Tools

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

1. Introduction

In the previous article I showed you how Silverlight and the Model – View – Presenter pattern (MVP) can interact with each other. Today I decided to move on ahead in the world of Object Oriented Programming and to present you another big player on scene – the Model – View – Controller (MVC) pattern. Actually the MVC is a MVP’s ancestor, and I think it must be studied first, but that is another topic. Before I start, I want to mention that the purpose of that article is not to compare both of the “brothers”, but to present you the world through the MVC eyes.

Introduction

In this article my aim is to give a quick overview of the controls included in the Silverlight Toolkit - launched a week ago and to give an example for every control included in the toolkit. I've made a little research for each control and I will share my impressions with the community.

Overview

The following Silverlight controls are included in the toolkit:

Components in the Stable Quality Band:

• TreeView
• DockPanel
• WrapPanel
• Label
• HeaderedContentControl
• HeaderedItemsControl

Components in the Preview Quality Band

• AutoCompleteBox
• NumericUpDown
• Viewbox
• Expander
• ImplicitStyleManager
• Charting

TreeView

Let's start with the TreeView.

What’s new?

Along with the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 a new version of the DeepZoom Composer was also released. After taking a look at it, I thought that it might be useful to make a list with the changes and the new features I found in it.

• Output format changed to XML file
• Image tags can now be added in the Compose section
• Alignment to Grid and guidelines added to the Compose section
• Export section enhancements (image formats, Silverlight project output)

While digging into templating and styling of Silverlight 2 Beta 2 controls, I came into a situation where the event for MouseLeftButtonDown was not triggered when I click on the control. I created a sample project and in the Page.xaml I added the following:

<StackPanel Orientation="Vertical" 
MouseLeftButtonDown="StackPanel_MouseLeftButtonDown">
     <TextBlock Text="Antonio Moreno" Height="22" FontSize="16" />
          <Grid>
               <Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
                    <ColumnDefinition />
                    <ColumnDefinition />
               </Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
                    
               <TextBlock Text="AMoreno@hotmail.com" Grid.Column="0"/>
               <TextBlock Text="(5) 555-3932" Grid.Column="1"/>
          </Grid>
</StackPanel>

 As you can see from the xaml, I have a StackPanel and an event handler for MouseLeftButtonDown event.

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Exactly 1 year after the release at Mix 07, Microsoft releases Expression Studio 2. The suite of tools for professional designers includes Expression Web, Expression Blend, Expression Design, Expression Media and Expression Encoder.
It also works seamlessly with Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008, solving the age-old designer and developer workflow challenge.

Here are the most important changes that made it into this release of the Expression Suite:

Last year the Microsoft Expression team shipped a new suite of tools for creative professionals. This first release of Expression Studio marked a significant milestone in the history of development tools at Microsoft, delivering superior designer-developer workflow and providing designers a set of interaction design, graphic design, Web design, digital asset management and video production tools to deliver better user experiences on Windows and the Web.

I am pleased to announce, just one year later, the team has done it again with today’s release of Microsoft Expression Studio 2.

Update: You can read about the latest changes in the DeepZoom Composer here.

Introduction

First let’s see what stands behind the name SeaDragon. This is a project of SeaDragon Software, which are a part of the Microsoft Live Labs. Its main purpose is to make the browsing of a large amount of visual information, regardless of the device, smoother and independent from the bandwidth of the network. You can read more about it here. So what’s the DeepZoom Composer? It allows us to use some of the SeaDragon technology in Silverlight. To get started first download the DeepZoom Composer.

i had previously done a screencast where i talked about the tools i use to convert vector graphics in SVG format to XAML assets to be consumed in either WPF or Silverlight applicaitons.  one of the tools mentioned in the screencast is Inkscape.  inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor, with capabilitis siilar to illustrator, freehand, etc and uses the SVG file format (mostly). ... (read more)