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On Wednesday, I had the distinct pleasure of giving a talk at this great conference, and it was a real treat getting to share some great content with you.  I’d like to thank all of you who attended for coming!  My talk – Taking Microsoft Silverlight 4 Applications Beyond the Browser – took a look at the features we’ve added for out-of-browser Silverlight applications with Silverlight 4. I went over a fair amount of material, which I promised to make available on my blog, so I’ve provided the info below.

He demonstrates some great examples using the FluidMoveBehavior, FluidLayout, LayoutStates, Transition Effects, and sample data. Kenny then dives in and creates several of these interactions from scratch, showing exactly how easy it is to use Blend 4 to create rich Silverlight experiences.

This post is based on Silverlight 4, but all the steps do also apply to Silverlight 3. The full source code of the resulting project can be downloaded here. The language C# is used throughout this post, but the steps are easy translatable to VB.NET.

A couple of bits of news. I did a number of updates to the HackingSilverlightCodeBrowser here:

http://www.hackingsilverlight.net/HackingSilverlightCodeBrowser.html 

including things like MEF and IsolatedStorage.

This day I read a question at the Expression Blend and Scetchflow Forum about how to make a ChildWindow rotate. Interesting enough to build a quick and simple solution for that, including a rotation when the ChildWindow opens. So here it is. You can view an example and download the sourcecode of a sample application at the Expression Gallery. The Sourcecode is Silverlight 3, but the implementation for Silverlight 4 is similar.

The following step by step tutorial builds a Silverlight 4 app.

The MainWindow control derives from UserControl and is meant to replace the default layout root. It provides the following features:

• A title bar that users can drag to move the window. The title bar consumes out-of-browser configuration data for the icon and title text.
• A default border that users can drag to resize the window. Hovering over the border changes the cursor as you would expect. A BorderBrush dependency property lets you customize the border background from the application layout root.
• Isolated Storage support to store the window size, position, and state on application shutdown and retrieve the values on the next startup.

One of the things I needed recently is a simple way to have a textbox that had a watermark in it. Apparantly SilverLight 4 provides it,,, and it doesn’t provide it. Check this post out. I really couldn’t help but laugh when I saw this. ‘Do not use in a Silverlight 4 application.’ and at the same time the supported version is only Silverlight 4. Aaah yes, well the only other solution is to use a watermark textbox someone else has created or to make your own. I opted to make my own.

Recreate one of the Ball watches in Silverlight 4 using the new Expression Studio 4 – entirely in vector graphics – no images or video.  The entries will be judged on visual accuracy, functional accuracy, and the innovative usage of Silverlight features.

Have fun!

Martin (LawBot / SilverLaw)