Resources

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

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. The problem

Download source code.

Have you ever wondered why the XAML parser recognizes the full palette of 141 colors (by name), but the Silverlight Colors class does not support the same full range of color names, for example, as WPF? I haven’t even noted that until the last week. In Silverlight in the XAML markup you can access all colors by name:

 Unfortunately, this not valid if you try the same operation in the code behind file:

If you check in MSDN you will see that the Colors class allows you to access only 16 colors.

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. 

The official release of Silverlight 3 is already a fact and at Silverlight.net you can find the latest files for download. For more information on how to get started with the new Silverlight 3, pay a visit to our Get Started page.

With the official release there are a lot of changes that will affect in some way the Silverlight 2 and Silverlight 3 Beta applications. As the list of changes is pretty long, I will overview only the most interesting of them, but to be fully intact with the new release and to convert your application as fast and easy as possible, be sure to read this breaking changes document, provided by the Silverlight SDK team.

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.

1. Introduction

In the previous parts of the article I showed you the first two groups of patterns used in the Composite Application Library (CAL) – Composite User Interface patterns and Modularity patterns. In the final part I will show you the third group – Testability patterns.

2. Patterns and Practices in the CAL - quick overview

As a whole the patterns used in CAL can be separated in three main groups:

• Composite User Interface patterns (part 1)
  • Composite
  • Composite View
  • Command
  • Adapter
• Modularity patterns (part 2)
  • Separated interface and Plug In
  • Service Locator
  • Dependency Injection
  • Event Aggregator
  • Façade
  • Registry
• Testability patterns (part 3)
  • Inversion of control
  • Separated presentation

3.