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Silverlight Cream for July 03, 2009 -- #628

2009-07-03T22:17:13-05:00:00

In this Issue: Andrej Tozon(2), Walt Ritscher, Chris Klug, Timmy Kokke(2), Koen Zwikstra, and Dan Wahlin.

Countdown to Silverlight 3 #6: System colors: Andrej Tozon continues his Countdown discussing the ability to get to system colors with Silverlight 3B.
Countdown to Silverlight 3 #7: Navigation: In his latest, Andrej Tozon discusses the Silverlight Navigation aspects of Silverlight 3B and a quick walk-through of it's use.
Disable Autoplay on Silverlight Video in Expression Encoder 2 SP1: Walt Ritscher shows us a 'hidden' setting in Expression Encoder that allows us to turn off autoplay... to the benefit of all our readers :)
Silverlight 3 - MergedDictionaries: Is your XAML getting overloaded with all the stuff you want to drag from app to app? Chris Klug discusses Merged Dictionaries in Silvleright 3B and how that helps the problem.
Styling a TreeView in Silverlight 3 and Blend 3: Timmy Kokke took a break from "SilverBullet" to do a great tutorial on Styling a TreeView in Blend ... definitely one to read!
SilverBullet #5 – System.Windows.ApplicationServiceContext: Timmy Kokke gives us a good start on how to figure if you're disconnected when running OOB.
Document Toolkit: it's like reading a book: Koen Zwikstra demonstrates using a custom book control to page through an XPS document just as you would a book on your desk... and he references code on Codeplex...
Handling Events within Silverlight Control Templates – AutoCompleteBox Example: Dan Wahlin has a nice post up modifying the AutoCompleteBox to act like an editable ComboBox by using a custom control template... with all the source :)

Stay in the 'Light!

Silverlight Cream for July 02, 2009 -- #627

2009-07-02T18:56:48-05:00:00

In this Issue: Erik Mork(2), Michael Washington, Faisal(2), Andrej Tozon(2), and Jose Fajardo.

I feel like I went through a time-warp or something because there is a flurry of SL out there right now. And a couple of folks are just flooding me! Hopefully I can catch up this weekend.

From SilverlightCream.com:

Downloading Prism: Prism apparently is not straightforward to get up on your machine (oops, kinda lets you know I'm not running it eh?) oh well..Erik Mork has a great tutorial links and all, no more excuses!
10 Things to Know About Silverlight Prism: When I first saw Erik Mork's 10 things post I thought ok, a list ... but nope .. each of thse is important and links out to a podcast, video, or post ... great list of resources!
Silverlight FileUploader 2.0: Michael Washington has provided a cool File uploader that gives each use the ability to create their own unique structure on your DNN portal.
Creating NikeClone With Silverlight Part-3: Faisal continues his cool series on duplicating the original Nike site. This time he is working on the basics of a search control.
Creating NikeClone With Silverlight Part-4: Faisal goes through some great Expression Blend information in this series... check it out to make sure it's not new to you!
Countdown to Silverlight 3 #4: Element binding: If you're not aware of this stuff, Andrej Tozon explains in words and example binding between UI elements in SL3B in his countdown series.
Countdown to Silverlight 3 #5: ChildWindow (Modal, Non-modal, Templated): Andrej Tozon is ahead of me on posts, and I'll catch up eventually, but in this post he is covering the ChildWindow control... very cool and needed!
Blend 3 + Silverlight 3 = Luv (video demo): Jose Fajardo has a great set of videos out walking you through what he thinks is the best to know about Expression Blend ... and from Jose, that's saying something... these are to watch!

Stay in the 'Light!

Silverlight Cream for July 01, 2009 -- #626

2009-07-01T17:55:01-05:00:00

In this Issue: Cristian Merighi, Walt Ritscher, Al Pascual, Vijay, and Faisal(2).

Shoutouts:

The Mashooo folks have the winning entries up for their S Prize contest. I'd like to thank them for the honor of participating as a judge. I didn't look at any of the games prior to going through the 10 finalists because I didn't want to be swayed. Since I was a judge I won't comment on the winners, but I will say I'm not disappointed :) Check them out ... the other 7 are all winners also! Mashooo S Prize Silverlight Games Contest

Danijel Stulic sent me a link to this awesome school timetable software completely done in Silverlight: School timetabling just got better using Silverlight. I did a trial, and it looks and works great. I hope you get time to blog about this, and if you do, let me know!

From SilverlightCream.com:

Silverlight and F# happily ever after: I've blogged about Cristian Merighi's work before... but have you looked at his blog? ... I love the Silverlight on there! In this post he talks about the F# templates that are available (and links), and then tackles building a custom IValueConverter that translates a PointCollection into the area of the relevant generic Polygon.
Arranging Shapes in a Circle with Expression Blend – Part 2: Walt Ritscher has part 2 of his great Expression Blend tutorial up on creating spinning thingies to let your users know your app is busy, or at least give them something fun to look at if it locks up :)
Silverlight 2.0 Authentication Services: Al Pascual demonstrates creating a Silverlight Authentication Service in Sl2, so that Silverlight will use the authentication cookie.
Unit Testing Business Logic in .NET RIA Services: Vijay uses the .NET RIA Services walkthrough application and demonstrates using a repository to make it more Unit Testing friendly.
Creating NikeClone With Silverlight Part-1: Faisal took aim at the original Nike Site and decided to take a shot at doing it in Silverlight ... and it looks great to me! ... very cool Blend tutorial along the way! and by the time I saw the first one, part 2 was up: Creating NikeClone With Silverlight Part-2

Stay in the 'Light!

Sure Cure for the Blahs: MVP Re-Award!

2009-07-01T11:09:56-05:00:00

First congratulations to everyone else that got awarded or re-awarded today!

The only one I'm aware of so far is John Stockton -- a first-time awardee in Silverlight -- very cool John! I'm sure Twitter is alive with all the info, but I can't get to it from here.

Just after getting to work, I got my re-award email and it made the muggy gray day here in Phoenix much brighter :)

Thanks to everyone involved... I know it's a tough thankless job sifting through all the information and there are so many people to choose from. I'm proud and humbled at the same time (is that possible??).

Thanks a bunch to my lead, Suzanna Moran-- a tireless lady that is always watching out for all of us.

And thanks to all of you that are involved with either developing Silverlight or making it what it is by developing using Silverlight.

As always

Stay in the 'Light!

Silverlight Cream for June 30, 2009 -- #625

2009-06-30T18:26:23-05:00:00

In this Issue: Davide Zordan, Erik Mork(2), Walt Ritscher, Peter Bromberg, and Lee.

Shoutouts:

Are you up for showing off?? Tim Heuer has announced a Silverlight Coding Competition – win USD $10,000! ... and check that list of judges... wow :)

Remember Chris Klug's FlickR ViewR? Well, check out the problems he had putting it on the blog: And then Firefox does it differently…reloading the Silverlight control when the css changes….

From SilverlightCream.com:

Multi Touch enabling your WPF application: Yeah I know this is WPF, but it's just cool, check out Davide Zordan's Windows 7 RC multi-touch app... and check out the link to David Kelley's Silverlight version too!
Prism’s Event Aggregator: In a continuation of the interviews with the P&P team members, Erik Mork and Shawn discuss Eventing in Prism this time.
Eventing in Prism - Loosely Coupled Talking: At the same time as the PodCast above, Erik Mork has pushed out another of his very cool tutorial videos and this one is on Eventing in Prism.
Arranging Shapes in Circle with Expression Blend – Part One: Walt Ritscher has put up an outstanding tutorial on using Blend to put your own spin (heh) on a graphic ... this is really great Walt!!
Silverlight 3 Polling Duplex Chat and Realtime Stock Updates: In a continuation on his previous post, Peter Bromberg extends into pushing data to subscribers using Silverlight 3 Duplex Polling... lots of code for us to sift through :)
Hilighting entire row in datagrid: Ever wanted to NOT highlight a row in a datagrid if it's readonly? Lee shows you how easy it is!

Stay in the 'Light!

Silverlight Cream for June 29, 2009 -- #624

2009-06-30T00:05:08-05:00:00

In this Issue: Andrej Tozon(2, 3), Jonathan van de Veen, Corey Schuman, and Al Pascual.

Shoutouts:

I'm with Jesse on this one: So Much Is Happening The Silence Is Deafening!

Remember when Mike Snow said he was writing a book on Silverlight Game Programming? Have you noticed his blog has slowed down? Well... the book is NOW: Game Programming with Silverlight.

Shawn Wildermuth announces that My Sillveright-Prism Article is Live! -- in MSDN Magazine... very cool, Shawn!

What a weekend... essentially 3-1/2 days trying to finish off my part of the book. Hopefully I've got that behind me now :)

From SilverlightCream.com:

Countdown to Silverlight 3 #3: Merged resource dictionaries: Andrej Tozon's third post in the series is on Merged Dictionaries.
Countdown to Silverlight 3 #2: Setting styles: Andrej Tozon's second in the SL3 series is on Silverlight 3 Styles and how in SL3 we aren't held down to just setting something once or not being able to inherit.
Countdown to Silverlight 3 #1: Out of Browser applications: Andrej Tozon is getting together some Silverlight 3 articles in preparation for it's release. This first is on the Out Of Browser experience.
Adventures while building a Silverlight Enterprise application part #14: Jonathan van de Veen can't show code but discusses a situation where he was required that various modules have a different look and even different features based on where they were used... interesting.
YouTube video in Silverlight 3: Corey Schuman did a proof of concept app displaying YouTube video in Silverlight 3 by inserting the URL of the video into the source of a MediaElement.
Problems with the clientaccesspolicy.xml for Silverlight access to HTTPS: Al Pascual expresses some frustration along with the solution to his clientaccesspolicy problems and asks if anyone has any thoughts.

Stay in the 'Light!

Silverlight Cream for June 26, 2009 -- #623

2009-06-26T10:25:25-05:00:00

In this Issue: Erik Mork, Colin Eberhardt, Nigel Sampson, and Alex Golesh.

Shoutouts:

Pavan Podila has a post up about a great-looking TreeMap he's done. He may post source later, I'll watch for it. Meanwhile read the post and watch the video. A SilverLight TreeMap control

From SilverlightCream.com:

Commanding in Prism: Erik Mork interviews P&P members Bob Brumfield and David Hill along with Shawn Wildermuth all discussing Commanding in Prism ... another great Prism Podcast Erik!
Silverlight MultiBindings, How to attached multiple bindings to a single property: I first looked at this and thought so... but oh... Colin Eberhardt has the aggregation of two bound properties not on the sample as a string but as a bound aggregate of the two elements already bound below ... now my head hurts:)... very cool, Colin!
A Mouse Wheel Blend Behavior: Wow... Nigel Sampson isn't talking about the 'behaviour' of the MouseWheel... he's talking 'Behaviors'. Nigel brought the mousewheel into Blend as a Behaviour and you can drag it onto your control to get mousewheel support... dang that's cool :)
Quick Tip: LINQ & Data Binding notifications: Alex Golesh gives us a quick tip on how to get around the fact that our LINQ query doesn't give any notification of collection changes.

Stay in the 'Light!

Phoenix Silverlight User Group Meeting July 1

2009-06-26T09:25:16-05:00:00

The next regularly scheduled meeting of the Phoenix Silverlight User Group will be next Wednesday, July 1 at 6pm at Interface Technical Training in downtown Phoenix (Central and Thomas, NW corner).

Steele Price will follow-up last month's excellent presentation with a full LOB presentation this time around.

He showed us a little of this last time, but come prepared to learn all about it on Wednesday.

Hope to see you there!

Phoenix Silverlight User Group

Silverlight Cream for June 25, 2009 -- #622

2009-06-25T10:26:57-05:00:00

In this Issue: Corey Schuman, and Pete Brown.

Shoutouts:

Jonathan van de Veen is working on a new project: The birth of CodeEmbed4Web. I'm looking forward to the post saying it's ready :)

From SilverlightCream.com:

ToggleButton Command for Prism: Are you working with Prism and chafing that you don't have Checked and Unchecked commands for a ToggleButton? Well, Corey Schuman has resolved that and along the way gives us insight into how to perform that magic, along with all the code.
From Silverlight in Action 2nd Edition: UI Element Binding: Pete Brown shares an excerpt from "Silverlight in Action 2nd Edition" ... the excerpt being on UI element binding. This resolves a problem I've found myself faced with many times both on the desktop and in web apps... good stuff, Pete!

Stay in the 'Light!

Silverlight Cream for June 24, 2009 -- #621

2009-06-24T07:40:53-05:00:00

In this Issue: Erik Mork, Fons Sonnemans, Ian Blackburn, Lee, and Timmy Kokke.

From SilverlightCream.com:

Commanding and Adding Commands in Prism: Erik Mork has his latest Prism Hypervideo up ... this one is on Commands and commanding ... great job on all these, Erik!
ImageSlider in Silverlight 2.0: Fons Sonnemans came across a blog of cool JQuery tutorials and decided to give one of them a shot in Silverlight ... looks like he stuck the dismount to me ... keep them coming, Fons!
Pushing Data From the Server to Silverlight 3 using a Duplex Wcf Service: Ian Blackburn took on a challenge after a class and put together a Duplex WCF service that pushes data to the Silverlight 3B application. This is actually a great tutorial on the subject, thanks Ian!
Resizing Childwindow: Lee has a good example of a way to resize a ChildWindow. I think the idea is there but it didn't exactly stay with my mouse... maybe it was my system (probably!)
SilverBullet #4 – System.Windows.ApplicationIdentity: Timmy Kokke explains the ApplicationIdentity class that provides all the info to the Out Of Browser application.

Stay in the 'Light!

Silverlight Cream for June 23, 2009 -- #620

2009-06-23T08:40:15-05:00:00

In this Issue: Erno de Weerd, Colin Eberhardt, Thanigainathan Siranjeevi, Stefan Olson(2), Dan Wahlin, Chris Klug, and Alex Golesh.

Shoutouts:

Tim Greenfield has entered the NewCloudApp Windows Azure contest with a Silverlight app and asks us to Look what Silverlight can do... for now he has his submittal, a cool jigsaw puzzle, but he promises to write all about it.

From SilverlightCream.com:

Silverlight, Windows Live Writer and WordPress: Erno de Weerd blogged this and it's been picked up by others. If you're blogging on WordPress, now you can embed your Silverlight... of course my client has WordPress blocked, but that's not your problem :)
Exposing Bindings as Properties of a Control: Colin Eberhardt has an example up using a control he creates to display Brownian motion of 50 objects. This end-to-end example should give you a good understanding of exposing Bindings as properties and then using them.
Silverlight 3 with Bing Translator Services: Thanigainathan Siranjeevi shows a quick-up app using the Bing API to get translation running in an application. I didn't know Bing did that!
Updates to custom routing using the Uri Mapper in Silverlight 3: In this update to Stefan Olson's custom routing he explains an exception if the navigation is cancelled and how changing the way the cancellation is done will resolve the problem.
Displaying a login dialog based on page attributes in Silverlight 3: Stefan Olson fills in some blanks for us in the Navigation architecture by providing and describing an AuthenticationUriMapper based on the Custom URI Mapper he's been describing in other posts.
Control-Oriented Vs. Data-Oriented Programming in Silverlight: Dan Wahlin takes a shot at helping us shift our paradigm to thinking about data rather than controls. It's the binding, man :)
flickrVIEWR – A flickr viewer in Silverlight – Part 3: Chris Klug has part 3 of his flickrViewR up and posted and this one ties it all together. Through the power of MVVM he has no code in the CodeBehind, so if you're trying to wrap your head around it, this is a good real-world example.
Silverlight 3 Quick Tip #10: Styling Improvements: Alex Golesh quickly demonstrates the enhancements to Styles in SL3B that have the rest of us smiling, such as Based On which lets us inherit styles... what a relief :)

Stay in the 'Light!

Silverlight Cream for June 21, 2009 -- #619

2009-06-22T00:03:12-05:00:00

In this Issue: Brian Genisio, Cristian Merighi, Terence Tsang, Gavin Wignall, and Alex Golesh(2),

Shoutouts:

The Expression Blend and Design blog announced Deep Zoom Composer - June 2009 Preview!

Unni posted a set of links on Blend 3 Databinding

From SilverlightCream.com:

Adventures in MVVM -- Ball of Mud vs MVVM: Brian Genisio discusses a demo he's doing of the contrast between a messy untested app and a good componentized one all of which is a twitter search app in WPF.
Parametric Shader Effect in Silverlight 3 Beta1: Cristian Merighi takes us step-by-step through writing a .fx file using HLSL, compiles it into a .ps file, and then uses it as a resource, and his demo works great!
6 New Silverlight Image Rotators: Terence Tsang has added to his collection of image rotators and has reworked the others to be easily resued via xaml .. very cool!
Shadow effect using 3D projection in Silverlight 3: Gavin Wignall does a very cool 3D projection on a ball image where the light and shadow follow the mouse.
Silverlight 3 Quick Tip #8: Caret Brush: Alex Golesh demonstrates issues with alternative UI and how you need to control the caret also... gradient caret anyone ?
Silverlight 3 Quick Tip #9: DataBinding with Validation: In this tip Alex Golesh quickly shows us Databinding with validation using a ListBox.

Stay in the 'Light!

Silverlight Cream for June 19, 2009 - 2 -- #618

2009-06-19T18:59:09-05:00:00

In this Issue: Ian T. Lackey, and Al Pascual.

Shoutouts:

Don't forget it is Time to rate the Silverlight games on the Mashooo S Prize

From SilverlightCream.com:

DotNetNuke Silverlight Chat v2 – Gravatar Support: Ian T. Lackey approaches adding Gravatar support to a Silverlight application with a perspective of if it's not there, make it so... read his code and comments.
IIS Security Settings for Silverlight 2.0: Al Pascual walks us through some of the problems we might encounter with Silverlight accessing files on servers. He then follows with a bunch of good advice on how to set things up properly.

Stay in the 'Light!

Silverlight Cream for June 19, 2009 -- #617

2009-06-19T08:23:20-05:00:00

In this Issue: Erik Mork, Nigel Sampson, Jonathan van de Veen, Steve Strong, and Kevin Dockx.

From SilverlightCream.com:

Which comes first the View or the ViewModel?: Erik Mork and Shawn Wildermuth attempt to unravel the chicken/egg debate as it relates to MVVM... what, you didn't think Shawn had an opinion on that one ?? :)
Attaching Silverlight 3 Behaviors in C#: If you're not familiar with Microsoft.Expression.Interactivity.Interaction or dealing with Attached Behaviors in your C#, then Nigel Sampson has some good information for you.
Adventures while building a Silverlight Enterprise application part #13: Jonathan van de Veen explores the good and bad of his decision to use EF in the application he's building. Good insight into how he got to this point and hopefully help us as well.
Virtual Earth Silverlight Control Part 3: Locating Best Buy Stores: Steve Strong has his latest Silverlight/Virtual Earth episode up and this time he's using the BestBuy Remix service. Steve gives you all the info you need and even has a video up explaining it.
Working with RIA Services #1: General Setup & Concepts: Kevin Dockx is starting a series of tutorials on .NET RIA Services and in this first one he's showing how to just get started using the AdventureWorks database.

Stay in the 'Light!

Silverlight Cream for June 17, 2009 -- #616

2009-06-17T19:02:39-05:00:00

In this Issue: Alex Golesh, Chris Klug(2), Gavin Wignall, Peter Bromberg, and Al Pascual.

Shoutouts:

Shawn Wildermuth is on Deep Fried Bytes: Listen to me on Deep Fried Bytes!... listen to him discuss OSLO and DSLs in general.

Updated with Chris Klug's real last name... sorry Chris!

From SilverlightCream.com:

Silverlight 2 applications: a day after Silverlight 3 release: Alex Golesh puts himself in the position of being 1 day after the release of Silverlight 3 and what we all need to do with out code to make it work... good advice, and there's still a lot of 1.1 code broken out there :)
flickrVIEWR – A flickr viewer in Silverlight – Part 1: Chris Klug took on a task of helping get pictures to a blog quicker by utilizing Silverlight and Flickr with a touch of MVVM along the way. Part 2 is here: flickrVIEWR – A flickr viewer in Silverlight – Part 2
Creating a 3D cube with images in Silverlight 3: Gavin Wignall followed his 3D Carousel with a 3D rotating cube... and it works just great! Of course he has all the code as well, thanks Gavin!
A Silverlight application that displays the TwitterCounter user's stats and chart.: Peter Bromberg decided to take a shot at his own version of twittercounter.com using Silverlight 3B and the Silverlight Chart control... end-to-end solution and code... cool!
Class to handle HTTPS and non HTTP services: Al Pascual continued working on the problem he was having yesterday and decided it had less to do with seeing the request and more to do with the connection itself... and he's shared his class that takes care of it.

Stay in the 'Light!