It's that time of year again ;)

(Thanks Adam for a great, topical, sample)

By now you've probably heard a fair bit about Silverlight - Microsofts cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.

But you're not sure how to get started and how to take advantage of the rich runtime to deliver great experiences to your visitors today.

Luckily Laurence Moroney has just published Introducing Silverlight which provides a great "getting started" guide to Silverlight, XAML and how to program media, animation and interactivity using Javascript.

So what are you waiting for.... dive in and get coding ;)

Recently I managed to do some damage to a Vista install (note to self - while resizing a partition from a Linux app works it's best to follow the instructions EXACTLY) and needed to run a repair.

Being a lightweight and ultra modern machine the one thing that was lacking was any sort of removable spindle media... like a DVD drive. That meant I needed to be able to create a bootable USB thumbdrive that I could copy my Vista ISO onto in order to run the repair (originally I'd used an external DVD drive but I didn't have it and needed my machine quickly) so... on my other Vista machine (everyone should have two computers) I fired up a command prompt in adminstrator elevated mode (find Command Prompt in the programs list, right click, "run as administrator" then followed these easy steps:

Run Diskpart at the cmd prompt and then enter these commands

• Rescan
• List disk (will list all your disks)
• Select disk # (where # is what you found from the previous step for your usb key)
• Clean
• Create part pri
• Select part 1
• Format fs=ntfs quick
• Active
• Exit

You USB key is now bootable and you can copy the contents of the iso across, plug it into the other machine, reboot and ... voila - I'm trying this from the repaired machine.

I've been playing around with Silverlight again in the last few days (I know - coding rather than talking about things. It's going to do my reputation no good at all) and I wanted to do something a little neater than the basic workflow where the user is directed off to the Microsoft.com download page and has to go from there.

A quick search and I spotted Laurences article on using inplace (aka direct aka inline) install for the Silverlight control and that made for a much better user experience - the control could be put where I wanted it and the user didn't have to leave my page to install it.

That then left the little challenge of what happened after they'd installed the control. In Firefox because of the architecture you have to restart the browser to activate plug ins so there's nothing I could do about that, but in IE7 the control is usually available straight away. The problem was the page didn't know the control had been installed.

Luckily the Silverlight Javascript libraries include a test for the plug-in being present (and you can check the version number) which means it's a simple enough task to write some Javascript that loops around every 5 seconds or so and tests to see if the plug-in is there and when it is stop showing the install prompt and show the goodness that you were after in the first place.

You can download my very simple sample from here or see it in action here

Taken from NYC Oct 2007

For a man with his very own, um, thrusting edifice in the heart of Manhattan I was surprised to notice that Donald only has one prominent ball at the base of his tower ;)

Looks like he's a man with nothing to prove (though I have to wonder about the terrier on his head!)

I really like BrowserHawk. During the heady days of the browser wars, and even now in the calmer waters of almost compatibility there it's sometimes really reassuring to know that there are some simple, reliable ways to know what the users browser is and what plug-ins it's got without having to write hundreds of lines of JavaScript with lots of try statements or go through complicated multi page refreshing detection routines to see what version of Flash or Quicktime you can target safely (or allow you to elegantly guide the user through getting exactly what your page needs to run)

Until now Silverlight was in the same boat. You needed to probe the results of the javascript loader to see if it had found the plug in, or if it was displaying the "click here to install Silverlight" graphic (which pretty as it is, sometimes isn't the best way to go)

I was pleased to discover reading the release notes for the new BrowserHawk detector that it supports detection of the Silverlight Plugin and returns the installed version number so you can make appropriate decisions while rendering the page.

One additional function that, while not Silverlight related, I wish I'd had back in the Big Brother days is the ability to detect and report back on JavaScript errors - until now it's always been difficult once you've released JavaScript laden pages into the wild to track what problems are occurring (and know exactly what the browser configuration is) in order to improve code quality. I hope my successors back in Australia take it on board...

With the prospect of a 6 hour flight ahead of me tomorrow I had a look to see if my iPod was still working. Amazingly after about 6 months sitting idle in a draw it managed to power up when I found the USB cable and plugged it in.

I had a quick look at the music installed and decided maybe it was time to refresh it a little so went to download iTunes.

It's been a while since I installed it but I was amazed at the 49MB download needed just to install a pretty simple music player.

Just like Acrobat the download has blow up out of all proportion. Exactly what is going on in there that needs this much code. Is this why machines are needing bigger processors and more CPU to do every day tasks... developers or product managers think it's fine to add thousands of lines of code to solve a problem when maybe thinking a bit more, though harder, would provide a more elegant solution.

I'll need to defrag my disk when this is installed. And no doubt it'll want to convert everything to m4a and take control of my machine