Articles

Working with DataForm I found difficult to use it in many scenarios due to its design. So I've created a control where I do not generate fields but I handle automatic validation and cancel/commit commands enabling also the usage of the control in mvvm scenarios. This is a good starting point to understand about Validation, BindingExpressions and traversing the visual tree.

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The first time I've met the DataForm control - it was some days after its beta release in the Silverlight Toolkit - I was really astounded from its power. It is capable of many wonders: it generates fields detecting the properties of the binded item, it automatically validates the input values using a bunch of attributes in a way similar to ASP.NET Dynamic Data, it manages the workflow passing through Edit, ReadOnly and Insert state, and these are only a small subset of the features it exposes.

Read part 2 of this article series called: A simplified DataForm replacement - Part 2 Adding validation support

Introduction

Some years ago (pre-silverlight times) a client ask me for a weird requirement…he wanted to drag files from his local explorer and drop them on their ASP .net grid application without using any ActiveX help… I thought, umm… is that possible?

With the advent of Silverlight 2 we got the same request again, … we knew this time it was not a technology limitation, it was a sandbox security limitation, how does the Ms chaps can offer this feature without exposing a security hole? Well it seems that they have managed to “open the box” for this feature in Version 4 on a secure and very easy to use way.

This interview is the first one from our 'Featured Author' interview series. We'll be presenting you the major contributors to the article content on SilverlightShow - Silverlight MVPs, bloggers and enthusiasts willing to share their experience and knowledge with the rest of us.

In this interview we'll be talking to Andrea Boschin - a Silverlight MVP with over eleven years of experience in IT, and a frequent speaker at Silverlight events in his country.

Q. Andrea - please briefly introduce yourself, and your experience with Silverlight.

A. I’m a guy 41 years old from Italy and currently I live and work in Treviso, a beautiful town near Venice. I started to work in the IT relatively late after doing some various jobs like graphic designer and school teacher. Finally I started to work into the web and learned by myself to program in VB and ASP and later in C# and ASP.NET. Since the start of my work, I’ve found I like to learn new technologies and take them into the real world. This happened with ASP.NET, the source of my first two MVP awards, and recently with Silverlight, I have started to use from the v1.0 in some real projects.

With the rapid development of Silverlight as a line-of-business technology, we are seeing more and more interesting, attractive, user-friendly business applications based on it. One such application is successfully showcasing the works and achievements of its author.

We introduce you to Silverlight MVP András Velvárt and the story behind the creation of his portal http://response.hu/, and two of his award-winning projects.

The first part of the article was about getting familiar with MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) – to get to know the basics, define its core principles and apply those to an existing Gallery application to make it configurable through themes. This part will dig deeper into the framework.

MEF as an IoC Container?

MEF is not a replacement for an IoC container - they both address different scenarios and can be used in the same application. However, MEF sure can be used for dependency injection without having to resort to a proper IoC container.

During a recent work I found some trouble working with the TreeView control in a Model-View-ViewModel scenario. As usually happen, the standard controls are designed to work in an event-driven behavior and this non always marries with a correct MVVM implementation. After some work, I found a way to change the TreeView and transform it to be lazy loadable.

Download Source Code

The Model-View-ViewModel pattern has been introduced in Silverlight by few time and this platform lacks a complete support to the pattern by the standard controls.

1. Introduction

This is the second article of my series about Silverlight web services tricks. At first time I planned to write only about WCF and that is why I called my article series “Deep dive into WCF”, but with my last experience I decided to move away from mainstream and offer some new unusual stuff. That is why I have generalized name of this series to “Deep dive into Silverlight services”.

In this article I’m going to show how you can build a super fast REST web services using ASP.NET MVC and Google Protocol Buffers library.

Whenever a new version of Silverlight is released, I start examining its features from two perspectives: how would my current (and planned) LOB applications benefit from using these new features, and what cool new things can I build to entertain my children.

This article will guide you through the process of creating a doodling application (you know, for kids ;)), while covering some of the most visible (or not) new features, coming with Silverlight 4. But this is not just about new features, it’s about how they are prepared and served.