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The ContentControl is often overlooked when building Silverlight apps. It’s used inside many controls such as the Button or ChildWindow, but it also turns out to be quite useful on it’s own for separating content from presentation.

The challenging bit was getting the selected item in the list box to cast a glow on the things around it. The glow seems to escape the list box itself. The reason this wasn't straight forward is that the ListBox control clips its content to keep everything inside the scrollable area. My first instinct was just to set negative margins on something inside the ListBoxItem's template (ItemContainerStyle), but that's when it became obvious that it was being clipped.

Storyboards are one of the primary ways you create animations in Silverlight, WPF, and Windows Phone using Expression Blend. Creating a storyboard is fairly easy, but actually using a storyboard such as having it play is not. To help with this, you have the ControlStoryboardAction.

The PathListBox is one of the newest features available in Expression Blend and Silverlight 4. It redefines how users look at lists of data as it breaks the mold of a list "box" and opens the possibilities to use any shape or path. Don't miss this episode and be sure to download Adam's sample code.

This is the 6th in a series on creating a "Chrome and Glass" Silverlight theme in Expression Blend. The purpose of the theme is to look at all the common controls and point out any interesting or difficult aspects of styling their templates. If you haven't styled many controls before then I recommend you begin with the first post in the series.

Welcome to my 7th Beginners tutorial for Expression Blend & Silverlight.

This time we will be looking at Styling the Generated Content of a ListBox via the Additional Templates, & I will do my best to guide you through this.

When building Silverlight and WPF applications that are composited (e.g. using MEF) or written to support UI customization, resources are loaded dynamically at run-time. This is a great solution on the development side, but can be a challenge when working on design tasks.  If your design surface can’t find the resources at design-time you are presented with zero styling or worse, XAML parsing errors.

Expression Blend 4 RC provides a new feature to support loading resources at design-time.

A while back I posted a sneak peek preview of 3 new themes that we were working on for Silverlight 4 applications. Our team wanted to do more than just the overall base theme and provide the themes for the core, SDK and some Silverlight Toolkit controls as well.  In addition, there was a lot of internal chatter about how cool these new themes were and a lot of teams wanting to adopt them as default, including WCF RIA Services.