Tips and Tricks

This article is compatible with the latest version of Silverlight.

Introduction

The MultiscaleImage is a really great control that allows us to do amazing things in Silverlight. That is why I decided to write a series of articles about the nice things that can be done using it. This is the first one and it is focused on the SubImages collection. It explains how to select an image from the collection and then fit it to the size of the control. If you're new to this control read my previous article about it - Using the MultiscaleImage control. Before going ahead you should also be familiar with the DeepZoom Composer and its latest changes. Note that in this article I've replaced the "Double-Click" zoom with “One-Click” zoom.

Live demo | Source code

Note: This article is submitted by Antoni Dol for Silverlight Contest: Write and Win.Thanks a lot, Antoni! Hello All, Please drop a comment if you like it.

This Silverlight 2 development kick start helps you get over initial hurdles and clears the path for faster results.

Coming from projects in which WPF design experience was established, the step to developing in Silverlight 2 was not an easy one. Even though I anticipated getting disappointed and even annoyed by times, there were several gotchas that baffled me. Some of those can still be found in the current Beta 2 release, but others are resolved to a degree that makes for a workable Silverlight 2 environment.

This article is compatible with the latest version of Silverlight.

Introduction

We’ve introduced you to the basics of Custom Controls in our previous article. Now we will give another example this time involving the Visual States Manager. We will create a templatable ContentControl that uses animations on its Content and the States & Parts model proposed by Microsoft.

Dowload source code

Parts & States Model

The idea behind the States & Parts is to separate better the logic from the visual appearance and thus to allow better flexibility for both.

This article is compatible with the latest version of Silverlight.

Recently I had to work with JSON files and more especially with serialization and deserialization using Silverlight and .NET. The information I found was very limited, so I had to figure it out by myself. When I managed, I decided to write it down for people who would have had the same problems as me.

This article is compatible with the latest version of Silverlight.

You are not familiar with the MultiscaleImage control, are you? Read this article.

When using MultiscaleImage control with its zoom functionality, it's really useful to set a maximum and a minimum level for the zoom. The reason is that sometimes there is no reason to zoom - the image either becomes too small and is almost not visible at all or it gets so big that you can't see any details. Adding such levels will allow you to make the behavior of your control more reasonable.

This article is compatible with the latest version of Silverlight.

Recently I needed to use a web service in order to get some data for my Silverlight application and I found that using an ASMX web service with Silverlight could be quite easy. Though, for people who have never used such service it could be not that easy. So I decided to make this “step-by-step” tutorial and I hope it could be useful to someone.

You may be familiar with the DZone network and our series of Refcardz. We are proud to announce that our newest refcard on Silverlight 2 has just been released and we would be honored if you can look through it and give us any review or feedback. Any supportive mention on your website/blog will be greatly appreciated :).

Please see information below:

Light up the web! Silverlight is Microsoft’s offering for designing, developing, and delivering rich interactive applications over the internet. These applications can run on all major platforms and in all major browsers.

This article is compatible with the latest version of Silverlight.

A common scenario in data binding is to format the data displayed in the UI. Almost every time you show a date or a price you need to format it. Silverlight and WPF are using the so called converters to apply custom logic to a binding.

Using Converters

Let's make a small example that illustrates the problem. Consider a ListBox filled with client details - name and birthdate.

Here the ListBox is bound to a custom business object with a field Birthdate of type DateTime - pretty common situation.

This article is compatible with the latest version of Silverlight.

Yesterday we've published Silvester - Silverlight Twitter widget and the idea was to let people put it on their blogs. To use the widget you need only an HTML snippet placed somewhere on your blog/profile page. The snippet contains an <object> tag that refers the widget's XAP file from our domain. So what you actually do is refer a resource from other domain, a.k.a x-domain scenario or cross-domain scenario.

Silverlight is a client technology and as such it sets a lot security requirements to keep the applications secure by default.

This article is compatible with the latest version of Silverlight.

I've been playing with some timers and Web Services and I got stuck in a case where the background thread was trying to update the UI. Well, that's never going to happen. To update the UI you should use the UI thread. Let's see how we can call the UI thread from the background thread.

Consider this situation:

You have data that needs to be updated every minute. The data is loaded by calling a web service.

For the update you can use the Timer class. Both the timer and the web service calls are executed asynchronously.