December 2007 Entries

Silverlight 2.0: Project template for self-resizing applications (update)

An observant reader gave me a better way to automatically resize a Silverlight application. The way I published in my last post was inspired from Silverlight 1.0, where JavaScript is obviously needed to do the job. However, in 2.0, you can register for a CLR event and avoid the multiple conversions between JavaScript and C#. These conversions take time and it's better to avoid them when possible. I modified the Project Template accordingly. You can download the updated version here, and follow the ......
Print | posted on Posted On Wednesday, December 26, 2007 8:38 AM | Comments (2)

Silverlight 2.0: Project template for self-resizing applications

Update: I posted an updated version which doesn't use JavaScript. See here. One of the first things I often do when I create a new Silverlight application is to make it self resizing. This is not very difficult, because thanks to the goodness of WPF (of which Silverlight is a subset), resizing a scene only involves one simple operation: a ScaleTransform. This transform applies to a panel (in this case the top Canvas) and to all its children. Using a ScaleTransform, all the distances (dimensions, ......
Print | posted on Posted On Sunday, December 23, 2007 7:06 AM | Comments (12)

Blend: New version with complete Style properties

Blend December CTP was released a short time ago. Included in this new version is one change that I'd been requesting from Microsoft, and I am really happy they made it: You can now select every properties of a given element when you edit them in a style. In the previous version, some properties were hidden, for some reason, and you could only set them using the XAML editor. At least Width and Height were not visible in the properties pane, and maybe more. In the December CTP, this small defect is ......
Print | posted on Posted On Saturday, December 22, 2007 12:18 PM | Comments (0)

Back in Switzerland after a WPF design week

This time it's for good: I am back in Switzerland and I am not flying again before next year. Which is in 2 weeks. :-) The week has been amazing. While the team continued developing UI in Switzerland, I went to coach the graphics designers in Princeton. In a week, we didn't "only" create XAML assets, but we also discussed the overall design and we are starting to have a very good idea of how the application is going tolook like eventually. It's so great to be able to reproduce the static screens ......
Print | posted on Posted On Friday, December 21, 2007 7:55 AM | Comments (0)

LINQ training and trip to Princeton, NJ, USA and Swiss elections

LINQ hands-on lab at Microsoft Switzerland Yesterday, a colleague and I attended a free LINQ hands-on lab given by Microsoft Switzerland in their offices of Wallisellen near Zurich. It was really good. I have seen LINQ in action a few times this year (actually, I had it demonstrated by no less than Anders Hejlsberg himself on one occasion, and Scott Guthrie on the other) but I had never tried writing queries myself. It was a good, 4 hours occasion to try it by myself. Needless to say, I was really ......
Print | posted on Posted On Wednesday, December 12, 2007 11:32 PM | Comments (0)

WPF: MCTS Beta exam

One neat thing when you're a MVP (for 3 more weeks!) is that you get a lot of invitations to all kind of events. So when I got an invite to take the MCTS exam (beta) for WPF 3.5, I though I should try it, even though it's my Most Busy December Ever. It's not easy preparing for a Beta exam, because there are no courses, no books, no test exams available, so you're pretty much left to yourself. Thankfully, I found a list of subjects online, and after marking those of them which I was really not feeling ......
Print | posted on Posted On Friday, December 7, 2007 4:27 AM | Comments (7)

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