Silverlight chess board now running on Linux

I published an updated build 1.4.0.5 of my Silverlight chess board that runs on Linux, using Firefox and Moonlight 2.

Here is a screenshot from an Ubuntu virtual machine:

Silverlight chess board 1.4

I released version 1.4 of the Silverlight chess board with the following updates:

Added support for international characters in PGN files (according to the PGN standard section 4.1, a subset of ISO 8859/1 Latin 1 is used).

Added a new parameter "piece" to allow customized piece characters used in the notation, instead of the English ones used by default.

Better error message when a PGN file was not found.

Put in a work around for an IE8 standard modes bug, which caused the notation not to wrap lines correctly in some cases.

You can find the updated documentation at the Silverlight chess board home page.

Validation and the ModalPopupExtender

Two quick tips if you are using the ModalPopupExtender from the ASP.NET Ajax control toolkit:

• If you need to do a postback from inside the panel set as your popup control, wrap the contents of the panel into an UpdatePanel.
• If you add validation controls inside the panel set as your popup control, make sure the button used as the target control has CausesValidation set to false.

Surface development

In the last couple of months I have been contracting with syzygy and developed some applications for Microsoft Surface. The first Surface unit with these applications was deployed last week at the opening of the new O₂ flagship store in Cologne.

According to Microsoft, this was the first Surface deployment as a point of sales system in Germany.

I developed the mobile phone advisor and lottery applications, and co-developed the custom application launcher and media player applications.

  

Syzygy has more information about the project at a special site (in German), and in a PDF (in English).

Surface teaser

Here is a teaser image of what I have been up to the last couple of months. Stay tuned for more.

Silverlight chess board 1.3 with full support for variations

Today I released version 1.3 of the Silverlight chess board with the following changes:

Added full support for variations. Variations can be replayed by clicking with the mouse on a variation in the notation div.

An additional CSS class ".variation" can be used to format variations.

Added keyboard support for replaying when the focus is on the notation div. Available keys depend on the browser being used. I have found that the left and right cursor keys work fine in Internet Explorer and Firefox, but not in Google Chrome.

You can find an updated sample and documentation at the Silverlight chess board home page.

Back in LA

I am back in LA. This time I took my car.

No PDC.

Rebranded hotel.

The advertising is gone.

City hall.

Walt Disney Concert Hall.

LAPD police car.

      

Bus.

Staples Center (rebranded).

      

Union station.