I just saw a discussion on my WebMonitor application on Codeplex, that a Chris Blankenship had asked me some questions and wrote an article on how he had improved my application.

His observation is really good. Normally WebMonitor uses a GET request to see if the web site is up. The reason I did that originally were because, as Chris also writes, that I sometimes need to look at the actual HTML on a particular web page.
What Chris has done is to change this to a HEAD request, as it saves data traffic and is more friendly to the server. In his article he writes how he did that, which is actually pretty easy.

Go and read his article, it pretty good and take a look at WebMonitor of cause :)

I will try to find the time to include this fix and make a new release.

- Enjoy!

The doors to the new big "online casual games"-site (http://silverarcade.com/) has opened! 

The site currently holds 9 games, but it's a start and I guess it will grow fast. I know I will do what I can to put games on the site. This site is interessed both for Silverlight game developers and casual online game players.

For Silverlight game developers the site gives you a great possiblity to show off your game and have people playing an enjoying your game. I don't know if it is on the roadmap, but maybe there could be a possiblity for the community to give you feedback on your game to improve it. Besides that you will also be paid based on the plays of your game. (This isn't there now, but they promise it will come and it will be based on income from ads). Further more, a site like this will make the penetration of Silverlight rise (we currently have a penetration of ~24% (http://www.riastats.com).

For online casual game players this is a great site to spend some time on, as Silverlight gives a new group of people the possiblity to create games for the web, which gives some new games to the players. So users/players of casual games could have many fun hours on the site as the number and quality of the games grows.

I have one game on the site for now, Bubbles, which can be played here: http://silverarcade.com/Games/Laumania/Bubbles 

- Enjoy! 

This is actually an “old” video from MIX08, but it’s still a good one. It’s about a game developed in Silverlight 2 that is running on miniclip.com.

http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX08/CT03

- Enjoy!

I came a cross this competition the other day and it’s actually pretty interesting for many reasons. Apparently Dr. Dobb's and Microsoft Silverlight have teamed up to launch a game competition called Dr. Dobb's Challenge Deuce. http://dobbschallenge2.com/
Users can win cash and prizes for submitting new in-game levels or creating a new game by modding the code. This is actually one very interesting part, both coders and non-coders can participate. Non-coders can make new levels in the browser by using a build-in game editor (haven’t tryed it my self yet), and normal game developers can download the source code and start modding it.

This is a really great idea and when you have tryed the game out, you will notice that it runs pretty smooth and cool which, by it self, is reason enough to download the source and see how they do it.

It’s things like this that will make Silverlight (as a plugin) and Silverlight as a gaming platform a success.

- Enjoy!