DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by pbrooks

Easy Drop Shadows on Text in Silverlight 3

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 08:52:12 GMT

Before Silverlight 3, you had to do perform some less-than-ideal tricks to achieve a drop shadow effect on your text. In fact, the most decent trick I could find had to rely on the TextBox control and not the TextBlock control since you cannot re-template a TextBlock control. But even that technique was not optimal since you couldn't get a truly smooth shadow.

Silverlight Contrib to Merge with Silverlight Extensions

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 02:26:00 GMT

Today, we are excited to announce that the popular Silverlight Contrib and Silverlight Extensions projects will be merging into a single project! We think this move will greatly benefit the Silverlight developer community. Combining the two projects will provide a centralized location for developers looking to contribute controls to the community as well as those seeking to find controls for use in their own applications.

Silverlight Contrib 2008.0.0 - Alpha 3 Available!

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 10:18:31 GMT

Silverlight Contrib Alpha 3 has been released! This release builds upon the Alpha 2 release with minor enhancements in many areas.

Netflix to Lay Off 50. Blames Silverlight.

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 23:31:17 GMT

In a corporate blog post today, Netflix (NFLX) said 50 of its technical specialists in its customer service group will be let go at the start of next year. The reason? The company isn't blaming the economy, it's blaming Microsoft's (MSFT) Silverlight

Building a Resizable Silverlight Control

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 08:29:16 GMT

When building a Silverlight control, in some situations, you need the visual elements of the control to scale according to the size of the control. Sometimes, this is easy because you can simply leave the height and width dimensions unspecified for the visual elements and they will fill to consume the available space in the parent container. But in more complex situations, you need to be able to specify the dimensions of the visual elements in your control.

Using ReSharper with Silverlight

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 07:37:30 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 20:14:11 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

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:34:07 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!

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 01:46:07 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 09:20:42 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

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 03:16:10 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

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 01:13:50 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 20:55:28 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 09:28:21 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 22:46:03 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 19:46:02 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 20:38:04 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

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 03:16:14 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 12:20:40 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 21:16:02 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 09:51:26 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 08:21:01 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 10:47:07 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 11:45:02 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 12:16:51 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.