Resources

1. Introduction

I recently found myself in the following situation. My boss came to me and asked me: “Dude, we have a big Silverlight project, performing a great number of CRUD operations. We need to find a unified way of showing Modal Dialogs in a MVVM manner, without using any code in the View. The logic of showing dialogs must reside in the ViewModel, not in the code-behind. Also do you remember our previous WinForms projects? There are several pretty useful classes, such as BindingSource and DataRowView, implementing BeginEdit, EndEdit and CancelEdit functionality out of the box.

Introduction

In this article we’ll look at building a spider, which can load web pages and extract links. It will then allow the user to select which links it wants to retrieve, which adds more links to the list. It will look something like this:

Building it will involve using a two-way DOM Bridge to interact with JQuery and building some parsing mechanism to use on the HTML we retrieve.

Introduction

Let’s imagine a scenario in which you have a series of Excel files (.xlsx) on your computer but you don’t have any Microsoft Office installed. What can we do if we want to examine the content of these files?
In this article we will describe a small Silverlight application allowing you to open and view these files and also create line series graphs. I used this exercise as laboratory to familiarize myself with some of the new features of Silverlight 4 like, for instance, drag&drop of files from local folders to the application, drag&drop between controls in the application, right click event handling, theming and so on.

Introduction

Some years ago (pre-silverlight times) a client ask me for a weird requirement…he wanted to drag files from his local explorer and drop them on their ASP .net grid application without using any ActiveX help… I thought, umm… is that possible?

With the advent of Silverlight 2 we got the same request again, … we knew this time it was not a technology limitation, it was a sandbox security limitation, how does the Ms chaps can offer this feature without exposing a security hole? Well it seems that they have managed to “open the box” for this feature in Version 4 on a secure and very easy to use way.

Whenever a new version of Silverlight is released, I start examining its features from two perspectives: how would my current (and planned) LOB applications benefit from using these new features, and what cool new things can I build to entertain my children.

This article will guide you through the process of creating a doodling application (you know, for kids ;)), while covering some of the most visible (or not) new features, coming with Silverlight 4. But this is not just about new features, it’s about how they are prepared and served.

Among the new features introduced with Silverlight 3.0, Out-of-Browser is certainly one that has aroused more interest among developers as it opens very interesting usage scenarios that go beyond the traditional Web application, with version 4.0 this feature has been enhanced with additional options that makes it a viable alternative to classic desktop applications.

Introduction

Out-of-Browser mode allows a Silverlight 3.0 or above application to be detached from its natural host (the browser) and be run by the final user as any desktop application.

Introduction

My XAP file is 5 Mb size, is that bad?

Unfortunately that’s a usual question for lot of new Silverlight developers, … you start coding you Silverlight app everything is easy to do, you can use lot of powerful third parties stuff, and finally you end up with an awesome application that runs quite well under Cassini / localhost, then you a realize that…

Well...

Introduction

Since the first release of Silverlight, the community has been patiently waiting for a version of Silverlight which would allow us to capture video from a user’s webcam, as well as audio from their microphone. This past month at PDC 09, our wait was over with the release of Silverlight 4 Beta 1.

In this article we will explore the ways in which Silverlight can interact with a webcam, as well as the powerful results one can produce by combining live video with pixel shaders, video brushes as well as WriteableBitmaps.

I don’t generally find the fall or winter an appropriate time to track weather conditions, but this is an exception.

Only 4 months have passed since 10 July 2009 - when Silverlight 3.0 has been released - and the last 18th November at the PDC the first beta of Silverlight 4.0 has been launched to the world. In this short time great work has been accomplished by the Silverlight team, adding some impressive new features, tuning some others and fixing a lot of bugs.

During this short time the development has been driven from people which have sent more then 12000 votes on a special site created to collect the preferences (http://silverlight.uservoice.com/).