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If you were developing larger Silverlight/WPF applications and trying to keep things like styles, control templates and other resources organized it can become really hard. Prior to Silverlight 3 it was hell to be honest 

You had to scatter resources all around your application, on control level and put global ones in App.xaml and soon it would all grow beyond control.

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.

There’s a whole lot of talk these days about MVVM. It’s the “hep” thing and everyone wants in. There isn’t a single day lately where someone doesn’t post about this topic (and I read their post..I’ve tried really hard to read everything I find). I’ve tweeted that all these posts have caused a great deal of noise, distracting developers from the interesting and really useful information.

I get the question all the time about how to get started – now we have an amazing collection of resources.  Are there any resources that I’ve missed?

I just wanted to post a thank you to all that attended the talk Monday night and ask for any feedback that you might have. That was my first time speaking at the user group and am sure there is a lot of room for improvement. So please feel free to add comments to this article with suggestions on how I can improve or email them to me directly (ian at openlightgroup dot net). Also, I was hoping to provide a quick summary of links to some of the resource I mentioned.

My many thanks go out to everyone who has spent time helping people learn how to use Silverlight/WPF Data Visualization!

Alex Golesh has published this useful Silverlight tip on how to enumerate embedded resources.

Today I’ve got a “Call for Help” from one of Silverlight MVPs – Bill Reiss. The mail said: “I would like to enumerate all items that were marked as Content or Resource in the main XAP file. If I can’t do both I’d settle for one. Any sample code for this would be greatly appreciated. Bill”.

Andy Beaulieu has published some links about .NET RIA Services and behaviors in Silverlight 3.

Thanks to everyone who attended my sessions at the Tech Valley Code Camp on Saturday 11/7! As promised, here are links to further resources for the sessions.

Here I already explained how to create the RESX files for Silverlight (by the way the article is relevant also for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 & Silverlight 3), and how to use those resources from XAML. In some cases, though, it is needed to use those resources from code behind. In my scenario I had to create value converter, which converts some Boolean value to string representation and for localizes application I had to provide localized value.

In order to use resources from code behind one need to get instance of ResourceManager class, and the use its methods to get the resource by name for any supported culture.