Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

Silverlight Talk in Second Life

analysis
Sep 6, 20072 mins

OK, I've hit my buzzword quota for the day. Seriously, Brad Abrams gave a talk about Silverlight in Second Life at the end of last month. As it happens, I missed it: it was at 3 PM SLT/PDT, which is 6 PM EDT for me, and my wife expected me home for dinner. Real life always wins. Fortunately, Brad has posted the slides, Silverlight media demo and Silverlight RIA demos on his blog. I suspect th

Seriously, Brad Abrams gave a talk about Silverlight in Second Life at the end of last month. As it happens, I missed it: it was at 3 PM SLT/PDT, which is 6 PM EDT for me, and my wife expected me home for dinner. Real life always wins.

Fortunately, Brad has posted the slides, Silverlight media demo and Silverlight RIA demos on his blog. I suspect that going through the media on your own PC will be a better experience than sitting through a demo in Second Life, especially given what Tim Heuer had to say about his own experience.

I understand exactly the problems Tim had. The problem with media starting out fuzzy and then getting clearer is an artifact of the way Second Life does incremental scene rendering. There’s a bandwidth throttling preference setting in the Second Life client that you can adjust to make this better, but I don’t know of a way to make it go away.

The problem Tim had seeing the speaker from his seat could have been solved if Tim had more experience in Second Life instead of being a newbie. Instead of flying his avatar around and annoying everyone else, Tim could have adjusted his camera position (using the Alt key on the Windows client) or used Mouse Look (started with the M key). There’s also a Disable Camera Constraints option (Ctrl-Alt-C). Without going through some training, there was no way Tim could have figured that out.

(I can’t believe I’m giving advice about using Second Life. I’m barely past the newbie stage myself.)

By the way: Silverlight 1.0 has shipped. Silverlight 1.1 remains in Alpha. Get them here.

Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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