DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by pbrooks

Using ReSharper with Silverlight

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:37:30 GMT

If you have ever used Resharper, you may know that it has a great feature called Templates. Templates give you the ability to quickly generate code that you would generally need to write by hand. I've built 4 templates that you can use in your Silverlight endeavors.

Tweaking OnApplyTemplate Event Timing in Silverlight 2

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:14:11 GMT

When building a custom control in Silverlight 2, the OnApplyTemplate method gives you the opportunity to "wire-up" logical instances of elements in your control. When a control is loaded, it is important to realize that in Silverlight 2, this method is not triggered very early with respect to other events. In other words, you could very easily write code that fails just because of where you call it. Understanding the control's life cycle will help in avoiding these situations.

Silverlight Unit Test Framework source code released

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 17:34:07 GMT

A week ago, we gave the world the first release of the Silverlight Toolkit. Shawn Burke told you that we're agile, and that we have a neat release model. The fun continues! Today, the source code to the Silverlight Unit Test Framework is available with the same open source license. It is checked in to the source control for the toolkit on CodePlex.

Silverlight Toolkit Released on CodePlex!

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:46:07 GMT

The Silverlight Toolkit is a collection of Silverlight controls, components and utilities made available outside the normal Silverlight release cycle. It adds new functionality quickly for designers and developers, and provides the community an efficient way to help shape product development by contributing ideas and bug reports. This first release includes full source code, unit tests, samples and documentation for 12 new controls covering charting, styling, layout, and user input.

Silverlight Contrib 2008.0.0 - Alpha 2 Released!

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 01:20:42 GMT

I'm happy to announce the Alpha 2 release of Silverlight Contrib! If you have been following the project on CodePlex, you know that a lot has changed in the past few weeks. The team has grown to 6 members and we have added quite a few new features (including Silverlight 2 RTW Compatibility). Additionally, we have created a web site (SilverlightContrib.org) which contains live demonstrations of many features in Silverlight Contrib as well as an RSS feed for keeping up with announcements.

Minrosoft: Silverlight 2 is Live

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 19:16:10 GMT

Redmond, Wash. - Oct. 13, 2008 - Microsoft Corp. today announced the availability of Silverlight 2, one of the industry's most comprehensive and powerful solutions for the creation and delivery of applications and media experiences through a Web browser. Silverlight 2 delivers a wide range of new features and tools that enable designers and developers to better collaborate while creating more accessible, more discoverable and more secure user experiences.

Sharing Code Between .NET and Silverlight Platforms

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 17:13:50 GMT

Quite often, I hear people asking if they can use .NET assemblies compiled for the full .NET runtime in Silverlight. Unfortunately, this just isn't possible, the Silverlight runtime is a subset of the full .NET runtime and for code to run correctly under the Silverlight runtime, there are various dependencies that must be linked and verified at compile time. But (there is always a but), there is one technique that you can use that effectively allows you to write your code once and have it work in both Silverlight and regular .NET applications.

Silverlight Unit Test Framework: New features & download for RC0

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 12:55:28 GMT

Enhanced interactive results, more log providers, dynamic test methods and attributes, tag expressions: there's a whole lot of fun new test-dev-geek candy in the latest Silverlight Unit Test Framework download on the MSDN Code Gallery

Microsoft Introduces the Silverlight/WPF Controls Team

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 01:28:21 GMT

Shortly after MIX07, ScottGu brought up an idea of building a larger team focused on building controls. We kicked this idea around for while as we talked about details, timelines, and goals. In April, most of these details were worked out and we hashed out a charter and some early areas of focus and deliverables.

Google Chrome updated to run Silverlight

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:46:03 GMT

Chrome latest build was released under the Developer chain, an alternative release cycle which let you update to interim builds of Google's Internet Browser, for testing purposes. On this post you will find an early review of the update which truly is an improvement to the beta release, check it out and get yourself switched to the Dev chain.

Reflecting the entire layout panel in Silverlight 2 Beta 2

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 11:46:02 GMT

After my post on creating reflection with Silverlight 2 Beta . I was asked several times by couple of Silverlight enthusiasts questions like this : is there any way i can reflect an entire grid?, is it possible to make a reflection of lets say a grid with multiple buttons since there is no VisualBrush in Silverlight?, is there any chance to reflect some generic Control(Framework element etc)?. So I started to think about how entire Layout Panels like Grid,Canvas,Border etc. can be reflected. In WPF I did this stuff so easily. But in Silverlight I didn't find any any way till last night. The idea behind Layout reflection is , creating a mirror effect of a Container Control, which means child controls placed inside the container will also be reflected.

Introducing Silverlight Contrib

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 12:38:04 GMT

I've just started a new project on CodePlex called Silverlight Contrib. The aim of this project is to offer the most comprehensive collection of free and open source Silverlight controls. The first drop is very small, but with support from the community, I hope to grow this collection into a full suite of controls that you can incorporate into your solutions.

CoolMenu: A Silverlight Menu Control

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 19:16:14 GMT

I thought it would be cool to try building a reusable container control so I came up with CoolMenu. You really have to try this one out to get the full experience, a screen shot just doesn't do it justice. CoolMenu is a Silverlight container control that gives you a nice wave-like effect as you move your mouse over the menu items. Clicking a menu item causes the item to bounce.

Silverlight Gauge Control

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 04:20:40 GMT

After posting my Treadmill application, Andrew Duthie suggested that it would be cool if I made it so you could drag your mouse along the speed and incline visuals and have them update instead of repeatedly clicking the plus and minus buttons. That gave me the idea for a new control. What if we built a gauge control that you could adjust in a similar manner as described above? That way, anyone could use it and furthermore, a properly designed control would allow us to define the "gauge" to be anything we would like and the control would work the same!

Visual Studio Theme Generator

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:16:02 GMT

A fun little ASP.NET MVC Application I wrote to generate Visual Studio themes based off of 3 given colors. I have always felt that selecting every color to make a decent theme is way too repetitive. This web application automatically chooses complements / contrasts based off your initial color selections (and uses jQuery to let you preview your theme before creating). Check it out and let me know what you think.

A Customizable Silverlight Star Selector Control

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 01:51:26 GMT

This control presents 4 stars/hearts/whatever and, by hovering your mouse over the control, you can change the state of the control. Clicking on a particular star will set the rating for the selector. I think this screenshot really illustrates the awesome skinning capabilities of Silverlight.

Controlling your Treadmill from Silverlight - Part 3

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:21:01 GMT

In the final post for this series, we will be expanding the usefulness of our application by adding a workout feature. This feature will allow you to craft workouts (in XML format of course) and then have the application execute them. The application will render a nice visualization so you can monitor your progress as you burn off those calories.

A Few Cool uses for Microsoft Live Mesh

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 02:47:07 GMT

I work with several different computers on a daily basis and sometimes it can be a chore to keep up with multiple copies of files and remember which machine has a particular file. In particular, I have a few applications that are constantly out of sync with one another and manually keeping them in sync is next to impossible.

Controlling your Treadmill from Silverlight - Part 2

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 03:45:02 GMT

In the first part of this series, I demonstrated a Silverlight application that controls a treadmill. Today, we will go into a little more detail on using various audio signals (aka Chirps) which, in turn, instruct the treadmill to change settings. To keep things simple, we are going to just focus on the speed and incline aspect of the application in this post.

Controlling your Treadmill from Silverlight - Part 1

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 04:16:51 GMT

If you are like me, you have a treadmill that sits in your garage collecting dust while you sit in front of your computer all day. Well, it's time to drag that 350-pound waste of metal within reach of your computer so you can wire-up some bleeding-edge technology to it! Yes, we are going to control your treadmill with Silverlight.

10 Silverlight 2 gotchas resolved

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 16:52:02 GMT

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. These include Canvas rules, Color resources, limited fonts, no BitmapEffects, no paging facility, limited resource facilities, significant transparency, StaticResources only, XML Databinding, and the lack of some important controls. I'll let you in on this treasure trove and tell you all about these 10 Silverlight 2 gothas resolved.

Save File Dialog in Silverlight

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:12:33 GMT

Suppose you are generating a file in your Silverlight application and you would like to allow the user to save the file on their computer in the location of their choosing. Currently, there is no mechanism that allows for this in Silverlight. However, since Silverlight is hosted inside of a web browser, you can take advantage of the browser's capabilities. This requires a little bit of Silverlight / HTML DOM interop, but nothing very fancy.

Project anti-pattern: Many projects in a Visual Studio Solution File

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:46:06 GMT

I've been hearing from several colleagues about how their Visual Studio solution files have many (i.e. more than 10, and usually more than 30 -- in one case, more than 100!). So far, none of them have been able to give me any good explanation for why this is and most of them hate it but they can't change it because their architect/lead/whatever won't let them. I'm hoping that by getting the discussion going on this in the greater community, we can try to discourage everyone from having lots of projects in a solution.

VSM Strangeness

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:19:31 GMT

While migrating a Silverlight 2 Beta 1 control to Beta 2, I encountered some odd behavior with the VisualStateManager and I thought I would document my experience in the event that you might run into the same issue. From what I can tell, this only occurs when you have multiple instances of a control that change state by animating color properties (ColorAnimation). There may be other ways to induce this behavior, but the following is the only way I have encountered personally. Simply put, calling VisualStateManager.GoToState to does not always go to the correct state in some cases, even though no exception is thrown and a true boolean value is returned.

Silverlight Control Builder Contest Announced

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 01:52:26 GMT

With this contest, we hope to incite the development of many open and free Silverlight Controls that all developers can use in their applications, and what better way to do this than through a friendly contest! This contest is your chance to demonstrate your control building skills to the Silverlight community and win some pretty cool prizes at the same time!