Articles

Note: This article is submitted by Damon Payne for Silverlight: Write and Win contest.Thanks a lot, Damon! Hello All, Please drop a comment if you like it.

If you have used Amazon.com or Flickr you may be familiar with Image Hotspots or Hot Regions. This is a region on an image where clicking or hovering the mouse reveals some additional information in a callout or popup. By providing extra information your photographs become more interactive and appealing. In this article we'll build a Hotspot Designer that allows the user to draw Hot Regions on an image, a preview and display control, and a way to save their work.

Here's a finished example, using a photo of the "gear closet" from my home theater.

This article is compatible with the latest version of Silverlight.

This is part 8 of the series “Silverlight in Action”

Here, we’re sharing our experience from the amazing CompletIT web site.

Introduction

In this session, we will cover one quite popular, but still very useful, technique for adding interaction to your web-site - "How to enable animations between pages using the Silverlight Navigation Framework".

This article is Part 1 of the series “Producing and Consuming OData in a Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 application.”

Watch the video tutorial

Download the source code | Download the slides

The Open Data Protocol (OData) is simply an open web protocol for querying and updating data. It allows for the consumer to query the datasource (usually over HTTP) and retrieve the results in Atom, JSON or plain XML format, including pagination, ordering or filtering of the data.

Introduction

The Microsoft’s Live SDK (or commonly referred to as Live Connect), provides a set of controls and APIs that enables applications to integrate single sign-on (SSO) functionality using Windows Live ID. You can also use it to access data in SkyDrive, Hotmail, and Windows Live Messenger. The library supports multiple platforms, including Windows Phone 7 Mango and Windows 8 Metro Style applications using either C#, Visual Basic or JavaScript.  In this article, we will build our first metro style application using the Live SDK and XAML/C#.

This article is Part 2 of the series “Producing and Consuming OData in a Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 application.”

To refresh your memory on what OData is:

The Open Data Protocol (OData) is simply an open web protocol for querying and updating data. It allows for the consumer to query the datasource (usually over HTTP) and retrieve the results in Atom, JSON or plain XML format, including pagination, ordering or filtering of the data.

This article is Part 0 of the series “XNA for Silverlight developers”.

This article is compatible with Windows Phone "Mango". 
Latest update: Aug 1, 2011.

Introduction

Around the time the first Windows Phone 7 devices were released to the market, one popular sentence you heard was "every Silverlight developer is a Windows Phone 7 developer" – and that's true. Silverlight is Microsoft's main platform to do Windows Phone 7 development, and every desktop Silverlight programmer will feel comfortable in the new mobile programming environment instantly. Sure there are differences and libraries specific to the devices, but you won't have to learn a new programming language or new ways to define your UI, and you can use the same development environment you've been using for normal Silverlight development all the time. That's great!

This article is Part 3 of the series “Producing and Consuming OData in a Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 application.”.

To refresh your memory on what OData is:

The Open Data Protocol (OData) is simply an open web protocol for querying and updating data. It allows for the consumer to query the datasource (usually over HTTP) and retrieve the results in Atom, JSON or plain XML format, including pagination, ordering or filtering of the data.

This article is Part 1 of the series “XNA for Silverlight developers”.

This article is compatible with Windows Phone "Mango". 
Latest update: Aug 1, 2011.

For Silverlight developers who want to delve into XNA, the hard part is not learning the new set of classes in the library, but the fundamental difference in programming style for some parts of XNA compared to Silverlight. Especially when you have no experience in game programming, you might find some things confusing or even illogical. In the first part of this article, I want to give an overview and explanation of the biggest differences. You will run across all these topics again in the following articles in more detail.

Later on, we finally start with some actual code and analyze the structure of an XNA project. We will learn about the concept of content and how to add it to your project. By the end of the article, we will have built a very simple "Hallo World" game that renders some moving content onto the screen. The source code for the sample project can be found at the end of the article.

CompletIT – the company behind SilverlightShow – has recently launched its new corporate website, done entirely in Silverlight. In this case study, CompletIT CTO Emil Stoychev and Development Lead Miroslav Miroslavov reveal the challenges faced during the management and development of this Silverlight project.

Company Profile

Company name: CompletIT
Website: http://www.completit.com/
Industry: Software Development, Consultations, Trainings
Brief intro to company: CompletIT is a privately owned company specialized in Silverlight software development, Silverlight training and consulting services.