1. Introduction

Currently Silverlight supports two ways of duplex communication: sockets and WCF polling duplex services. I was really impressed by the simplicity of using WCF polling duplex in Silverlight 3, but its responsiveness and scalability leaves much to be desired. On the opposite site we have sockets, which are rather tricky to use, but their responsiveness and scalability satisfy real world application requirements.

In this article I’m going to introduce my SocketsLight framework, which should simplify the working with sockets by providing high level API over .NET sockets library.

Introduction

Silverlight 2 has introduced many interesting features and controls but it misses something that Silverlight 3 makes possible –easily creating and manipulating rich data forms. These series of posts will help you when creating rich data forms in Silverlight 3 in your projects. Silverlight 3 introduces a new control, called DataForm. It enables various methods for display, edit, update and navigation through data.

The DataForm control is like the DataGrid control in Silverlight 2. But while the DataGrid control is used to manipulate a list of items, the DataForm control focuses on the item itself.

1. Introduction

This is the first article of my series about deep dive into  ADO.NET Data Services. In this article I'm going to show you how to implement your own ADO.NET Data Services proxy with T4 templates.

Source code and database backup

2. Content

2.1 Problem

ADO.NET Data  Services is a very powerful toy, but as many other cool Microsoft technologies it needs some workarounds to become usable in the real world applications.

Most of the problems are connected with the auto generated proxy which is created after the addition of a service reference.

1. Introduction

In this article I will present you a game which I created on Silverlight. It is a very small and simple but extremely popular game – the n-puzzle game. The n-puzzle is known in various versions, including the 8 puzzle, the 15 puzzle, and with various names. It is a sliding puzzle that consists of a frame of numbered square tiles in random order with one tile missing. If the size is 3x3, the puzzle is called the 8-puzzle or 9-puzzle, and if 4x4, the puzzle is called 15-puzzle or 16-puzzle. The object of the puzzle is to place the tiles in order (shown on the next figure) by making sliding moves that use the empty space.

If you are interested in more details about the history of the puzzle game, you can use the next link. But now let’s roll up our sleeves and dive into the world of Silverlight. The demo can also be found on a separate page.

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

1. Introduction

Animations allow you to create truly dynamic user interface. They are a core part of the Silverlight/WPF model. The most natural way to create them is to create them declaratively (in the XAML), configure them, and put them into action without writing a single line of C# code or using timers. At first glance, I thought that the property-focused nature of Silverlight animations seems terrible limiting. However, in the process of work I found out that it’s surprisingly capable.

Introduction

Silverlight helps for creating Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). It runs in the context of the browser. There is an isolated area, called sandbox, which holds the Silverlight application. But why is it necessary to restrict the Silverlight applications in such a way? The answer of this question is pretty simple - because of the security. Running such applications locally is dangerous. They may damage your computer or your data. So, there is a necessity to somehow restrict them. Thus, a Silverlight application runs in the sandbox.

Short Introduction to the RIAs World

Nowadays the web space is full of different sites. Old-fashioned HTML is slowly being replaced by the new Rich Internet Applications (RIA). But why are they so popular? The passion of the RIA technology is that it tends to reform the static HTML sites in order to make them look more like Desktop applications.

Why Silverlight?

...

Since the Silverlight 1.1 was released I and my colleagues started using it in a commercial business applications for some small tasks, where the benefits were obvious. Even the fact the Expression Blend crashes and the lack of controls at that time didn't stop us. We were impressed of the tempo of the improvement and we expected to see reliable and ready for business use platform when the final is released.

So, now the final is a fact, but is it really ready for real-world business application?

Shortly - no. Not yet.

There are several reasons for my "No".

Introduction

Recently we started wondering if there is a noticeable difference in the performance of Silverlight in different browsers.  Measuring performance reliably is not a trivial task.  One thing is that performance have many aspects like rendering graphics and manipulating large data. Obviously to rate overall performance you need to balance the weight of individual aspect ratings.  Finding the appropriate balance depends on the purpose of the rating. Since Silverlight's primary task is to create RIA  we decided to test first the graphics rendering performance.

Benchmark

There are a few popular benchmarks that compare Flash vs.

Download source

In a response to one comment in our first article about the weather control we decided to update it. Now it is easier to slide item by item. It is not the best implementation but it works with a little tuning. Just remember if you change the item's sizes you must adjust the width of the control. The width should meet the requirements of this equation.

(control.Width - LeftButton.Width - RightButton.Width ) %  (control.Height / ItemHeight * ItemWidth) = 0

Not convenient but we will work on that until the next version.