QuickStarts

Several months ago the guys from Microsoft announced that they are developing a framework for developing Business applications under Silverlight with the codename Alexandria and now it's a reality! On the MIX'09 session a release of it under the name .NET RIA Services was announced.  The possibilities that the framework are really great and allow the Silverlight developers to easily develop business application in a much easier and faster way.

I am starting this series of articles in order to introduce the main features of the .NET RIA Services framework.

Introduction

A cool new feature in Silverlight 3 is the ability to run Silverlight applications out of the browser which resembles a desktop application. Only a few configuration steps are needed to enable your application to run offline.

See also:
Tip: Detecting Network Change in Silverllight 3 Application

Overview

To enable this feature you only need to open the AppManifest.xml file which can be found in the Properties folder and add
some settings as follows:

Introduction

A new feature in Silverlight 3 is the Perspective Transforms. With its help you can simulate rotating an object in 3D space. Note that this is not a real 3D, Silverlight does not support 3D yet.

Overview

Let's start with a little demo: 

And let's describe the things step by step. You have an UIElement, in our situation an image. The X axis of the element is from left to right, the Y axis is going up and down and the Z axis is going in and out of the surface of the image.

If we want to rotate the image on the X axis we are just setting the RotationX of the UIElement.Projection as follows:

 

And we have the following result:

1. Introduction

Whatever software application you want to create, the most important problem that must be solved is the tight coupling. Mixing one layer with another is a very common mistake and it is the main reason for your application to be tightly coupled. For example: as a practical example in this article I will create a simple data entry application, which purpose is to load, create, edit, delete and save data. The most straightforward way to create the application is to put everything in the user interface (handling the button’s click events and writing the code there). It is the easiest way but it is far from the best. This will produce a low quality code and high complexity. And when the things are tightly coupled, one change can lead you into chasing breaking changes in the whole code. So the most important thing is to keep the layers separate, one layer – one responsibility. Yes, it is true, that creating an application with separate tiers requires additional work, but this may save you a headache in the future.

The most famous solutions and approaches (patterns) for creating a multi layer application are the MVC and MVP patterns. Since Silverlight does not require reinventing the wheel, these patterns and practices can be applied with great success when you create a Silverlight application. In previous articles I showed you how the Model-View-Presenter (MVP) pattern and the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern can be used in Silverlight. Today I decided to continue and to present you another pattern – it is the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM). MVVM is tailor-made for WPF and it is an adaptation of the MVC and MVP.

View live demo

Download source

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.

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

Introduction

There have been many requests online regarding methods to go about sending content to a user from within a Silverlight application. Many Silverlight users have asked for a “Save File” dialog that can be leveraged to pass files out of an application. The technique described in this tutorial shows how you can leverage a standard HTML right-click dialog to allow a user to select the “Save Link/Target As” menu and pass any type of file from any type of object to the user, allowing them to save the file to any location they wish.

Introduction

In Part 5 of this series I looked into creating a form to maintain the details of products in the inventory. In this article I will look at implementing reporting functionality within the Silverlight application.

Source Code and Live Demo*

Instructions on setting up the sample project can be found in Part 1.

*To log into the sample application use the following Username: demo and Password: demo

Reporting Requirements

Businesses need to be able to store their data, but they also want to get information out of the system to track and monitor various aspects of the business such as performance, cash flow, forecasts, sales vs targets, etc.

With the Windows Presentation Foundation a new type of events were introduced - the RoutedEvents. They have provided the developer with entirely new approach to the eventing and the event handling. Those of you who are already at the WPF and have experience with the routing of events may found this article useless, but I believe that it can be a good starting point for everyone who makes his first steps in the event routing and more specially in the Silverlight event routing.

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.

In the article about the basic customizations of the DataGrid control we showed how to change the color of the rows and of the alternating rows, how to modify the headers' and the gridlines' visibility. But we haven't mentioned anything about how to change the look of the row when the mouse is over it or when it's selected. Let's take a look how we can achieve that.

Before starting

I won't start directly with the explanation of each thing and step we have to do. Instead I’ll start with a few common things. First there is no specific property for the color of the selected row, as RowBackground and AlternatingRowBackground and the only property that comes in hand is the RowStyle. The Target property of the style must be set to DataGridRow and the thing we have to customize is the Template property. I've tried to do this using the Expression Blend, but I didn’t find a way to get to this Template, so I had to disassemble the System.Windows.Controls.Data.dll and get the template from there. After that I modified what I needed in the VisualStudio.