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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. 

Only 4 lines of real code stand between you and having a Silverlight application running. Join me as I begin a series with this introductory article.

With VS 2010, lots of new features have been introduced for developers to make their life easier. But one of the very exciting feature provided is inbuilt support to Silverlight. For all those who use VS2008 and Silverlight 3.0 may know that you need to install Silverlight 3.0 SDK and toolkit externally. VS2008 does not provide any drag-drop support for Silverlight controls on the designer canvas, you can drag-drop XAML of Elements in the XAML designer or need to use Expression Blend to design. 

It covers all of the new business centric features, features for rich media experiences, Expression Blend and Visual Studio tooling enhancements, and new Out of Browser features!

I initially started using this option because it made code samples easier to read (especially when going to print). However, a more valuable reason is that this practice is source control friendly.

Jesse Bishop demonstrates how to dynamically set or change the visual theme for a Silverlight application at runtime.

The scenario is generally that an application has many possible themes, and needs to pick one  depending on, for instance, a particular user or client who has logged in.  What if these themes are huge, or there are hundreds of them?  You probably wouldn’t want to bloat the downloaded .xap file by including every theme for every user.  So, some approach is needed that lets us target a specific theme to download – at runtime – that isn’t in the application’s resources. 

Goncalo Chaves demostrates how to create an animation dynamically in code.

Last week I was developing a Silverlight application for a customer, and after a few modifications it was necessary to make an dynamic animation … so no storyboards with Blend… get in the code and do everything with C#.

Last week, Silverlight FireStarter was hosted, an in-person and also online event where top speakers like Scott Guthrie, Brad Abrams, Tim Heuer etc talked about all there is to know about Silverlight.

Scott Guthrie is excited to announce a new program of Microsoft – WebsiteSpark.

WebsiteSpark is designed for independent web developers and web development companies that build web applications and web sites on behalf of others.  It enables you to get software, support and business resources from Microsoft at no cost for three years, and enables you to expand your business and build great web solutions using ASP.NET, Silverlight, SharePoint and PHP, and the open source applications built on top of them.