Wade Wegner

Take a look at this great highlight reel featuring a number of great customer solutions that leverage Microsoft Silverlight.  In particular, look for solutions from great customers like:

• CT Corporation, a Wolters Kluwer business
• McDonalds Corporation
• Winchester Ammunition
• National Instruments

More to come on some of the great solutions and technologies highlighted at MIX 2010!

As a native Illinoisan, I know that the Taste of Chicago is a big deal!  It is the largest outdoor food and music festival in the world, and is attended by more than 3 million people each year.  If you like food and music, this is a festival for you!

This past year, the City of Chicago needed to quickly build out an interactive map for the event – and when I say quickly, I mean it.  They needed an interactive mapping experience built and deployed in less than 10 days.  To help make this a reality, the City of Chicago turned to a very capable Microsoft partner, West Monroe Partners (WMP), for assistance. 

The challenges here were pretty clear:

• Build an interactive and immersive website in less than 10 days.
• The website needed to scale massively for the event, but once the event was over they wanted to scale the infrastructure down.
• WMP wanted to leverage their existing skills and tools.

WMP proposed the following – an immersive Silverlight Deep Zoom experience running on Windows Azure (if you’re not familiar with Deep Zoom, take a look at the Hard Rock memorabilia site).  You can still visit the Taste of Chicago interactive map – check it out:

The Windows Azure Platform – which I’ve discussed many times on my blog – is Microsoft’s cloud platform.  It is comprised of the following: Windows Azure, an operating system as a service; SQL Azure, a fully relational database in the cloud; and .NET Services, consumable web-based services that provide both secure connectivity and federated access control for applications.

The City of Chicago’s decision to go with Silverlight and Windows Azure provided a host of very tangible benefits, including:

• Fast, cost-effective development
• Immediate customer satisfaction
• Increased agility
• Dynamic user experience

In fact, this is broken down in detail in the Taste of Chicago case study with WMP and the City of Chicago.

Additionally, Erik Brown – technical lead at WMP – spoke to Microsoft about their experience building the interactive map in Silverlight and on Windows Azure.  I definitely recommend you take a look:

A really great story about how a capable partner can leverage innovative technology to not only dazzle a customer, but provide a valuable service for millions of users.

I hope this helps!

It only took me two or three months, but I finally updated my Silverlight Hangman application.  It was originally written an earlier version of Silverlight 1.1 alpha, and I hadn’t taken the time to update it.

The only things I had to do was switch out the Silverlight.js file and change the value of “Hidden” to “Collapsed” for the “Visibility” property of objects.  Otherwise I was able to use the same files in the Beta 2 version of Visual Studio 2008.

(Darn, I bet when Visual Studio 2008 is released soon I’ll have to update it again!  Oh well!)

Enjoy!