Controls

See also part 2, part 3 and the updated version with item by item sliding.

Introduction

In this article series we'll show you how we made a custom weather forecast control. To create the control we used some of the developments from our previous articles. Here we review mostly the new things that were not reviewed before. In the end of the article there are links to those articles that are relevant. 

As you see in the end we have a a nice control with custom look that draws weather data from a web service and that is usable in real-life.

Last year I built a couple of WPF tag cloud applications that hooked up to my del.icio.us account and displayed the data using different visualisations which included a tag cloud in a variety of different flavours and I also used the Time Line Panel from the blendables control suite from Identity Mine. To access del.icio.us I used a .net library up on Source Forge originally developed for use in the del.icio.us Winforms client called Netlicious which was originally written for .net 2.0 by Nate Zobrist.

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

Overview

In this article we’ll be looking at the concept of adding interactive Silverlight elements to existing Web pages to provide added rich features. We’ll be looking at creating an animated Silverlight panel which will slide in from the side of the browser window when a button is clicked.

The somewhat tricky bit is that we want the panel to lie on top on the normal HTML content of the page and when when the Silverlight UI is slid out we want to be able to interact with the HTML instead.

Download source code

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

Reusable code to do narrow data columns with navigation buttons, such as address lists.

Download Source code

Contents

• Introduction
• Requirements
• Installation
• TallColumns Project
• TallColumnsManager Project
• Db Project
• WrapPanel Project
• GroupHeader Project

Introduction

When it comes to presenting data, there is a lot of emphasis on grids that present data in a single wide column, showing lots of fields horizontally.

However, some data tend to be presented in narrow columns, such as address lists and book indices...

Introduction

We’ve introduced you to the basics of Custom Controls in our previous article. Now we will give another example this time involving the Visual States Manager. We will create a templatable ContentControl that uses animations on its Content and the States & Parts model proposed by Microsoft.

Dowload source code

Parts & States Model

The idea behind the States & Parts is to separate better the logic from the visual appearance and thus to allow better flexibility for both.

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

Silverlight sure has come a long way since the days of “WPF/E.” With its most recent release, Silverlight 2 Beta 2, it has truly proven itself to be one of the best toolsets for Rich Internet Applications, and has effectively achieved its original goal of being an Internet version of WPF. The power and possibilities behind Silverlight are endless. However, with the continuous stream of alpha and beta releases, there are many breaking changes that appear. Newcomers to Silverlight and developers upgrading to the newest versions may have trouble learning all the ropes of the new 2 Beta 2 version.

Source Code: VideoPlayer.zip

Are you a fan of Twitter? Personally I'm, but I'm also a fan of Silverlight. Twitter has a couple of Flash and HTML badges (a.k.a widgets) you can get and put on your blog to let your visitors know what you are up to in the moment. However, Twitter does not have a Silverlight widget. What negligence! :) If you are like me and want not a Flash, but a Silverlight widget on your blog go ahead and read on how you can build one by yourself or just copy the text below to use it.

Introduction

Last week I’ve published the first part of this article about the Shape controls in Silverlight 2. Now it’s time for the second. We will focus on the Polygon, the Polyline and the Path. Although these controls look more complicated than the first three, still the most important thing is to use your imagination.

Polygon

To create a Polygon we use the Points property of the control to define the positions of the polygon’s points. Each point has X and Y value separated with spaces.

Introduction

In Silverlight there is a TextBlock control that is used to display simple text. However in many cases you need to display hyperlinks in the text. This article focuses on how to build such control and provides full source code for it.

LinkLabel source code

Overview

In this article I take for granted that you have basic understandings how to build a custom control in Silverlight. I described the main flow in a previous post so go read it if you need to fill some gaps.

Introduction

The RepeatButton is a Silverlight control which does an action repeatedly from the time a user presses it till the time it is released.

See also: 
Button Controls Article
Button Article
HyperlinkButton Article
ToggleButton Article

Overview

To demonstrate the common use of the RepeatButton I’ll give an example:

When we press the RepeatButton the TextBlock starts showing the current time.

XAML: