Die, AJAX! » Silverlight

10 Minute Silverlight Game Programming Tutorial - Shootorial Conversion #4 (C#)

admin — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 03:17:06 +0000

Another day, another shootorial! Every good game has a villian and in this fourth installment, we will add several villians at random intervals. OO-ifying the game in the last tutorial will make adding enemy ships almost embarrassingly easy.

So, let’s get started! (more…)

10 Minute Silverlight Game Programming Tutorial - Shootorial Conversion #3 (C#)

admin — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 19:23:12 +0000

Welcome back! In my previous Silverlight game programming tutorial, I converted Kongregate’s Flash Shootorial #2 to Silverlight, giving a scrolling background for the space ship to fly over. So today, in Shootorial #3, you will arm that ship with missiles, transforming into a lethal killing machine.

Kinda ;).

Again, keep in mind that Kongregate wrote these tutorials for beginning programmers, thus they prefered to “make things work” rather than “make things work in the best way”. And, in the interest of keeping the code simple, I plan to cut corners, too ;). Additionally, this tutorial builds on my other tutorials, so if you don’t understand something please refer to Shootorial Conversion #2 and Shootorial Conversion #1.

Here we go! (more…)

10 Minute Silverlight Game Programming Tutorial - Shootorial Conversion #2 (C#)

admin — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 18:23:28 +0000

I knew you’d come back for more :).

Welcome to the next tutorial in my Silverlight game programming tutorial series. For those out of the loop, I recently started a series of tutorials porting Kongregate’s Flash game programming tutorial series over to Silverlight. In my last Silverlight game programming tutorial I converted their Shootorial #1 tutorial, so this time I will convert Shootorial #2.

As I stated before, Kongregate’s tutorials assume no programming knowledge and holds your hand while walking you through the IDE. Conversely, I assume a basic understanding of C# programming and I don’t use the IDE at all. Also, I assume you read enough of my previous Silverlight tutorials to know how to deploy a basic Silverlight application. If not, check the previous game programming tutorial’s prerequisites to learn more.

Okay,…onward! (more…)

10 Minute Game Programming Tutorial: Silverlight - Shootorial #1 Conversion (C#)

admin — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 04:59:38 +0000

Welcome to the first of many Silverlight game programming tutorials on dieajax.com. In a burst of originality and creativity, for this initial set of tutorials, I decided to convert Kongregate’s excellent beginning Flash game programming tutorial series to Silverlight. The first of these let’s the developer get their feet wet by walking them through drawing a space ship on the screen that they can move with the arrow keys. These tutorials focus on simplicity, clarity and “getting something to work”, rather than writing battle-hardened, production-ready code. However, as time goes on, the tutorials will certainly get more advanced and I, personally, have plans to create and give away the source code to as many fully-playable Silverlight games as I can make.

Alright, let’s begin! (more…)

Introduction to game programming in Silverlight

admin — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 03:43:25 +0000

Even with an initial release less than two years ago, a thriving community of game developers write games for the Silverlight platform. Still, the Flash platform probably employs the largest game developer community, so in order to help eager Silverlight game developers enter the fray, I will convert Kongregate’s Flash game programming tutorials to Silverlight. Like the rest of my Silverlight tutorials, these tutorials will not require you to install Visual Studio. And, while informative, the Kongregate tutorials (necessarily) don’t address the more advanced concepts in game programming ( i.e. multi-threaded game loops, 3D rendering, etc). I will attempt to address these topics and more in future Silverlight game programming tutorials. (more…)

10 Minute Tutorial - Silverlight: Mouse button and scroll wheel event handling using managed code (C#)

admin — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 03:49:00 +0000

Originally, I wanted this post to stand as the definitive tutorial on mouse handling in Silverlight. However, after researching all the different methods people use to handle the right mouse button and scroll wheel in Silverlight, I quickly gave up that pipe dream. Instead, this tutorial serves as merely a starting point for handling mouse events in Silverlight. If you can’t find what you need here, chances are, someone else has hacked together the solution you nedd. I provide links to a few of these solutions on my Silverlight Portal page.

So, for this tutorial, we will create a rectangle that you can drag using the left mouse button, resize using the scroll wheel and change its color using the right mouse button. Hopefully, this examle will give you a basic overview on how to handle mouse events in Silverlight.

With all that said, let’s get started. (more…)

Silverlight 2 Released!

admin — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 00:58:06 +0000

After months of waiting, wishing and hoping, Microsoft FINALLY released Silverlight 2.0 today. Given both the Betas and the RC releases, we all pretty much know what the official release contains, so I won’t go over it here. I will however give you some links to read more:

Mike Snow announces the release
Jessie Liberty has an excellent release guide
Scott Guthrie gives an overview off the Silverlight 2 goodness

One other thing: It looks like Microsoftl also supports developing Silverlight applications using Eclipse! Although the tutorials I write on this site will never require you to have an IDE, I am very excited by this news. Here’s a few more links on Silverlight with Eclipse to whet your appetite:

eclipse4sl Home Page
Silverlight development with Eclipse tutorial

Silverlight 2 RC0 Released; Silverlight Portal is up

admin — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 20:53:19 +0000

Two pieces of news today. First, if you’ve lived under a rock for the past week, Microsoft dropped the bits for the first Silverlight 2 release candidate. This is a DEVELOPER RELEASE only. That means, Microsoft will have NO official consumer Silverlight 2 RC0 runtime, so you should not actually expose RC0 applications to the rest of the world. Mircosoft only did this release to make sure developers could get their applications converted over in anticipation of an official release (which means Microsoft may do an official release soon). You can find more information, including breaking changes, at the links below:

Method of Failed - Silverlight 2 RC0 Released for Developers
ScottGu’s Blog - Silverlight 2 Release Candidate Now Available
Silverlight Version 2 RC0 Released!! (details all breaking changes in the post)

Being a only a developer release, I wiil not update any of my Silverlight 2 Beta 2 tutorials. Once Microsoft offically releases Silverlight 2, then I will make sure all my tutorials work. However, after looking over the breaking changes, I believe all my samples should continue to work fine.

Secondly, I finally launched the first version of Die, Ajax!’s Silverlight Portal. Long-term, I want the Silverlight Portal to aggregate the best of all the Silverlight tutorials on the web in one place. Things may look kind of sparse now, but I will add plenty more tutorials over the following weeks. So, go ahead, knock yourself out.

Channel 9 video review: Mike Sampson - Building a Silverlight player for Channel 9

admin — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 05:46:08 +0000

WARNING! You may need to watch this video twice. That awesome Star Destroyer model distracted the hell out of me the first time. Looks like it had the same affect on a few other people, too.

Apparently, Adam Kinney didn’t have to walk far for this interview. Currently, his office neighbor, Mike Sampson (a.k.a Sampy), works on the Silverlight-based media player for Microsoft’s Channel 8 and Channel 9 websites. So for about fifteen minutes, Mr. Sampy animatedly discusses his extremely positive experience using the Expression suite and Silverlight to bring this media player to life. (more…)

10 Minute Tutorial - Silverlight: Building a Silverlight application with MSBuild (C#)

admin — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 01:10:19 +0000

“If you build it they will come”

Don’t know about that, but if you use MSBuild, it’ll sure make everyone’s life a hell of alot easier.

As of .NET 2.0, Microsoft provides developers with a build engine, called MSBuild, as part of the runtime distribution. In this tutorial, I will walk through hand-coding a MSBuild build file for the sample code of my application framework Silverlight tutorial. (more…)