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

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! Read more

November 1, 2008 | Filed Under Games, Tutorial, Silverlight | 1 Comment 

Introduction to game programming in Silverlight

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. Read more

October 28, 2008 | Filed Under Games, Silverlight | Comments Off 

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

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. Read more

October 20, 2008 | Filed Under Tutorial, Silverlight | Comments Off 

Silverlight 2 Released!

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

More Silverlight tutorials on the way!

October 14, 2008 | Filed Under Silverlight | 2 Comments 

Silverlight 2 RC0 Released; Silverlight Portal is up

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.

September 28, 2008 | Filed Under General, Silverlight | 1 Comment 

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