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Introduction

Some time ago Corey Schuman published the article A look at the Printing API in Silverlight 4 right here on SilverlightShow.net. The article deals with the basics of printing in Silverlight 4, using a WYSIWYG approach. In this article we want to look into a more advanced scenario of printing, where WYSIWYG is not the best approach. We’ll take a look at how to print text in such a way that it will fit on the page and we’ll look into printing more than one page.

Before we start, a screenprint of what we’re building:

And if you want to have a look at the result, you can do so here.

The book chapter goes into great detail on the printing API. I won't duplicate that here. However, you can find additional information on MSDN.

The goal of the report writer is to create a simple way to print reports in Silverlight. A non-goal was to create a report designer or similar. I'll leave that to you all and to the vendors.

There are lots of examples on blogs demonstrating printing on simple elements. However I wanted to test how the printing functionality performs when working with charts.

I chose to use the most widespread (and free) charting component, the Silverlight Toolkit. In my example I’ve created four charts and added printing support to all of them.

Well, what an exciting week!  First Visual Studio 2010 is released, followed by Silverlight 4 yesterday!  Consequently, I was inspired to post about something new!  I’ve been spending some time looking at the new printing feature in Silverlight 4, and while on the surface it looks like a pretty simple and lower-level set of APIs, it’s possible to build rich frameworks on top of them for accomplishing common printing tasks.  In this post, I’ll take a look at an attempt I made (and added to SLaB) at building such a higher-level API over printing that makes printing collections of data easier

Silverlight 4 now supports printing functionality using the Printing APIs. Using the API’s you can now print your whole application screen or a portion of the application. Also, you can customize the look while you printing your part/full application. In this post I will step you guys to the depth of the printing API.

When you try to dynamically load image (in code behind) and print it, it doesn't work. Paper sheet is blank.

Here Alex van Beek discusses printing in both Silverlight 4 and Flex 4.

I’ve wanted to do a “Silverlight vs Flex” series for quite a while now. Both Silverlight and Flex will reach version 4 during the first quarter of this year, at least, that’s what the roadmaps say. With both reaching version 4, this seems like the perfect time to do a comparison about how to implement certain features. Silverlight has been catching up with Flex, but in Silverlight 4, there are features in Silverlight that are just not possible in Flex (COM interop / Drag and Drop from the desktop), while other features that previously were only possible in Flex, are now also available in Silverlight 4. Whether the implementation of these features in Silverlight is as mature as in Flex is what we are going to find out in this series. We’re going to start with how printing is implemented on both platforms.

I’ve wanted to do a “Silverlight vs Flex” series for quite a while now. Both Silverlight and Flex will reach version 4 during the first quarter of this year, at least, that’s what the roadmaps say. With both reaching version 4, this seems like the perfect time to do a comparison about how to implement certain features. Silverlight has been catching up with Flex, but in Silverlight 4, there are features in Silverlight that are just not possible in Flex (COM interop / Drag and Drop from the desktop), while other features that previously were only possible in Flex, are now also available in Silverlight 4. Whether the implementation of these features in Silverlight is as mature as in Flex is what we are going to find out in this series.

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.