Tweaking OnApplyTemplate Event Timing in Silverlight 2

submitted by pbrooks 3 days, 20 hours ago

pagebrooks.com — When building a custom control in Silverlight 2, the OnApplyTemplate method gives you the opportunity to “wire-up” logical instances of elements in your control. When a control is loaded, it is important to realize that in Silverlight 2, this method is not triggered very early with respect to other events. In other words, you could very easily write code that fails just because of where you call it. Understanding the control’s life cycle will help in avoiding these situations. read more...

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Silverlight Toolkit Released on CodePlex!

published 1 month, 6 days ago, submitted by pbrooks 1 month, 6 days ago

codeplex.com — The Silverlight Toolkit is a collection of Silverlight controls, components and utilities made available outside the normal Silverlight release cycle. It adds new functionality quickly for designers and developers, and provides the community an efficient way to help shape product development by contributing ideas and bug reports. This first release includes full source code, unit tests, samples and documentation for 12 new controls covering charting, styling, layout, and user input. read more...

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Sharing Code Between .NET and Silverlight Platforms

submitted by pbrooks 1 month, 22 days ago

pagebrooks.com — Quite often, I hear people asking if they can use .NET assemblies compiled for the full .NET runtime in Silverlight. Unfortunately, this just isn’t possible, the Silverlight runtime is a subset of the full .NET runtime and for code to run correctly under the Silverlight runtime, there are various dependencies that must be linked and verified at compile time. But (there is always a but), there is one technique that you can use that effectively allows you to write your code once and have it work in both Silverlight and regular .NET applications. read more...

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Introducing Silverlight Contrib

submitted by pbrooks 3 months, 9 days ago

pagebrooks.com — I've just started a new project on CodePlex called Silverlight Contrib. The aim of this project is to offer the most comprehensive collection of free and open source Silverlight controls. The first drop is very small, but with support from the community, I hope to grow this collection into a full suite of controls that you can incorporate into your solutions. read more...

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Silverlight Gauge Control

submitted by pbrooks 3 months, 25 days ago

pagebrooks.com — After posting my Treadmill application, Andrew Duthie suggested that it would be cool if I made it so you could drag your mouse along the speed and incline visuals and have them update instead of repeatedly clicking the plus and minus buttons. That gave me the idea for a new control. What if we built a gauge control that you could adjust in a similar manner as described above? That way, anyone could use it and furthermore, a properly designed control would allow us to define the "gauge" to be anything we would like and the control would work the same! read more...

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Controlling your Treadmill from Silverlight - Part 3

submitted by pbrooks 4 months, 1 day ago

pagebrooks.com — In the final post for this series, we will be expanding the usefulness of our application by adding a workout feature. This feature will allow you to craft workouts (in XML format of course) and then have the application execute them. The application will render a nice visualization so you can monitor your progress as you burn off those calories. read more...

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Controlling your Treadmill from Silverlight - Part 2

submitted by pbrooks 4 months, 5 days ago

pagebrooks.com — In the first part of this series, I demonstrated a Silverlight application that controls a treadmill. Today, we will go into a little more detail on using various audio signals (aka Chirps) which, in turn, instruct the treadmill to change settings. To keep things simple, we are going to just focus on the speed and incline aspect of the application in this post. read more...

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10 Silverlight 2 gotchas resolved

submitted by pbrooks 4 months, 14 days ago

silverlightshow.net — Coming from projects in which WPF design experience was established, the step to developing in Silverlight 2 was not an easy one. Even though I anticipated getting disappointed and even annoyed by times, there were several gotchas that baffled me. Some of those can still be found in the current Beta 2 release, but others are resolved to a degree that makes for a workable Silverlight 2 environment. These include Canvas rules, Color resources, limited fonts, no BitmapEffects, no paging facility, limited resource facilities, significant transparency, StaticResources only, XML Databinding, and the lack of some important controls. I’ll let you in on this treasure trove and tell you all about these 10 Silverlight 2 gothas resolved. read more...

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