Controls

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

1. Introduction

Microsoft Silverlight uses the WebClient class to send HTTP requests to remote scripts, which allows the application to perform specific web server functions, such as retrieving files. Remote scripts, created with Active Server Pages (ASP) and Personal Hypertext Processor (PHP), add an additional layer of functionality with direct access to the remote server, such as the file system. In this article, I will demonstrate an application that utilizes the WebClient class to retrieve and display files from a remote server.

Introduction

In this article I will present the Silverlight application I was busy with recently - the Silverlight Metronome. It's a classical metronome (a measurement tool for tempo, mostly used by musicians) that is based on a pendulum with a moveable mass, which modifies its period. The project was very challenging as it needed some simple physics and a beautiful design to be implemented. In my opinion I have accomplished it or at least I have done it according to the physics; the design has always been a very subjective topic. Anyway, you can see the live demo here and download the source code here, but I'm sure that you would like from us to make a fast dissection of the application and see how it works.

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.

Introduction

Silverlight 2 has a couple of useful controls, which you can use when building your own applications. This collection of controls is extended by Silverlight Toolkit. It contains really great controls like Expander, AutoCompleteBox, TreeView, etc. You can download the Silverlight Toolkit from its site or you can see the online demo.

Imagine that you want to create a questionnaire. A questionnaire consists of questions and a list of possible answers for each question. In most occasions you are supposed to select just an answer.

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

1. Introduction

My recent aim in coding with Microsoft's Silverlight is to support ASP.NET developers by solving common ASP.NET- and HTML-problems scenarios easily with Silverlight applications and tools. The project of this article here shows my idea of solving the annoying ASP.NET-DropDownList bandwidth- and ViewState-problem with a huge amount of option items inside the control.

Using the normal ASP.NET-DropDownList with enabled ViewState is quite simple and easy, but the time you fill your ASP.NET-DropDownList with a great amount of option items.

This article is sponsored by Telerik

Vladimir Enchev, a senior software engineer from Telerik team, created an example demonstrating how you can handle millions of records in milliseconds with Telerik's RadGridView for Silverlight.

Since the first beta release of Silverlight 2 there was a lot of talk about controls such as TreeView, auto complete TextBox, WrapPanel, DockPanel etc, and because of the high demand some custom controls were created. Two weeks ago the Silverlight Toolkit was released and introduced the so long awaited controls. In this article we'll take a closer look at one of them - the TreeView.

Introduction

I believe that most of you are already familiar with the controls of this type either from their web or desktop experience with technologies such as WPF, WinForms or ASP.NET. But for those who are going to be introduced to this type of controls I'll give a short description: The TreeView is a control with tree structure which main purpose is to display hierarchical data in the form of nodes. Each node that has children can be collapsed and expanded.

1. Introduction

In the previous part of the article I described how to create a simple analog clock in Silverlight using pattern oriented approach. It was focused not so much on Silverlight but on the object oriented programming. In that part I will focus your attention on the process of improving the view (the clock face), making it much better and user-friendly. I will look at little more advance topics such as creating gradient brushes, creating custom figures, making transformations and of course adding movement and interactivity with animations.

So let’s roll up our sleeves and set to work.

Introduction

In this article my aim is to give a quick overview of the controls included in the Silverlight Toolkit - launched a week ago and to give an example for every control included in the toolkit. I've made a little research for each control and I will share my impressions with the community.

Overview

The following Silverlight controls are included in the toolkit:

Components in the Stable Quality Band:

• TreeView
• DockPanel
• WrapPanel
• Label
• HeaderedContentControl
• HeaderedItemsControl

Components in the Preview Quality Band

• AutoCompleteBox
• NumericUpDown
• Viewbox
• Expander
• ImplicitStyleManager
• Charting

TreeView

Let's start with the TreeView.

Since the first beta release of Silverlight 2 there was a lot of talk about controls like a TreeView, auto complete TextBox, WrapPanel, DockPanel etc, and because of the high demand some custom controls were created. Last week the Silverlight Toolkit was released and introduced the so long awaited controls. In this article we'll take a closer look to one of them - the DockPanel.

Introduction

The DockPanel is a layout control, like the StackPanel and the Grid, but in some cases is far more powerful than them. The idea of the control is that you can "dock" its child controls in all of the four directions - top, bottom, left, right (compared to the StackPanel, which allows only two directions - top->bottom and left->right). That gives us pretty much freedom when designing our application's UI. Freedom in sense that the count of the nested controls will be less, which means less code and more simple structure of the XAML, or you don't have to bother to define the structure of a Grid first.

Here are some basic guidelines about the behavior of the control ( we'll take a closer look at some of them later on in the article):

• You can align the child controls to the top, bottom, left or right. The default alignment is to left.
• The child controls take the place that is left after placing the previous child controls.
• You can fill the rest of the place with the last child control. The DockPanel does this by default.