Search

Lately I’ve been writing some topics on using the Silverlight designer in Visual Studio 2010 RC to build SL4 apps. One of the features of the designer that I find super cool is the ability to make changes to a control template, and provided you are using that control in your application, see the changes in the template reflected on the design surface right away.

Microsoft Expression Blend 3 has a great feature – SketchFlow. It allows creating gorgeous prototypes for Silverlight and WPF applications. But it has some disadvantages like shortage of controls. For example, there are no sketching GroupBox controls in Silverlight and WPF sets, sketching DataGrid (Silverlight and WPF) etc.

In case you haven’t figured it out: Location services (aka, GPS) is not emulated in the developer tools CTP.  As you might expect, this makes it difficult to play around with location-based applications.

The API in Windows Phone 7 revolves around the GeoCoordinateWatcher class. This class is what you would initialize to start listening for events.

One of the announcements that happened during the MIX10 conference was the availability of the V2 of the Microsoft Translator API.  This is the engine that powers the translation behind http://www.bing.com/translate and some other Bing-related properties as well.  A lot of research has gone into the engine from Microsoft Research and others.  Language translation isn’t an easy task especially taking into consideration cultural significance of words, etc. 

If you installed the Silverlight Client for Facebook, and also upgraded to the release candidate for Silverlight 4, you may have noticed it stopped working :-).

NOTE: Applications compiled on Silverlight 4 beta will not work on machines with Silverlight RC runtime.  This is known/expected.  As with all pre-release software, this type of breaking can be expected.

Today, the Silverlight 4 RC was announced and made available to the masses.  But you may be asking yourself: what’s new since the beta?  Well, I’d like to dive into one of the areas where a bunch of new work was done to improve the development experience – the XAML Parser.  With Silverlight 4, we’ve done a significant overhaul of the XAML Parser, allowing us to add new features and improve consistency within the platform and with WPF’s XAML support.

My recent Silverlight project had a need to distribute the items in rows and columns. I had to dynamically calculate the number of columns and rows it needed based on some logic. So it was clear that I need UniformGrid as in WPF so that I can bind my ViewModel properties to Rows and Columns properties of the Panel. But it was a bit surprising to me that there isn’t a Silverlight UniformGrid either in Silverlight SDK or in Silverlight ToolKit. So here is one I ported from WPF. Check out the Silverlight 3.0 demo below

Our UX design team for Silverlight has been thinking about app building a lot this past year, gathering valuable input from developers, designers and end-users about how people interact with applications, primarily line-of-business applications (<shudder>I hate that term</shudder>).  Hot off the press here is a preview of some of the things we’ve been thinking about from a XAML theme perspective.

Q1 2010 release focuses on strengthening 3 main aspects of RadControls for Silverlight and RadControls for WPF:

• Ensuring first-class performance for all data-centric controls through various techniques,
• Enhancing and polishing RadControls themes
• Providing highly advanced, enterprise-level features, especially for the data visualization controls