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I have been working on a UX pattern that discovered a while back. I am not the first person to do this but I have never seen an implementation in Silverlight before so I decided to give it a try. 

The idea is this: The user is presented with a set of images and a text box.  Each image is tagged with a number of keywords.  As the user types a search term, images whose tags are not related to the search terms are faded out.  In this way it is a combination of search and autosuggest. 

Beat Kiener implemented a WeakEventSource wrapper to simplify custom control development.

When implementing custom controls you should fully support the Silverlight content model to get the controls bindable with the MVVM pattern. Responding to CollectionChanged events provided by INotifyCollectionChanged interface should be considered too. But when attaching just the necessary events you can get into a serious memory leaking problem. The WeakEventSource implementation is a weak-event-pattern implementation based on the WeakEventListener. The class is helping us to reduce writing tedious code in custom control de-velopment, reduces memory leaks which are hard to find and last but not least it is easier to review custom control written that way, because a Reviewer must not have full knowledge of the weak-event pattern.

I will be using the custom binding made available with Silverlight 3 that enables a decreased message size through encoding the message as binary rather than text.  I will also write some code to test this layer.

In this article Radenko Zec shows you how to unit test facade pattern.

The facade pattern is commonly used software engineering design pattern. His purpose is to provide simplified interface to a larger body of code. It has several good uses:

• Make a software library easier to use and understand, since the facade has convenient methods for common tasks.
• Make code that uses the library more readable, for the same reason. [...]

Rob Bagby has published a blog / screencast series illustrating developing Silverlight 3 application, taking advantage of various design patterns. 

Here are the first three blog post of the series:

• Patterns-Based Silverlight Development – Part I – Getting Started
• Patterns-Based Silverlight Development – Part II – Repository and Validation
• Patterns-Based Silverlight Development – Part III – Pipeline Pattern

And the first two screencasts:

• deCast – Patterns-Based Silverlight – Part I – Getting Started
• deCast – Patterns-Based Silverlight – Part II – The Repository Pattern

Ward Bell and I have been chatting about our thoughts and exchanging ideas on how we handle our own presentation frameworks. In an effort to get on the same page with the world, we have conformed to using some common terminology because frankly when it comes to patterns and frameworks we technology people are horrible at being clear. How much can we all take of acronyms and funky named patterns can we take?

Gabriel Schenker and Ray Houston want to introduce a new framework which provides a fluent interface to Microsoft Silverlight.

As we have been able to leverage a lot of OSS software in the past we found that it is time to give something back to the community too. This was the birth of the OSS project we call “Fluent Silverlight”. The code is publicly available and is hosted by Google Code. It can be found here.