Friday, July 10, 2009

The new version of "Flash contender" has been released...

Today the Silverlight 3 RTW* has been released. In my very limited knowledge… I dunno whether there was a RC version before or not. Since all that I know the last previous version was beta… but who cares… this new version of “flash contender” has been released anyway :P
The run time can be downloaded via this link.

And the overview...

The new features description can be found in this link.

There are some features that exciting for me, those features are GPU support, 3D support, 3. Out of browser capabilities and new bitmap manipulation API.

Regarding those the new features, these are some comment that pop up from my head, but please be aware that due to my limited knowledge and I haven’t try this feature my self so better not use it for reverence hehehe…


  1. GPU support - for faster video and bitmap rendering…

  2. Perspective 3D support - yes… finally the “real 3D” support! not just a 2D vector that looks like 3D. So for those who previously were expecting to implement 3D in this Silverlight world… it’s time to bring it on dude! Hehehe…

  3. Out of browser capabilities - if you think that this feature will kill the WPF application… in my opinion it won’t… well at least for now. The features of this Silverlight version are still very… very… very… limited compared to the WPF desktop application. One of the simple example is that there is no printing/reporting support on this Silverlight application. Another silly analogy to explain this is, from the size of the framework. This Silverlight 3 run time is only around 4MB. Which is very small compared to the .NET 3.0 framework, although it is combined with the other Microsoft foundation (WCF and WF) so I personally don’t know the size of the WPF framework itself. So this second analogy is not very relevant :)

  4. New bitmap manipulation API - I personally quite glad hearing this feature. Since it will certainly ease my pet project :P

  5. For the other features… you can see it for yourself from the given link… :P

However… without any intention to devastate the excitement, there are some (basic) features that are not included in this release. Some of those features are right click and mouse scrolling button support and also the printing/reporting support. From my point of view, for the right click and scrolling is really essential for today application. For the printing/reporting support is also essential especially when we want to build business application or even enterprise level application.
Therefore I would like to ask you guys to support by asking this features to the wish list in the Silverlight official forum.

In case if you want to develop Silverlight 3 application you can download the SDK from this link.

*RTW stands for Released To Web in case you’re not geeky enough… :P

Monday, February 16, 2009

Pet Project

A geek is not that “geek” if she/he ain’t having pet project. So based on that judgement, this time I would like to share my plan for my pet project.
Ever since I graduated I always wanted to rewrite my final project application that I wrote for my graduation. The application was a very simple image processing application. It implemented the Exemplar-based image Inpainting. Although it was a simple application but I think the implemented algorithm is so damn interesting. The application lets the user choose an image and a part or object that user wanted to remove, and the application with some unique algorithm do the “magic”, regenerating those empty part that being left by the object that being removed. The result will be just like a background of the image. Burrrb… enough already with the geeky explanations… I’ll just show you the example:

Input:


Result:


I got this interesting topic from a friend of mine, than the introduced me to his friend who’re working on it for final project for his graduation. Thanks to him because of his help, I managed to finish it and graduated in time :P

Alright, let’s back to the pet project geeky stuff. The previous application was written in Delphi programming geek language. And for sure the application wasn’t written in a good way. It was only written to kill the job. No compile error and the program ran as expected… than the job is done… he3x… :P

As I mentioned, I want to rewrite the application to the .NET technology. To make it look more professional fancy, the design for the application is described on the following simple diagram:



As you all can see… the front end for this application is going to use Silverlight 2.0 technology, and it will consume a WCF Service. The service will process the image based on the user input and then send back to the client to display the result.

There are some obstacles for developing this application. Apart from the issue of learning curve to get familiar to those new technologies, here are the issues that currently I have in mind…

  • • On the front end,
    I haven’t seen any component that helps the development of the image processing application, such as: “marching ants” selection tools. If I have to write this tools by myself, for sure it will take a lot of time… :P

  • • On the back end,
    Finding a free web hosting that support Silverlight and WCF service isn’t that easy. I quick browse on the net and found these two options. Aspspider offers free hosting for 6 months trial only. And for the silverlight.live.com, I’m not so sure if it supports the WCF service


I wish that those obstacles do not make my spirit down, to start working on this pet project.

Any information, suggestion or even comment that can help me to finalize this pet project is positively welcome.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Welcome to my blog...

I’m glad that finally I can write a blog, after postponed for a quite long while.

There are some reasons why I’m tempted to be a blogger. One of the reasons is to practicing my writing skills; especially in English; but I can’t promise to write all of the articles in English due to the fact of my limitation in English. And sometimes I believe that some story or article is more fun or exited if it’s written in Bahasa or even in Ngoko* :P

That’s the “normal” reason; the other thing that motivates me is the fact that a lot of people who knows me (my friends or even my family member) told me that I sometimes always have a different point of view analyzing things. Well, sitting in other way I’m writing this blog also to tell the world how silly I am (please refer to About Me for more explanation). And I really hope people can enjoy my blog, if you find that you aren’t enjoying my blog feel free to add critics, comments or… just redirect to other blog or web site… it’s just that simple… hehehe… Enjoy!

*One of the types of Javanese language.. yes Javanese... no Japanese... :P