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Source: Andrej Tozon's blog

I'll use a similar scenario as before – gradually load a few tiles into an ItemsControl. Let’s get started.

Source: Andrej Tozon's Blog

In my last blog post I wrote about using Reactive Extensions together with layout states in Silverlight to gradually introduce collections of data to a ListBoxes. One small problem with code from that post is that I’m generating the sequence of data myself, whereas in real-world scenario would be pulling it from some data source like database or web service. It’s easy to turn an existing collection to an Observable by using the ToObservable() operator, but the generated sequence wouldn’t be time-based, as it would have been if we had used the GenerateWithTime() constructor.

Source: Andrej Tozon's blog

I’ve been working on several applications where I needed to display several items in a ListBox (or an ItemsControl) at startup, but they had to appear on the screen one by one, with a short delay, not all at once. Using ListBoxItem’s layout states took care of handling how an individual item would appear in the list, but I still needed to handle a short pause between each item being added to the list. Usually I resorted to using a Timer, which sorted out that needed delay for me, but that really felt like hacking that had nothing to do with the real problem. Reactive Extensions, however, offer a much elegant solution.

Source: Andrej Tozon's blog

One thing to know about Reactive Extensions is that simply going from pull model (enumerating) to push model (observing) doesn’t give you immediate background thread processing – everything is still happening on the same thread.

Named & optional parameters are a new C# language feature coming up with .NET FX 4.0 and guess what… it’s in Silverlight 4 as well!

Optional parameters will come very useful when defining complex APIs where you would usually have to provide several overloads for the same method for it to make sense to wide variety of usages.

The first part of the article was about getting familiar with MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) – to get to know the basics, define its core principles and apply those to an existing Gallery application to make it configurable through themes. This part will dig deeper into the framework.

MEF as an IoC Container?

MEF is not a replacement for an IoC container - they both address different scenarios and can be used in the same application. However, MEF sure can be used for dependency injection without having to resort to a proper IoC container.

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.