SilverlightShow: Silverlight Community

Hacking Silverlight

editorial@silverlightshow.net ( David Kelley) — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0300

Coming soon...

Product Description

"We did what would normally take six months in eight days-with a team learning from scratch." -from Chapter 1 of Hacking Silverlight

Writing good code is hard enough using established, well-documented technologies; with something new like Silverlight, you need to think like a hacker. Hacking Silverlight is a unique tutorial that shows the reader how to build great Silverlight web applications fearlessly. Each chapter starts and ends with carefully annotated code examples that range from Silverlight basics to undocumented techniques you won't find anywhere else.

Author David James Kelley is part of an elite group hand-picked by Microsoft to test early Silverlight builds and develop sample applications. This book guides the reader through a running case study of an actual, large-scale Silverlight project.

About the Author

David James Kelley is a Senior Software Architect at IdentityMine. For over 10 years David has focused on distributed application design and emerging Microsoft technologies on the web. He helped design and build large systems for Microsoft, Onyx Software, Saltmine, Giordanous Group, and IdentityMine and he has specialized in applying leading-edge technology to real-world business problems. David built many of the core Popfly blocks in Silverlight and was part of the team that created the Emmy Award site for Entertainment Tonight--one of the first large-scale commercial Silverlight applications.

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Thirty-One Days of Silverlight

editorial@silverlightshow.net ( Silverlight Show) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 10:48:00 +0300

Each day in the month of July, Jeff Blankenburg is going to publish an article on a Silverlight topic.

The topics will range from 100-level to 300-level in difficulty, but all of them will be written so that a beginner could start from scratch to create them.

I will covering Drag & Drop, Event Handling, and even Collision Detection. This is an extensive list of tutorials, and I hope that it will help you see how useful and powerful these technologies can be.

Here is a list with the articles that have been already published:

Creating NikeClone With Silverlight Part 6

editorial@silverlightshow.net ( Silverlight Show) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 10:27:00 +0300

Faisal ended the sixth part of his NikeClone series. In this part he shows you how to create UITemplates Control where to place all the styled and templated Controls. You can find all of the previous blog posts from the series here.

Welcome to the sixth part of my NikeClone series. In the last part I showed you how to create ExpandableMenu and Background control. In this part I’ll show you how I created UITemplates Control where I placed all the styled and templated Controls.

Blend 3: Visual Data Binding

editorial@silverlightshow.net ( Silverlight Show) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 09:52:00 +0300

Qixing Zheng has posted one video tutorial on Sample Data and Behaviors in Blend.

In previous version of Blend, we introduced data binding features in Blend. However, in order to make sample data targeted to particular applications, designers had to create XML data files in Visual Studio or other editors and then import into Blend. There was no easy way in Blend to generate the sample data they need. Check out how Sample Data makes this process easy in this tutorial!

Silverlight FloatableWindow Update: Start Position and Resizable

editorial@silverlightshow.net ( Silverlight Show) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 09:40:00 +0300

A while back Tim Heuer wrote a post where he refactored the Silverlight ChildWindow to create a non-modal window and called it FloatableWindow. Now his friend Karl Shifflett helped him to add two new features - a start position and resizing capabilities to the window.

My buddy Karl Shifflett decided to use it (FloatableWindow) in Glimpse as the diagnostic window – thanks Karl! Karl even added some code to it to basically provide a start position (HorizontalOffset and VerticalOffset). Another request Karl had was to add resizing capabilities to the window. I’m pleased to say that I added both of these features to the source.

Using Silverlight to Consume a Simple PHP Service Using WebClient

editorial@silverlightshow.net ( Silverlight Show) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 09:12:00 +0300

Davide Zordan demonstrates consuming a PHP service with Silverlight.

Read here the original post on the Siverlight forum and download the source code.

Testing C# Silverlight Apps with IronRuby

editorial@silverlightshow.net ( Silverlight Show) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 08:35:00 +0300

In this post Jimmy Schementi doesn't use the Silverlight unit test framework, but rather some nice dynamic language test goods. As an example he is testing a calculator on steroids.

IronRuby makes it really easy to test .NET applications because of it's .NET integration and ability to run real Ruby programs, like RSpec. However, this becomes much more difficult to do in Silverlight for a variety of reasons. And Silverlight doesn't have good options for testing to begin with, except for the Silverlight Unit Test Framework, but I yearn for something simpler. This post will show you how to test a C# Silverlight application with IronRuby, using a testing framework called Bacon, a lightweight RSpec clone.

Thrive for Developers

editorial@silverlightshow.net ( Silverlight Show) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 08:26:00 +0300

Microsoft has a new site - Thrive for Developers, which purpose is to help developers advance in their careers, enhance their skills, and connect with a developer community.

We’ve heard from lots of developers that times are tough. You’re doing more with less, applying your skills more broadly, and maybe even learning new tools. That’s why we created Thrive – a one-stop community hub that offers job postings, technical content, and community resources. So whether you’re seeking new ways to differentiate yourself on the job, or you need to re-tool your skills for that next big role, Thrive has the resources to help you get there faster.

DiscountASP.NET Partners with Gizmox, the Developer of Visual WebGui: New partnership offers customers free hosting on DiscountASP.NET and a markdown on VWG products

editorial@silverlightshow.net ( Marissa Levy) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:20:01 +0300

July 7, 2009 – DiscountASP.NET, a leader in ASP.NET hosting, announces a partnership with Gizmox, the developer of Visual WebGui, a comprehensive rich Internet, Cloud & SaaS application platform that provides powerful, richer, and faster application development.

Under this partnership, DiscountASP.NET customers can receive a $50 discount on the Visual WebGui Professional studio. Visual WebGui users can get 6 months free hosting for the first year of DiscountASP.NET’s base ASP.NET hosting annual plan.

"DiscountASP.NET recognizes that Visual WebGui is a powerful platform and has built a large user base,” said DiscountASP.NET's Vice President of Marketing, Takeshi Eto. "We specialize in ASP.NET hosting and are always interested in partnerships that provide our customers with the most advanced tools that make their life easier and their web applications richer.”

Visual WebGui offers a series of open source products atop its innovative rich Internet applications (RIA) platform, which together enable the unique Visual WebGui desktop-like developer experience that leads to the simplest, most cost-effective development and deployment of rich data centric applications on the web/cloud.

“The DiscountASP.NET and Visual WebGui partnership is a great fit,” said Roy Goffer, Online Marketing Manager of Gizmox. “DiscountASP.NET focuses on cutting-edge ASP.NET hosting while Visual WebGui deploys like a standard ASP.NET and provides tools to help developers and ease their efforts to bring their applications to life.”

About Visual WebGui
Visual WebGui, http://www.visualwebgui.com, is the first open source RIA development and deployment platform to extend desktop power to the internet atop standard .NET. Visual WebGui allows users to built much more powerful, richer and faster UIs using a control and theme designers in addition to the drag-and-drop visual form designer, and deploy to the Web or Cloud as AJAX or Silverlight UIs. Developing Web applications in Visual WebGui requires no learning curve for Windows developers who feel more at home programming in Visual Basic, C#, and other desktop native programs, cutting development time up to a proven 90 percent. More than 35,000 VWG applications have been built, and are in production, at enterprises such as SAP, IBM, Israel Aerospace Industry, and multi-national companies such as Visa and Texas Instrument.

About Gizmox
Gizmox, the developer of Visual WebGui open source platform and a member of the Microsoft Visual Studio Industry Partner (VSIP) program and other partner programs, was founded in July 2007. Gizmox enables Web-like desktop platform; its SDK has been downloaded by more than 350,000 individuals and software houses with more than 35,000 active community members. The company is funded by Venture Capital and private investors. One of the founders and active chairman of the board is Professor Arie Scope founder of Microsoft's Israel subsidiary, and its former General Manager and Chairman for 16 years.

About DiscountASP.NET
DiscountASP.NET is an innovative global leader in Microsoft Windows hosting, focused on providing the best value in ASP.NET hosting. A Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, DiscountASP.NET is one of the first hosting providers to offer Windows Server 2008 hosting, SQL Server 2008 hosting and MVC hosting. Through strong word-of-mouth and their commitment to ASP.NET and SQL Server technology, DiscountASP.NET has become the choice for affordable enterprise-class ASP.NET web hosting. For more information, visit http://www.DiscountASP.NET

All trademarks are the property of their legal owners.

Media Contacts

Roy Goffer
Gizmox, LTD.
Tel: +972-9-767-3063
Email: Roy.Goffer@gizmox.com

Marissa Levy
NCSM Strategic Marketing
Tel: +972-2-563-1892
Email: Marissa@ncsm.co.il

Blend 3: Rich Interactivity with No Code

editorial@silverlightshow.net ( Silverlight Show) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 10:34:00 +0300

Qixing Zheng posted a mini-tutorial on Expression Blend 3.

The idea of creating rich interactivity without code should sound very appearing to designers, because we want to turn static UI into interactive prototypes and test out our design ideas quickly. In Blend 3, “Behaviors” are packaged, re-usable building blocks of interactivity. They can be visually applied to UI components in the application using drag and drop. No more opening up Visual Studio and writing routine code like starting an animation when a button is clicked. Blend 3 will have bunch of commonly used Behaviors shipping with the tool, but they are extensible so that you or your developers can create your customized Behaviors.

Creating a ComboBox Style AutoCompleteBox Control in Silverlight

editorial@silverlightshow.net ( Silverlight Show) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 10:25:00 +0300

Dan Wahlin has built a derived version of AutoCompleteBox that he calls AutoCompleteComboBox.

Silverlight’s AutoCompleteBox control provides a nice way to filter a list of items as the user types into a TextBox. If you haven’t used it before you can see an example here. In a previous post I showed how you could customize AutoCompleteBox to make it look and feel more like an editable ComboBox so that users can click a down arrow to see the list of items and also filter the items by typing into the TextBox.

Changing the Layout for the Selected Item in ListBox

editorial@silverlightshow.net ( Silverlight Show) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 10:03:00 +0300

Chris Klug experienced a problem with changing the layout for the selected item in ListBox. The thing that caused troubles, was the fact that it was supposed to show a compact information layout for all items except the selected item. Find out what's the solution of the problem.

The selected item should have a more verbose layout and some extra functionality. Initially that seemed like a tiny problem. That would just be a ItemTemplate with a VisualStateManager. Apparently not…!

Why not? Well…the DataTemplate does not support a VisualStateManager. When you select an item in the ListBox, the VisualStateManager that is used to change the layout is in the items ControlTemplate and not in the items DataTemplate. So the Layout in the DataTemplate does not have the ability to change its layout based on the state.

Creating NikeClone With Silverlight Part 5

editorial@silverlightshow.net ( Silverlight Show) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 09:40:00 +0300

In this fifth part of the NikeClone series Faisal will show you how to create ExpandableMenu and fix the Background of the MainPage of NikeClone.

This is the fifth part of my NikeClone series. In the first part I showed you how to create SoccerItemList which will serve the pupose of being a MenuControl in our main page. In the second part I showed how to create LoginWindow. In the third part I added some code in the Login button’s event handler of the soccerItemList and designed a StyledSearchTechBox and defined templates for the two search buttons and in the fourth I showed you how to create CardsUI.

Finding the Target of a Storyboard Timeline

editorial@silverlightshow.net ( Silverlight Show) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 09:33:00 +0300

Page Brooks will explain you how to find the target of a storyboard timeline.

I noticed the other day that Storyboard has a SetTarget method, but it does not have a corresponding GetTarget method. So how can you find the target of a Timeline child? Fortunately, Storybard has a GetTargetName method, we can use this method to obtain the name of the target and then search parent container’s children for a matching child.

Hatching Effect Shader for Both Siverlight and WPF

editorial@silverlightshow.net ( Silverlight Show) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 09:19:00 +0300

As you all may know, both Silverlight 3 and WPF 3.5 SP1 introduced support for effects and shaders. Charles from Expression Blend and Design team works hard in Expression Blend to make sure that you can use these custom effects easily. Check what he has done till now.

Beyond just writing the functionality for making the effects work inside Blend, I enjoy writing custom effects as well, so in this post let me show you an example of a hatching shader effect I created.

Michael Jackson Memorial Live with Silverlight

editorial@silverlightshow.net ( Silverlight Show) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 09:08:00 +0300

The Michael Jackson Memorial, which happens today, July 7^th, 10am PST, will be streamed live in HD from the Staples Center in Los Angeles using IIS Smooth Streaming and Silverlight. The streaming live video will be available live worldwide today…

Silverlight 3 - MergedDictionaries

editorial@silverlightshow.net ( Silverlight Show) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 11:21:00 +0300

Chris Klug discusses Merged Dictionaries in Silvleright 3 and how this could help you if your XAML is getting overloaded with all the things you want to drag from application to application.

So what do MergedDictionaries offer? Well, they make it possible for you to store resources in external files. These files are then either embedded in the application as Content or as Resources. This means that we can spread out or resources in several files and just reference them in our controls, or possibly in our applications resources. This makes our Xaml files shorter and easier to read. We only declare our resources in one place and can reuse them in a good way. We can even store them in external assemblies and reuse them across several projects.

Disable Autoplay on Silverlight Video in Expression Encoder 2 SP1

editorial@silverlightshow.net ( Silverlight Show) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 11:13:00 +0300

By default any Silverlight video you create in Expression Encoder 2 has AutoPlay set to true. If this cause you troubles, find out a way to solve the problem in the post of Walt Ritscher.

There is a way to configure AutoPlay in Expression Encoder. It’s just not very obvious.

Azure Simon

editorial@silverlightshow.net ( Silverlight Show) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 11:07:00 +0300

David Kelley announces that Davide Zordan posted a version of Silverlight Simon up in the cloud.

Davide had also added multi touch support to the WPF version. You can check out the code on the codeplex project http://Simon.codeplex.com/

Hanu Kommalapati's MSDN Magazine Articles

editorial@silverlightshow.net ( Silverlight Show) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 10:50:00 +0300

Hanu Kommalapati decided to create a blog post in which to present the MSDN Magazine articles that he has recently written: ".NET Framework Internals: How the CLR Creates Runtime Objects", "Build Line-Of-Business Enterprise Apps With Silverlight, Part 1" and "Build Line-Of-Business Enterprise Apps With Silverlight, Part 2".

I wrote some MSDN magazine articles but never really blogged about them.

Fish Eye Menu Control

editorial@silverlightshow.net ( Silverlight Show) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 10:46:00 +0300

For the new version of Zleek, Steve Commisso wanted to create an intuitive page menu for the bottom of the albums. He wanted to go with an OS X – style menu.

You can add any FrameworkElement as a menu item, so primitive shapes up to User Controls are all fine. This control is part of the Agnition.Utils library, which has been updated.

Silverlight 3 Navigation Drag and Drop Actions

editorial@silverlightshow.net ( Silverlight Show) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 10:28:00 +0300

So far Nigel Sampson has covered building a Trigger "Double Click Trigger" and a Behavior "Mouse Wheel Behavior" so all that's left are Actions and he concentrates on the subject in this post.

Actions I believe are probably the most useful of the three sorts of Behaviors in Silverlight, the sheer amount of variation possible when composing these with events provides a lot of richfunctionality to the Blend user. The real power comes from having all this functionality at your drag and drop disposal, by quickly wiring this all together it leaves you more time for true functionality of your RIA.

Silverlight 3 talking to a RIA Service, Everything Hosted on Windows Azure

editorial@silverlightshow.net ( Silverlight Show) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 09:55:00 +0300

Mark Monster has published his first tryout of Windows Azure. He wanted to find out if it’s possible to run the Preview of RIA Service on the CTP of Windows Azure.

First of all you’ll need a lot of different components, and if you want to host your solution in the cloud you’ll also need to register at Windows Azure.

IPhone Style Drag and Push Panel in Silverlight

editorial@silverlightshow.net ( Silverlight Show) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 09:38:00 +0300

SmartyP has recreated the iPhone's implementation very successfully and you should definitly check his work.

I've been doing a bit of work at the new job on some custom panels relative to our project. In doing the work we have been talking a lot about the iPhone's main launcher panel and how the iPhone implements dragging and reordering of icons on the screen. I wanted to take what I have learned in working on those custom panels and apply it to actually recreating the iPhone's implementation.

EntitySpaces 2009.1.0706.0 Alpha Release

editorial@silverlightshow.net ( Silverlight Show) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 09:03:00 +0300

Besides the enhancements mentioned in the DynamicQuery Enhancements the EntitySpaces 2009.1.0706.0 alpha release addresses some important issues discovered in the previous alpha concerning Silverlight and WCF.

You should uninstall the prior alpha before upgrading. Our Silverlight assembly is now named EntitySpaces.DynamicQuery.Silverlight.dll. Second, there is a new class called esDataContractSerializer (available in the .NET 3.5 assemblies) that can be used in any WCF or Silverlight application).