Silver Bay Labs

Previous Work

What Clients Are Saying

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AES Global

"Silver Bay Labs really came through in designing and developing our Silverlight vessel tracking application. Asking only for a proof-of-concept to determine the possibilities of the Microsoft platform for our data, Silver Bay Labs was able to integrate ADO.Net Data services using Oracle, MVVM, unit testing, and Deep Earth. The project was delivered on-time, and used best practices to enable further enhancements. The work Silver Bay Labs did was top-notch, and we’ll definitely be looking forward to working with them in the future."

Scott Galloway - Executive Vice President

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Silverlight Tour

Erik Mork and Silver Bay Labs have been helping teach the Silverlight Tour for quite some time and over that period I have been incredibly impressed by the breadth and depth of his knowledge of all things Silverlight. I recommend him for projects whenever I get the chance.”

Shawn Wildermuth - Founder

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Scheduall

  • "I found the introduction to Expression blend to be extremely valuable. The coverage of Prism was great. The hands-on approach is a very good idea."
  • "It was really helpful."
  • "It brought Silverlight to an understandable state."
  • Was the session worthwhile? Definitely!
Scheduall Team Members

Silverlight Projects

Vessel Tracking Application

Vessel Tracking application

Vessel Tracking Application

The Vessel Tracker visualizes the status and location of vessels from around the world. The interface is similar to Virtual Earth and allows a user to hover over a vessel and find out detailed information about the vessel. Behind the scenes, the application was created with features that enhance the lifetime and serviceability of the application. It was designed to use MVVM to separate the UI/Application logic layers. This means that the UI and logic of the application can be enhanced and changed independently. It also means that the application is testable. As an extra service to the client, I included unit tests for the application so that they can, now and in the future, be assured that the application is operating correctly. In addition, I used ADO.NET Data Servies (formerly Astoria) for the communications with the server. ADO.NET Data Services is a powerful technology that uses REST to communicate LINQ queries to the server. The benefit here is that the client has very efficient (and loosely coupled) access to the server. If a developer needs a new set of data on the client, it's as simple as writing a new query: creating a new server side web service isn't required. This benefit required some effort on the server (the client uses an Oracle database), and to that end, I created a pair of IQueryable endpoints for ADO.NET Services to consume. This project also highlights another service that I provide: leveraged use of existing code. I was able to point the client to an open source project that provides Silverlight mapping capabilities. This saved the client weeks of development time and thousands of dollars.


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Heroes Happen Here (initial version)

I contributed to the initial version of the Heroes Happen Here site. This version was in 2007 and used Silverlight 1.0. In this project, I used the downloader object to download dynamically generated XAML. While the initial version of the site has been upgraded over the past couple of years, much of the original design and development remain the same.


Development Guides

SEO Optimized Screencast Application

Development Guides is a ASP.NET MVC site powered by multiple Silverlight applications. It allows users to interact with code screencasts at an unprecedented level. It has the following SEO and user friendly features:

  • Display of code in the video
  • Ability to copy code from the video
  • Deep Linking into the video
  • Great experience for users without Silverlight
  • OpenId logins
  • Silverlight application for enriching videos

See an example video with code integration. The video application displays code to the user by using the Html Bridge and jQuery integration. The application includes a custom file-upload control for uploading raw videos. In addition, the site uses cloud services to distribute and display videos. Jesse Liberty of Microsoft has said of the implementation, "The integration is a work of art."


Prism Sample

Prism Samples

I'm a champion of best practices in Silverlight. As a part of that focus, I release Prism Code to the community. This code takes a concept or best practice and shapes a solution. The samples have been very well accepted by the community.

As a part of my dedication to patterns, I've been involved in popularizing the best practices for Silverlight. This has involved interviewing Microsoft Patterns and Practices team members and releasing screencasts on the best way to write silverlight applications.





Prism Sample

Tree Based Hyper Video Player

This Hierarchical Video Player has several interesting features. It's based on the Expression template and integrates this player with a hierarchical tree control. This allows a user to navigate a rich collection of videos. The player is driven by an XML file that describes the videos and embeds metadata (links to other videos) in the player. In addition, the player is designed in such a way as to provide a seamless viewing experience even as the underlying media changes.


MSDN Trainig Materials

Microsoft Internal Training Materials

When Silverlight 1.1(the forerunner of Silverlight 2) was released, I was asked to write some of Microsoft's MSDN internal training materials for the alpha version of Silverlight. These materials included details on how to access web resources and utlize the new programming model in the new runtime.



Silverlight Brain Research

Silverlight and Neurology

A month after Silverlight 2 was released, neurology research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported that individuals who practiced a particular training test could increase their intelligence. My wife and I created a Silverlight application that exactly implemented this current research. The goal was to create an application that would mimic the timings and display of the training application. We later found out that we had created a nearly exact copy using the information from the neurology paper. Part of our success was realized because we included Silverlight Unit Tests to ensure the proper functioning of the application. We released the application code under an open source license, and today it's a popular training tool for thousands of individuals. After the initial release, we also created a Silverlight Offline version as well.


Organizations

Professional Silverlight services have been provided to the following companies

Toyota London

Microsoft

Aeshen

Silverlight Tour

Thor Projects

AES Global

Scheduall