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What great news!  The historic inauguration of President-Elect Barack Obama will be streamed LIVE using Silverlight, our online Rich Internet Application (RIA) and media platform, via the Presidential Inaugural Committee website on January 20th.  For those of you who followed the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, you witnessed first hand and what our Silverlight technology can do in the online media arena!  This is a great time for our country and a very exciting time for Microsoft to be able to showcase argueably the most important moment of our time using the power of the Microsoft platform!

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Quick Links

MSDN Site: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd362339

Community Forum: http://codeplex.com/unity

Description:

The Patterns & Practices team has recently released a port of the Unity Application Block to Microsoft Silverlight 2.  This release includes the following capabilities and packaging:

• The single Microsoft.Practices.Unity.dll file in the Silverlight version contains all the classes from the three separate desktop DLLS: Microsoft.Practices.Unity.dll, Microsoft.Practices.ObjectBuilder2.dll, and Microsoft.Practices.Unity.StaticFactoryExtension.dll.  You only need to reference and deploy the one assembly in your Silverlight projects.
• Becase of the differences in the Silverlight security model, only public types can be created and injected by the container.  The desktop version allows you to also inject internal types.
• XML configuration is not supported.
• The Unity interception mechanism is not supported.

An updated quickstart is also included.

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 I mentioned in a previous post the work I’ve been doing with the Library of Congress.  It has been a great effort and an excellent showcase of the power and flexibility of our platform.  On April 12th, we closed another chapter in this unprecendented effort by officially launching their myLOC.gov website.  The website has been architected and built on top of a platform consisting of SharePoint Server 2007, Silverlight, Windows Communication Foundation, and Windows Live ID.  The launch of the myLOC.gov site on this past Saturday marked the culmination of 9 months of work to deliver a compelling solution that’s geared at reshaping how Americans view American History by literally bringing many of the historical treasures contained within the walls of the Library of Congress to life and allowing not only the American people, but the entire world to experience this great treasure.

The launch of the myLOC.gov website capped off a great week for the Library of Congress and Microsoft.  As a part of the revitalized digital experience, coined the “Library of Congress Experience”, is also the launch of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)-based interactive touch screen kiosks that’s running within the Library of Congress’s Thomas Jefferson Building in DC.  There, US citizens, and people travelling to DC from around the world, will be able to enage within an immersive technology experience that allows people to interact with the Library’s historical collections in new and exciting ways.  The myLOC.gov site takes this onsite experience and brings it to the web!

In the coming weeks, myself, in combination with our great partners, Portal Solutions and Schematic will be creating a “How We Did It” article (likely to be posted on the SharePoint Team Blog), in the same vein as the two-part article I published on another great effort with Conservation International, that’ll dive deeper into the overall solution architecture and cover specifics around logical and physical architecture as well as discuss implementation details of key features and functionality.

So stay tuned!

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The Silverlight 2 Retail Financial Services Demonstrator provides essential resources to help customers and ISVs to create their own demo or proof of concept based on the Silverlight 2 platform. Included in the kit are:

• Functional Silverlight 2 Website (Woodgrove Financial) – View it online!
• Installation, customization and demo script that provides step by step instructions for installing the demo, customizing the data shown in the demo as well has how to step through the site with talking points.
• Source Code – that is right, you also get to see and use the source code to see what is going on under the covers and use as a foundation for your own POC!

Why use Silverlight 2 and the Demonstrator?

• Immersive, cross-platform / cross-browser user experience
• Insightful visualizations, improved end user experience that can be personalized and branded
• Great performance, reuse of .NET code on the web (cross platform!!)
• Great examples of using visualizations to help sell and service financial products including cause and effect, multiple scenarios, unified communications, etc…

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Over the past year, I’ve had the opportunity to work on some really cool and unique projects.  I’m proud to add yet another project to my portfolio, which is the current work we’re doing with the Library of Congress and the delivery of what they’re calling their “New Visitors Experience”, set to launch in the next month.  As the Microsoft Solutions Architect for this effort, I must say that to date we’ve produced some compelling solutions around Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight.  This work has been met with a tremendous amount of press but yet is only the tip of the iceberg of what’s yet to come.  We’ve recently posted a video case study on our MIX website that highlights some of our efforts to date.  Stay tuned for more from this blog regarding the Library of Congress project and the really, really cool things we’re doing around Silverlight, WPF, WCF, Windows Live and SharePoint Server 2007!

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