Dr. Dobb's and Digital Publishing: The Silverlight Project

Dr. Dobb's has been involved in online digital publishing for a long time. "How long?" you (rhetorically) ask. Well, at least as far back as 1990 when, to illustrate the power of hypertext, we published a special edition of the June issue in digital format which was downloaded from CompuServe. This edition used the HyperWriter platform which, by today's standards, seems clunky. Since then, we've published Dr. Dobb's in a variety of digital formats, including HTML, PDF, and Flash.

Which brings us to our most recent digital publishing platform -- Silverlight, a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in from Microsoft for developing Rich Internet Applications that make use of text, graphics, audio, and video.

To illustrate these capabilities, we've built a couple of projects that you should find exciting. One is a Silverlight-based game called Sparkleball and the other a digital version of our previously published Vista supplement called Flipbook.

While fun to play, Sparkleball is an admittedly simple game. But playing the game isn't necessarily the point. Creating the game is where the real fun starts -- which is why we included a step-by-step tutorial of how we built it. Take a look at the tutorial, improve on what we started, post your version, and tell us what and how you did.

For its part, Flipbook is a complete digital magazine with text, graphics, supplemental video and audio files and, I'm sure you'll agree, way too much of me. But then you need to see it to believe it. More specifically, it includes articles by Charles Petzold and Mike Riley, among others, audio and video presentations by the Microsoft engineers who built Vista, and tutorials by Scott Swigart. And to be truthful, it wasn't that hard to do.

All in all, this was a fun project to put together and we're looking forward to hearing from you if it is just as much fun to read.

-- Jonathan Erickson

Posted by Jon Erickson at 11:53 AM  Permalink