Bizarre Websites On Which You Can Kill Time With Style

Bizarre Websites On Which You Can Kill Time With Style

via Smashing Magazine Feed by Julia May on 5/25/10

Modern Web-building technologies allow designers to realize their most daring and creative ideas. Enhanced interactivity and a remarkable visual appearance can be achieved by means of such tools as Flash, JavaScript and Papervision3D, to name just a few. These strengths usually impress and entertain visitors and thus are often used for conceptual artistic presentations and promotional campaigns.

In this post, you’ll find a collection of amusing websites that, by combining unconventional (and sometimes bizarre) ideas and clever JavaScript and Flash effects, will entice you to play on them for an embarrassing long time.

[Offtopic: by the way, did you know that there is a Smashing eBook Series? Book #1 is Professional Web Design, 242 pages for just $9,90.]

Bizarre and Beautiful Websites

Record Tripping
Record Tripping is a nifty experimental game by Bell Brothers. You are invited to solve a series of puzzles by scratching a record with your mouse’s scroll wheel. Clever game play and a lovely interface make this online Flash game as fun as it is weird.

Sound of Hamburg
Here is one of the most creative and unconventional Flash websites we’ve seen lately. Sound of Hamburg lets you compose music on and with the city of Hamburg. The combination of brilliant idea and unique interaction makes for an absorbing Web experience.

Echogenesis
Echogenesis is another interactive brainchild of Bell Brothers. This exciting Flash website lets you explore five natural environments and experience a variety of sound and visual effects through your interaction.

Verbatim Championship
Verbatim Championship is a hilarious Flash-based website where you can build your own “Media Monster” using Verbatim recording devices and use it to fight other monsters.

Incredibox
This fun and well-developed Flash application lets you conduct a beatbox or a capella band. The website is available in both English and French.

De Montagetafel
This website was definitely among the best for Flash Web design for 2009. You are invited to try your montage skills and create your own documentary on an edgy topic.

Optus Whale Song
An amazingly creative experience is offered by the Australian telecommunication company Optus on its official website. You can compose a song for a whale and make an orchestra perform it. This is a must-see Flash website.

Flurrious
If you like to create things, this website will keep you busy for hours (especially in winter). Using a versatile Flash editor, you can compile your very own snowflake and watch it dance in an artistic snowfall.

Blues Maker
Blues Maker is a fun online Flash application that allows you to create a fine blues song. The list of options is rather limited; still the process of song-making is quite enjoyable. The design of the website is really cool, too.

Bubole
Bubole will definitely make you smile. It is an amusing monster builder and game. You create a weirdo and make it fight with monsters created by other players. The funny sound effects and typography are nice touches.

Ball Pool (not Flash)
Ball Pool is a beautiful jQuery website with a simple yet absorbing concept behind it. Just click and shake your browser to generate more colorful balls. A simple and fun app to cheer you up in the middle of a working day.

Bank of Imagination
How often do you start sentences with “What if…”? If you have a rich imagination, consider investing in the Bank of Imagination. This Flash-based interactive website allows you to note and save your “What if” thoughts. You can also observe other global flights of fancy by browsing other user messages.

Google Gravity
This website probably won’t be of much interest to the average Web user, but SEO specialists will love it: who else could stare at Google’s downfall for ages?

Flame
Flame is a brilliant JavaScript painting tool that proves that anyone can be an artist. The program was created by Peter Blaskovic as part of his experimental project “I am Artist.” Using a number of nifty drawing tools and, of course, your imagination, you can create some cool psychedelic drawings and then export them in a resolution of 1680 x 1050 pixels. All you need to use this tool is Java (probably already installed on your computer).

Ball Droppings
Ball Droppings is a cool JavaScript experiment that lets you create music in a quite unusual and tricky way: just draw lines with your mouse to bounce the balls that fall from the hole.

Beans
This is the pearl in our collection of bizarre JavaScript and Flash websites. Who would have thought that crushing little screaming beans could be so much fun?

Labuat
Labuat is the most beautiful and enjoyable time-killer in our selection. It’s a song illustrated by an interactive brush that reacts to music, and the lyrics won’t leave you cold.

Why Do You Stay Up So Late?
Why Do You Stay Up So Late? is a compelling lyrical poem accompanied by a beautiful Flash animation. Such a creative combo gives the website a special feel.

The Infinite Oz
The Infinite Oz is an interactive Flash animation that features a collaboration between nine acclaimed international artists. Exploring fantastic sci-fi worlds that replace each other infinitely is a quite relaxing pastime.

Annamika kaleidoscope
Catherine Hubert created this Flash kaleidoscope to provide Web users with a place for meditative contemplation.

Neon Bible
This interactive video for a song by Arcade Fire is weird and hypnotizing at the same time.

Drum Machine
Drum Machine has several pre-loaders that play before the actual animation starts. In most cases, you would not wait so long for a Flash website to load, but Drum Machine is an exception. a mesmerizing combination of animation and sounds won’t let you leave.

Soundtrack for a Book
This exquisite Flash website belongs to the Singapore-based indie band Concave Scream. A myriad of colorful particles assembled into 3-D book covers, set to dreamy music, makes for a beautiful and calming Web experience.

Papervision3D.org
Before entering the official website of open-source Flash framework Papervision3D, you have a chance to explore an interactive 3-D underwater environment.

Condiment
The portfolio of creative communication agency Condiment features a clever JavaScript jigsaw puzzle. This engaging feature, set against a neat and stylish design, makes the website a pleasure to browse.

The Digital Invaders
This Flash website takes some time to load, but incredible animations, showing an awfully funny crowd of invaders, fully compensate for that.

Bio-Bak
Bio-Bak is indubitably a trendsetter when it comes to bizarre Web design. Enter this kingdom of the absurd and fun to load up on positive emotions.

Donnie Darko
Okay, here is the most extraordinary movie website you may have ever seen. It engrosses you in a mysterious and suspenseful journey based on the 2001 US psychological thriller Donnie Darko.

Paul Neave
You will never get bored on this website. This online home of interactive designer Paul Neave is a fount of engaging Flash applications and games.

Salt Films
This website of film production company Salt Films tastes delicious. Elegant and funky graphics, creative animation and interactive salt shakers for the work of film directors deliver the most pleasing Web experience.

Bonus

And Then There Was Salsa
Although not a website, this cool video ad shows Flash in its glory.

About the Author

Julia May is a freelance writer now working with FlashMint, a top-class provider of beautiful Flash templates and smart jQuery templates.

(al)

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Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 and WCF RIA Services Released

Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 and WCF RIA Services Released

via ScottGu's Blog by ScottGu on 5/17/10

The final release of the Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 and WCF RIA Services is now available for download. 

Download and Install

If you already have Visual Studio 2010 installed (or the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express), then you can install both the Silverlight 4 Tooling Support as well as WCF RIA Services support by downloading and running this setup package (note: please make sure to uninstall the preview release of the Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 if you have previously installed that). 

The Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 package extends the Silverlight support built into Visual Studio 2010 and enables support for Silverlight 4 applications as well.  It also installs WCF RIA Services application templates and libraries:

Today’s release includes the English edition of the Silverlight 4 Tooling – localized versions will be available next month for other Visual Studio languages as well.

Silverlight Tooling Support

Visual Studio 2010 includes rich tooling support for building Silverlight and WPF applications.

It includes a WYSIWYG designer surface that enables you to easily use controls to construct UI – including the ability to take advantage of layout containers, and apply styles and resources:

The VS 2010 designer enables you to leverage the rich data binding support within Silverlight and WPF, and easily wire-up bindings on controls.  The Data Sources window within Silverlight projects can be used to reference POCO objects (plain old CLR objects), WCF Services, WCF RIA Services client proxies or SharePoint Lists. 

For example, let’s assume we add a “Person” class like below to our project:

We could then add it to the Data Source window which will cause it to show up like below in the IDE:

We can optionally customize the default UI control types that are associated for each property on the object.  For example, below we’ll default the BirthDate property to be represented by a “DatePicker” control:

And then when we drag/drop the Person type from the Data Sources onto the design-surface it will automatically create UI controls that are bound to the properties of our Person class:

VS 2010 allows you to optionally customize each UI binding further by selecting a control, and then right-click on any of its properties within the property-grid and pull up the “Apply Bindings” dialog:

This will bring up a floating data-binding dialog that enables you to easily configure things like the binding path on the data source object, specify a format convertor, specify string-format settings, specify how validation errors should be handled, etc:

In addition to providing WYSIWYG designer support for WPF and Silverlight applications, VS 2010 also provides rich XAML intellisense and code editing support – enabling a rich source editing environment.

Silverlight 4 Tool Enhancements

Today’s Silverlight 4 Tooling Release for VS 2010 includes a bunch of nice new features.  These include:

Support for Silverlight Out of Browser Applications and Elevated Trust Applications

You can open up a Silverlight application’s project properties window and click the “Enable Running Application Out of Browser” checkbox to enable you to install an offline, out of browser, version of your Silverlight 4 application.  You can then customize a number of “out of browser” settings of your application within Visual Studio:

Notice above how you can now indicate that you want to run with elevated trust, with hardware graphics acceleration, as well as customize things like the Window style of the application (allowing you to build a nice polished window style for consumer applications).

Support for Implicit Styles and “Go to Value Definition” Support:

Silverlight 4 now allows you to define “implicit styles” for your applications.  This allows you to style controls by type (for example: have a default look for all buttons) and avoid you having to explicitly reference styles from each control. 

In addition to honoring implicit styles on the designer-surface, VS 2010 also now allows you to right click on any control (or on one of it properties) and choose the “Go to Value Definition…” context menu to jump to the XAML where the style is defined, and from there you can easily navigate onward to any referenced resources.  This makes it much easier to figure out questions like “why is my button red?”:

Style Intellisense

VS 2010 enables you to easily modify styles you already have in XAML, and now you get intellisense for properties and their values within a style based on the TargetType of the specified control.  For example, below we have a style being set for controls of type “Button” (this is indicated by the “TargetType” property).  Notice how intellisense now automatically shows us properties for the Button control (even within the <Setter> element):

Great Video - Watch the Silverlight Designer Features in Action

You can see all of the above Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 features (and some more cool ones I haven’t mentioned) demonstrated in action within this 20 minute Silverlight.TV video on Channel 9:

WCF RIA Services

Today we also shipped the V1 release of WCF RIA Services.  It is included and automatically installed as part of the Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 setup.

WCF RIA Services makes it much easier to build business applications with Silverlight.  It simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms using the power of WCF for communication.  WCF RIA Services provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to data for queries, changes and custom operations. It also provides end-to-end support for common tasks such as data validation, authentication and authorization based on roles by integrating with Silverlight components on the client and ASP.NET on the mid-tier.

Put simply – it makes it much easier to query data stored on a server from a client machine, optionally manipulate/modify the data on the client, and then save it back to the server.  It supports a validation architecture that helps ensure that your data is kept secure and business rules are applied consistently on both the client and middle-tiers.

WCF RIA Services uses WCF for communication between the client and the server  It supports both an optimized .NET to .NET binary serialization format, as well as a set of open extensions to the ATOM format known as ODATA and an optional JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format that can be used by any client.

You can hear Nikhil and Dinesh talk a little about WCF RIA Services in this 13 minutes Channel 9 video.

Putting it all Together – the Silverlight 4 Training Kit

Check out the Silverlight 4 Training Kit to learn more about how to build business applications with Silverlight 4, Visual Studio 2010 and WCF RIA Services.

The training kit includes 8 modules, 25 videos, and several hands-on labs that explain Silverlight 4 and WCF RIA Services concepts and walks you through building an end-to-end application with them. 

 

The training kit is available for free and is a great way to get started.

Summary

I’m really excited about today’s release – as they really complete the Silverlight development story and deliver a great end to end runtime + tooling story for building applications. 

All of the above features are available for use both in VS 2010 as well as the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express Edition – making it really easy to get started building great solutions.

Hope this helps,

Scott

P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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Using transactions with LINQ-to-SQL

Using transactions with LINQ-to-SQL

via ASP.NET Weblogs by Jalpesh P. Vadgama on 5/19/10

Today one of my colleague asked that how we can use transactions with the LINQ-to-SQL Classes when we use more then one entities updated at same time. It was a good question. Here is my answer for that.For ASP.NET 2.0  or higher version have a new class called TransactionScope which can be used to manage transaction with the LINQ.

Let’s take a simple scenario we are having a shopping cart application in which we are storing details or particular order placed into the database using LINQ-to-SQL. There are two tables Order and OrderDetails which will have all the information related to order. Order will store particular information about orders while OrderDetails table will have product and quantity of product for particular order.We need to insert data in both tables as same time and if any errors comes then it should rollback the transaction.

To use TransactionScope in above scenario first we have add a reference to System.Transactions like below.

After adding the transaction we need to drag and drop the Order and Order Details tables into Linq-To-SQL Classes it will create entities for that. Below is the code for transaction scope to use mange transaction with Linq Context.

1 MyContextDataContext objContext = new MyContextDataContext(); using (System.Transactions.TransactionScope tScope  = new System.Transactions.TransactionScope(TransactionScopeOption.Required)) { objContext.Order.InsertOnSubmit(Order); objContext.OrderDetails.InsertOnSumbit(OrderDetails); objContext.SubmitChanges(); tScope.Complete();  }

Here it will commit transaction only if using blocks will run successfully. Hope this will help you.

Technorati Tags: Linq,Transaction,System.Transactions,ASP.NET

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