Meet Littles The Chihuahua (powered by Silverlight 4)

It’s not often you run into a Chihuahua powered by a beta version of the richest design framework available in the world.  Littles the Chihuahua’s object model takes full advantage of Expression Blend’s frame, trigger and time based animations. Methods include Wave{}; PlayDead{}; FetchSlippers{}; and many more.

Littles was first programmed using Silverlight 2.0, and is best known for serving for 7 years as the United States Development & Evangelism Platform Team Mascot.  Some may infamously know her from her ill-fated demo during Mix07.  Secretly sprearheaded by Australian Evangelists such as  Michael KordahiLittles was due to burst onto the stage with an accelerometerstrapped on to her back, sending signals via Bluetooth to hijack the opening keynote demo as such:

Her movements would trigger the screen on the computer to tilt and shift, moving a virtual ball around a small maze.  Unfortunately, the non-dog friendly and ADD ridden gambling nature of Vegas hotels on the strip caused the effort to be prematurely abandoned.

Emirates Hill Chihuahua Right to Left Language Support

Now in Silverlight 4, Littles can take her routines (play dead) and subroutines (drape paw dramatically over eye) even further. In previous versions of Silverlight, Littles did have the capability to render her barks in many lanaguges. For example, in Turkish, Miniko (a.k.a. Littles)  does not bark or go “woof”, but simply says “hov hov”.  In France Mininoa (a.k.a. Litttles) issues a dainty “vaf vaf” with a certain “je ne sais quoi - je suis Chiwa” disdain.

With the Right to Left language support, Littles can now render her barks in RTL languages such as Arabic – a perfect enhancement for the newly transplanted & newly translated Emirates Hill Chihuahua.  We can only look to Silverlight 5 to make Chihuahua transplants as easy as translations. In the next post, we’ll compare the relocation of a human versus Chihuahua from New York City to Dubai. Which is easier? The results will surprise even you.