Tools

It was just days before this year’s Halloween when I was searching for those nifty applications that let you play scary sounds directly from your mobile phone; thought that would be a great entertainment for my young daughter.

And it was.

Later I decided to create a similar application to run with Silverlight. I knew porting such application to Silverlight would be fairly easy, but the real challenge was in doing it with as less coding as possible. And how exactly do you write an application without writing code, some may ask?

Behaviors

Expression Blend 3 introduced a new way of adding interactivity to user interface elements, called behaviors.

Introduction

One of the main concepts, when you work over a complex (or not so) project, is “divide and conquer”. This is the need of splitting the whole project into small and reusable parts, called controls. Having lots of these smaller parts, you can easily manage them in a view (page, window, etc).

People who have worked with WinForms and ASP.NET are already familiar with this idea. It is realized both in WPF and Silverlight as well. Each control has its own behavior and style. The look and feel of each control can be tweaked through styles or can be entirely redesigned through templates, and the behavior of controls can be modified through event handlers.

1. Introduction

Silverlight 3 is already a fact and along with it a new version of Expression Blend has been released. One of the changes in the Expression Blend that makes me a deep impression is that the new Blend has been made more approachable for designers. Beside the behaviors, Photoshop and Illustrator importers, the new Blend 3 makes a huge step in the direction of making better user experience. This step is the SketchFlow. The SketchFlow is a new set of tools for Expression Blend to create sketches and prototypes of interactive content and applications.

I was working with one of the web application localization. I was searching with couple of translator's available with the web. The most popular of them are

1. Google Translation Service

2. Bing Translator Service

I tried using the Google API for the web and it was pretty good. Then in recent times I came across Bing translator and tools link in them gave me the way to implement the Bing API. Bing is making a revolution in the search engines and so I liked to use that here.

Following URL's are referred for this.

1. Introduction

Currently Silverlight supports two ways of duplex communication: sockets and WCF polling duplex services. I was really impressed by the simplicity of using WCF polling duplex in Silverlight 3, but its responsiveness and scalability leaves much to be desired. On the opposite site we have sockets, which are rather tricky to use, but their responsiveness and scalability satisfy real world application requirements.

In this article I’m going to introduce my SocketsLight framework, which should simplify the working with sockets by providing high level API over .NET sockets library.

Authentication and authorization plays a key role in the web world. Going distributed makes information sharing healthier. But only if it's allowed for the know contact it will be healthy. We can very well see this in the existing web world. We have the memberships and roles for ASP.Net web applications. In addition we also have forms authentication and NTLM authentication.

Going smart client is always best. But considering security it has to be more secure since smart clients attract all the people they can be easily prey to security vulnerabilities.

Silverligth 3 is the most awaited release of Microsoft. I found the download’s from the page Silverlight 3. The following are the utlities that can be found in this download page.

1. Silverlight 3 Beta Tools for Visual Studio
2. Microsoft Expression Blend 3 Preview
3. Silverlight Toolkit
4. .NET RIA Services
5. Silverlight 3 Beta Documentation

In this list the most attracting one is the RIA services which is making wonders with Silverlight now. I will be discussing about them in the later posts.

Introduction

Silverlight 3 beta is out and it introduces a great variety of new functionality. Tim Heuer has already published a guide to the new features in Silverlight 3.

Element effects in Silverlight 2 are missing. This means that if you want to make your elements more attractive, you have to write your own effects. Silverlight.FX introduced a great number of effects and animations, which you can use. Nikhil Kothari has written a number of posts to show you the capabilities of this small but powerful framework.

1. Introduction

This is the first article of my series about deep dive into  ADO.NET Data Services. In this article I'm going to show you how to implement your own ADO.NET Data Services proxy with T4 templates.

Source code and database backup

2. Content

2.1 Problem

ADO.NET Data  Services is a very powerful toy, but as many other cool Microsoft technologies it needs some workarounds to become usable in the real world applications.

Most of the problems are connected with the auto generated proxy which is created after the addition of a service reference.

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

1. Introduction

Microsoft Silverlight uses the WebClient class to send HTTP requests to remote scripts, which allows the application to perform specific web server functions, such as retrieving files. Remote scripts, created with Active Server Pages (ASP) and Personal Hypertext Processor (PHP), add an additional layer of functionality with direct access to the remote server, such as the file system. In this article, I will demonstrate an application that utilizes the WebClient class to retrieve and display files from a remote server.