start doing some searches, you find bits of information of one web site, some bits on one blog post, some bits on another. Then you want to find some images for a login and logout button. So you've got all these web sites that you need to remember where the information is and you possibly may also need to share you're research will a fellow worker that's working on the project with you.

Well this is where Tafiti comes in. Tafiti, which means "do research" in Swahili, is an experimental search front-end from Microsoft, designed to help people use the Web for research projects that span multiple search queries and sessions by helping visualize, store, and share research results. Tafiti uses both Microsoft Silverlight and Live Search to explore the intersection of richer experiences on the Web and the increasing specialization of search. Tafiti is also available as a standalone site for those that don't want to dig into the code and just use or sample the application first hand, just head over to Tafiti.com.

Recently I was asked how to display Rich media (mainly video) in Sharepoint 2007 by our communications department. This shouldn't be too hard to do so time to whip up a quick demo/proof of concept to make sure that it in fact can be done, and what better way than to create a custom web part that embeds Microsoft's Silverlight.

Adding Silverlight to your web application is easy enough so it shouldn't be too difficult to do in Sharepoint 2007 either. There are a few different files that you will need in order to do this however, a couple of Javascript files, a XAML and of course your custom web part.

So kick off Visual Studio and lets get cracking.

Last week I posted about my interview with Angus Logan and Danny Thorpe and included the whole interview in the blog post by using Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live. But just what did I need to do to get that all working? Here I will show you.

Encoding with Expression Encoder

For this, you will need to install Expression Encoder to encode the mp3 and apply all the cool touches to it. For this, I didn't want to use any of the built in players that come with Encoder because they were all intended for videos, so I wanted one that was specifically for audio, so one quick search later took me to the Silverlight Audio Player. Download the most recent source code, and in the zip file you download will be a folder called "SilverlightAudioPlayer"; copy that folder into your %Program Files%\Microsoft Expression\Encoder 1.0\Templates\en\ folder (or whichever language you have installed). Now we can begin.