Thanks! Please see the answers in the following.

a) We talked about stand alone installer for SL and this is what you said:
——-
Did the stand alone installer make it to RTM?
J: Yeap. You can download the SL only installer at http://www.intersoftpt.com/TrialSoftware/WebUIStudioNET2008R2ForSilverlightSetup.exe.

b) I had asked if the Fisheye component can be databound to list for large number of entries, and I think you mentioned it should be available for RTM. Did it make it?
c) Were you able to include Sound effects place holder for the FishEye component?
J: Yes. We made both. I will publish a post that show you to enable these new features.

d) If there is a standalone installer for SL, do you have a trail version?
J: See a).

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,
Jimmy.

Congrats on the release of 2008 R2. A few follow up questions:

a) We talked about stand alone installer for SL and this is what you said:
——-
#3. Sure, please dont forget this is just a beta. We already have plan to provide Silverlight-only Installer in RTM. Thanks for your suggestion, really appreciated.
——-
Did the stand alone installer make it to RTM?

b) I had asked if the Fisheye component can be databound to list for large number of entries, and I think you mentioned it should be available for RTM. Did it make it?

c) Were you able to include Sound effects place holder for the FishEye component?

d) If there is a standalone installer for SL, do you have a trail version?

Thanks!
..Ben

..Ben

Some answers to your #2 post:

a) There are “pros” and “cons” with both approaches, and I think depend on how we want to deliver the application for end users. For instance, we would like to have really sleek user experience when users load on our special samples such as First Experience. In this case, if “load on demand” model is used, the experience would be slightly different, as the control would have run the animation without any images at first load, and then each image will appear later.

There are also some samples where we used external images (load on demand approach). For instances, check out the Flickr sample and Youtube-style Video Player sample.

b) Yes, it’s possible to customize how many preview items that you want to show. That can be done via MaximumPreviewItems property. And if you are using Scale mode perspective, you can also control the distance between the focal image and the preview items. You can set it with far distance, so the focal image can be more visible and attractive.

c) Good ideas. Forwarded to our development team, and will be made available on RTM. Thanks!

d) I think it’s already supported. Could you provide a sample media source so that we can conduct a test?

e) At the moment, no. That is due to the original FishEye nature which displays all items at once. In RTM, FishEye will have an “Auto Adaptive” feature, means it will automatically resize the button size according to the screen real estate’s availability. A sample of this scenario can be seen in Sirius’ main Dock navigator at the left side. Try to resize the browser smaller, and notice the button get smaller too. The same goes true if you enlarge the browser.

Regarding your latest post about source code availability of Sirius, we will deeply consider your suggestion to make the source available. There are some more works need to be done on the Showcase, but we certainly will consider your suggestion.

Please let me know if I missed anything. Looking forward to your response. Thanks!

I’d appreciate if you could answer my questions in the second post.

It’s excellent news to separate the SL installer from ASP.net for RTM. This is really important. I went back and forth on this issue with Jemmy a couple of days ago, and I was not satisfied with his answers and I brought it up again.

I’m very excited about your direction and the level of details you pay attention to.

Thanks!
..Ben

Thanks for your comments.

#1. I’m pleased that prospects started to compare SL components around. I believe SL developers will soon notice what are the difference between our products and others. Many component vendors focused on quantity, but if you take a look, they don’t even have design-time support. And one control only have several properties. Compare with WebFishEye alone, having nearly 70+ of customizable behaviors, full design-time support, data binding, item template, and many built-in visual effects.

And as you can see, other vendors can only provide “normal” controls like simple button, slider, scrollbar, etc. We don’t have interest to do such things, and therefore, quantity is really not our speciality, but quality and innovation are.

Again, we’re so pleased when prospects and customers started to compare and have a look around.

#2. I will answer the details in another comment.

#3. Sure, please dont forget this is just a beta. We already have plan to provide Silverlight-only Installer in RTM. Thanks for your suggestion, really appreciated.

Please feel free to let me know should you have other questions, or feedback.

Regards,
Jimmy.

For a SL developer, all we need, is your two DLLs for the two components. So why do you make us install the whole ASP.Net suite into my IDE when I don’t need ASP.Net? I understand one of your ASP.Net component may use the two dlls, and that’s fine, but for SL developers, just give us the two DLLs, docs and some samples. We point the reference to the dlls and we’re ready to go.

Telerik, DevExpress, ComponentOne, Infragistics, all have ASP.Net suite, but none make you install other suites for SL. In fact, you can’t tell me, SL uses ASP.Net library, therefore we have to have ASP.Net. So what’s the deal? 😉

Hope you don’t mind my frank questions, you may loose customers because of this!

..Ben

a) I started having images in my XAP and the XAP grew very fast and then I began to use the relative position and let HTTP do image downloading on demand, and my Xap went from several meg to 640K, and you will not even notice that images are being loaded on demand by HTTP server. Why don’t you try that with your showcase?
Here is one of the apps I wrote that none of the images are in the XAP. This a book, bring your mouse to the lower/upper corner, grab the corner and flip the page.
http://www.MicroIntelligence.Com/Brochure

b) One of the reason I like your component set, is WebCoverFlow, but I want to know if it’s possible to show only “one” image at a time to take advantage of screen real estate to the max for that image. I don’t want other images distract the viewing experience of the focal image. In some cases it’s important to see before and after images, but in some cases, a single image is more powerful. Can we do that?

c) It would be great to allow us to add short sound clips with Fisheye component. i.e. when you move your mouse over, the icon flips or jumps or gets highlighted. Well, it would be good to offer a property to insert an mp3 to play with that animation. This really makes the jump or flip more noticeable.

d) Is your WebCover media player able to recognize “Video markers” that may have been put in place with Media Encoder? This way we can use your media player to play the video and at the same time respond to the markers to show text or images and so on.

e) Let’s say I want to data bind your FishEye component to a list, that I would not know the number of entries at design time, can your FishEye, show a Left/Right arrow or some form of indications, if the items are more than what it can show at a time?

Once I get answer to these, it may raise some new ones.

Thanks!
..Ben

Sounds like you’re beginning to like SL… 😉

I had been asking those questions from Jemmy and tech support and I’m happy you addressed them. There is one other thing I like to suggest. I think you should also provide the source to the showcase program to either everyone or anyone who signs an NDA with you. There are some great things done in it that is none proprietary but still good to learn from, i.e. loading the XAP at runtime. Personally, if it was available, I wouldn’t give it second thought to pay $400 for two components, where as now it’s hard to justify that price for two components. Especially, when you see a company like ComponentOne who has a great and mature set of components (almost 30 components for LOB), for about $500 (promotion price till release $800 normal price).
Please don’t take me wrong, I’m not knocking down your product, I was just stating from an economic point of view, that it would justify the cost of $400 if you also provide the showcase as a learning tool as well. I discussed it with Jemmy and now you know!

Seeing this level of quality, I’m sure you will see me around from this point on. Great looking product!
..Ben