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I've had a few projects where it's been necessary to use animations to transition between "screens" in the application. While I use the visual state manager as often as I can for this, sometimes the transitions aren't really changing the state of the control itself, but simply animating the change of underlying data.

A while ago I started the WriteableBitmapEx project to make the life a bit easier when working with the WriteableBitmap. And now what would be more natural than porting it to the Windows Phone platform.

This is (as I mentioned) a Silverlight 3 app. You’re welcome to download the source (here) and do with it as you please. It uses the completely awesome Saluse Media Kit to create the playback visualization bars (in conjunction with the must have WriteableBitmapEx extensions for WriteableBitmap). If you have your own list of 25 albums, it would be easy to reuse this. It’s driven by an XML file.

The WriteableBitmap API is very minimalistic and there’s only the raw Pixels array for such operations. The WriteableBitmapEx library tries to compensate that with extensions methods that are easy to use like built in methods. The library extends the WriteableBitmap class with elementary and fast (2D drawing) functionality, conversion methods and functions to combine (blit) WriteableBitmaps.

Allowing users to upload images is becoming common place for many websites and applications today. Equally common is the fact that most cameras and phones today produce very large and high quality images. On the other hand, very rarely do you actually want a high resolution / low compression image sitting on your server; nor does the average user know or care enough to manually reduce the size of their image before uploading it to your site.

In Silverlight, the WriteableBitmap class is used to manipulate bitmap data. The current class is pretty low-level, providing access to the bits, but not many convenience features. Thankfully a few community members have started an open source library called WriteableBitmapEx. This library extends the functionality of the WritableBitmap class to include methods for drawing, blending and more.

This blog post of Colin Eberhardt is about his entry to the Mix10k code competition - an old-skool demo, plus a few tips about keeping you code size less than 10k.

The mix10k challenge, where you are given 10k to create a Silverlight / HTML5 application, has been on my mind for a while … the Christmas vacation was the perfect excuse to put together my entry. Inspired by the demo’s of the Amiga era, here is my mix10k old-skool demo entry.

In the Silverlight 4 Augmented Reality Proof Of Concept blog post I proved that it's possible to implement Augmented Reality applications with Silverlight 4 and the built-in webcam API. The proof of concept used an image showing a Silverlight logo that was attached to the tracked marker. With this blog post I'm back in this field, but this time with real 3D Augmented Reality in Silverlight!

The problem manifests itself when you handle large images in large numbers. The My Pictures Viewer that I blogged about yesterday is a case in point. When a user running the application selects a folder containing one or more image files, the viewer displays clickable thumbnail versions of the images. The problem is that because Silverlight's BitmapImage class consumes massive amounts of memory (up to 40 or 50 MB per image for a typical 2 to 3 MB digital photo), you simply can't have too many instances extant at once. But to create a thumbnail, you first need a BitmapImage that wraps the entire image.