Samples

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.

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.

With the addition of the much anticipated Printing API, Silverlight continues to round out its feature set. Although beta, it’s very flexible enabling you to print what you see on screen, selected portions of the UI, custom “print-friendly” views, and multiple page printing.

This post takes a deep dive into the Printing API, starting out with a simple scenario and moving to the more complex.

Print what you see

To get up and running quickly, create a simple UI. The below figure shows a sample contact screen with text fields, an image, and a print Button.

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.

Introduction

One of the main concepts, when you work over a complex (or not so) project, is “divide and conquer”. This is the need of splitting the whole project into small and reusable parts, called controls. Having lots of these smaller parts, you can easily manage them in a view (page, window, etc).

People who have worked with WinForms and ASP.NET are already familiar with this idea. It is realized both in WPF and Silverlight as well. Each control has its own behavior and style. The look and feel of each control can be tweaked through styles or can be entirely redesigned through templates, and the behavior of controls can be modified through event handlers.

This took about 4 months of part-time work but I finally got the Silverlight Bridge File Manager working enough so I can release it. This is actually just a small part of a larger project that is Silverlight Bridge. Silverlight Bridge will eventually allow you to see the files on your local computer and drag and drop the files from your local computer to the folders on the server.

Silverlight Bridge is a project that Ian started when he decided that you should be able to see your local hard drive in a Silverlight application.

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).