Search

In this tip, Mike Snow explains about the phone styles available for Windows Phone 7 applications.

Source: Silverlight Tips of the Day

When building Silverlight applications for the Win 7 mobile phone there are a variety of themes and styles you can choose from to ensure things render the way you expect them to given the variety of screen sizes mobile devices can have.

Mike Snow continues his tips of the day with number 36 in which he discusses tile transitions.

Source: Silverlight Tips of the Day

This tutorial will look into using the Opacity property on the tiles to create smooth, natural looking transitions between tiles. For example, blending a dirt tile into a grass tile, a grass tile into a rock tile, etc.

We tweet all news and content updates - follow us on Twitter! 

BiDi or Bi-directional text is text that flows right-to-left (RTL) and left-to-right (LTR). For example, while English flows left to right other languages such as Arabic, Hebrew and Persian scripts flow right to left. Chinese characters can also be written in either RTL or LTR directions.

Silverlight supports BiDi through a property called FlowDirection. This property can be set to either RightToLeft or the default LeftToRight.

Full screen can be toggled on and off via a user command such as a button click by setting the following property to true or false: Application.Current.Host.Content.IsFullScreen

Normally Silverlight applications will only stay in full screen mode until a user hits the <ESC> key or until the application loses focus. For example, if the user has multiple monitors and they click on another application in another monitor this will cause the Silverlight application to return to windowed mode.

However, as with most things, you can leverage a Silverlight-enabled WCF server to do the dirty work for you. In this steps below I will be showing you the code needed to send the email through the SmtpClient object as well as some minor configurations you need to do to your server to get it working.

With Silverlight 4 came support for Text Trimming. Text Trimming is a feature that applies to TextBlocks and is used to append “…” at the end of the string if the text in the TextBlock does not fit. In WPF this can be done at the character level or the word level. Silverlight 4 only supports trimming at the word level.

If you try to use the special/reserved characters in a string in XAML you will get a slew of errors in your Error List.

When a Silverlight application is launched the entry point is a class that inherits from System.Windows.Application. By default, when you create a new Silverlight application project, this would be your App class which gets defined in App.xaml.cs. You can, however, change which startup class you want to use. In fact, if you do not plan to use XAML at all you can reduce the size of your application by deleting the Page and App classes including the XAML and code behind files.

When you are about to submit a form, click OK on a dialog, etc. it’s a good idea to first verify if any of your controls have data validation errors associated with them. To learn how to hook up your controls to data validation please review Tip of the Day #22.