QuickStarts

This article is Part 1 of the series WCF RIA Services:

1. Getting Started with WCF RIA Services 
2. Querying Data Through WCF RIA Services
3. Updating Data Through WCF RIA Services
4. WCF RIA Services and MVVM
5. Metadata Classes and Shared Code in WCF RIA Services
6. Validating Data with WCF RIA Services
7. Authenticating and Authorizing Calls in WCF RIA Services
8. Debugging and Testing WCF RIA Services Applications
9. Structuring WCF RIA Services Applications
10. Exposing Additional Domain Service Endpoints for Other Clients

Introduction

In order to build serious business application in Silverlight (and other client technologies), you have to work with a lot of data. And that data is usually not resident on the client machine, it is usually distributed amongst many clients and is stored and operated on by back-end services. If you try to write this kind of application architecture yourself, you have to tackle a lot of technologies and write a lot of plumbing. In the end, most of what you are doing is pushing and pulling data from the client to the back end and invoking operations on the server from the Silverlight client application.

1.Introduction

There are several container controls in Silverlight . One of them is panel. Container control like for example StackPanel host another controls. Data presentation controls like ListBox inherits from ItemsControl. ItemsControl contains set of items to display and has ItemsSource property.ItemsControl is responsible for creating visuals for each item and placing them in a panel.

Main panel that holds items in ItemsControl is ItemsHost property. If we set this panel to be StackPanel for large datasets, ItemsContainerGenerator will generate containers that are off visible screen.

1. Introduction

In the first part of the article, I tried to describe what is RX Framework and what can be done with it. One thing I’ve missed to mention was how RX could be used for asynchronous service calls. Namely, this is the accent in the second part of the article. For those who missed the first part, you could read it here.

The demo source code could be downloaded from here.

Introduction

Only three months after the release of the latest official version of Silverlight 3, a new beta version – Silverlight 4 is already a fact. There are a lot of new things, which deserve to be mentioned, such as Rich Text, drop target, webcam, microphone, etc. Check out the official Silverlight site for more information. However, in this article I decided to show you one very interesting feature, which is taken from WPF, namely it is the implicit styles feature.
What was the situation till now? Whenever you’ve created a style  in Silverlight, you were obligated to specify the TargetType as well as an unique Key/Name for the style.

1. Introduction

To change a look of Silverlight controls the way that you want it to, you can style it by modifying default template of the control. Silverlight controls have XAML based templates that can easily be changed and saved as new template. You can change the look for entire control without writing any line of code in C#. It can be done completely in XAML. However if you want to do minor modifications to the look of control such as change background color or default font you can do it directly in XAML without need to change default template of the control.

1. Introduction

Silverlight 3 is already a fact and along with it a new version of Expression Blend has been released. One of the changes in the Expression Blend that makes me a deep impression is that the new Blend has been made more approachable for designers. Beside the behaviors, Photoshop and Illustrator importers, the new Blend 3 makes a huge step in the direction of making better user experience. This step is the SketchFlow. The SketchFlow is a new set of tools for Expression Blend to create sketches and prototypes of interactive content and applications.

1. Introduction

With the release of the new Silverlight 3, a lot of new cool features have been introduced. One of my favorite definitely is the support of behaviours and triggers. In WPF the triggers are extremely powerful. They allow you to declaratively associate an action with an event or property value. In the previous versions of Silverlight one of the things that were really missing were the triggers and the behaviors. It was not possible, for example, to add mouse-overs to objects declaratively (as in WPF).

1. Introduction

Sometimes creating user interface for Silverlight application can be tricky. The reason – the different users may have different screens, resolutions, some of them may have installed multiple toolbars in their browser (that will cause less space for our Silverlight application), or maybe some of them don’t like maximized windows. The purpose of that article is to show you how to create a Silverlight custom control, which will allow you to create applications with dynamic layout, that are easy for use on any screen and will use the screen area in the most optimal way. You can see the demo here.

1. Introduction

Silverlight 3 is now fact, and it introduces a lot of new functionalities. One of the things that we have been missing in Silverlight 2 was the element effects. If you want to make your elements more attractive then you need to write your own custom effects. Of course there are additional libraries (such as Silverlight.FX), which offer a great number of effects and animations. Fortunately, in Silverlight 3 such effects have been implemented.

In this article I will develop a simple Silverlight Slide Show using Pixel Shader effects. 

I was working with one of the web application localization. I was searching with couple of translator's available with the web. The most popular of them are

1. Google Translation Service

2. Bing Translator Service

I tried using the Google API for the web and it was pretty good. Then in recent times I came across Bing translator and tools link in them gave me the way to implement the Bing API. Bing is making a revolution in the search engines and so I liked to use that here.

Following URL's are referred for this.