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by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 8/15/2010 8:55:53 PM
Data validation is an important part of any application. If you've written code to validate data in Silverlight applications prior to the release of Silverlight 4, you've probably discovered that there isn't a great way to ensure that data is entered correctly and errors displayed properly by controls. The typical technique used for validating data was to throw exceptions within property setter blocks as data was found to be invalid. Controls bound to a property could be notified of a data valid ...
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by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 8/6/2010 10:35:50 PM
I’ve had the opportunity to give a lot of presentations on the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) lately both publicly and internally for companies and wanted to put together a post that covers some of the frequent questions I get on commanding. MVVM relies on 4 main pillars of technology including Silverlight data binding, ViewModel classes, messaging and commanding. Although Silverlight 4 provides some built-in support for commanding, I’ve found that a lot of people new to MVVM want more detail ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 6/8/2010 7:04:00 PM
There's rarely a boring day working in the world of software development. Part of the fun associated with being a developer is that change is guaranteed and the more you learn about a particular technology the more you realize there's always a different or better way to perform a task. I've had the opportunity to work on several different real-world Silverlight Line of Business (LOB) applications over the past few years and wanted to put together a list of some of the key things I've learned as ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 5/18/2010 2:30:59 AM
If you haven’t already heard the news, the final release of the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2010 have been released! That’s great news for Silverlight developers and to top it off the crew up at Microsoft even snuck in a few new features including intellisense for styles (a big deal in my opinion) and the ability to easily manipulate Grid rows and columns. One of the most time consuming (and boring) tasks experienced by developers is also covered with the new “Go To Value Definitio ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 5/11/2010 3:05:16 AM
Looking for a way to display HTML content within a Silverlight application? If you haven’t tried doing that before it can be challenging at first until you know a few tricks of the trade. Being able to display HTML is especially handy when you’re required to display RSS feeds (with embedded HTML), SQL Server Reporting Services reports, PDF files (not actually HTML – but the techniques discussed will work), or other HTML content. In this post I'll discuss three options for displaying ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 5/6/2010 6:00:52 AM
Silverlight 4 has a lot of great features that can be used to build consumer and Line of Business (LOB) applications. Although Webcam support, RichTextBox, MEF, WebBrowser and other new features are pretty exciting, I’m actually enjoying some of the more simple features that have been added such as text trimming, built-in wheel scrolling with ScrollViewer and data binding enhancements such as StringFormat. In this post I’ll give a quick introduction to a simple yet productive feature called text ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 5/3/2010 7:53:34 PM
If you’re building Silverlight applications that consume data then you’re probably making calls to Web Services. We’ve been successfully using WCF along with Silverlight for several client Line of Business (LOB) applications and passing a lot of data back and forth. Due to the pain involved with updating the ServiceReferences.ClientConfig file generated by a Silverlight service proxy (see Tim Heuer’s post on that subject to see different ways to deal with it) we’ve been using our own technique t ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 4/19/2010 5:23:00 AM
We are putting out a call for abstracts to present at the Fall 2010 Silverlight Connections conference in Las Vegas, Nov 1-4, 2010. The due date for submissions is April 26, 2010. For submitting sessions, please use this URL: http://www.deeptraining.com/devconnections/abstracts Please keep the abstracts under 200 words each and in one paragraph. No bulleted items and line breaks, and please use a spell-checker. Do not email abstracts, you need to use the web-based tool to submit them. Plea ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 4/19/2010 12:20:31 AM
I had a great time at the DevConnections conference in Las Vegas this year where Visual Studio 2010 and Silverlight 4 were launched. While at the conference I had the opportunity to give a full-day Silverlight workshop as well as 4 different talks and met a lot of people developing applications in Silverlight. I also had a chance to appear on a live broadcast of Channel 9 with John Papa, Ward Bell and Shawn Wildermuth, record a video with Rick Strahl covering jQuery versus Silverlight and rec ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 3/15/2010 11:31:54 PM
Silverlight provides a flexible animation engine that can be used to transform and manipulate objects in a timeline. While you can do nearly anything you’d like to objects using Storyboards things get a little tricky when you want to synchronize storyboards with audio or video files. There are several different approaches that can be taken to keep things in sync. In my talk at MIX10 I discussed the following options: Empty Storyboards Using Markers Animating Custom Attached ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 1/6/2010 4:54:00 AM
UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who voted! It looks like I'll be presenting on Syncing Audio, Video and Animations in Silverlight Applications at MIX10. MIX10 is right around the corner which should be a lot of fun especially if you’re interested in Web and Rich Internet Application (RIA) development. If you’re not into development then the conference is held in Las Vegas so you can still have a good time while seeing a bunch of us software developer types hang out and get all “giddy” over tec ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 1/3/2010 8:31:21 AM
The subject of Dependency Injection (DI) and Inversion of Control (IoC) containers has received a lot of attention over the last few years. Building applications that are loosely coupled has become more and more popular (and for good reason) especially in applications that have a lot of dependencies that could break over time or need to handle the addition of new modules seamlessly. From a personal standpoint I fall somewhere in the middle of the overall DI argument. I definite ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 12/9/2009 7:30:06 AM
With the increasing popularity of Silverlight as an application development framework the discussion of patterns has grown louder and louder. Fortunately the majority of developers building Silverlight applications have agreed on a pattern that fits well in the Silverlight world called Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM). The MVVM pattern allows applications to be divided up into separate layers that provide multiple benefits ranging from better code re-use to enhanced testing capabilities. This post ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 11/10/2009 8:48:00 AM
I’m in Las Vegas this week for the DevConnections conference and wanted to get the slides and code posted for the talks as I give them. This time around I’m talking about Silverlight (including a full-day workshop), the new Microsoft Ajax Library script loader and template features and RIA Services. Silverlight 3 Workshop Getting Started with Silverlight 3 Using RIA Services Using the Microsoft Ajax Library Script Loader and Template Features ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 8/27/2009 9:58:47 PM
Silverlight provides the ultimate in flexibility when it comes to styling controls. If you don’t like how something looks you can tweak the template in a tool like Expression Blend quickly and easily and get something completely different. This post is geared towards those of you who may just be getting into Silverlight. My goal is to demonstrate how easy it is to change controls using a simple example that I just went through on a client application. Being able to change a co ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 8/21/2009 6:37:53 AM
Data binding is one of my favorite features and something that I use a lot while building Silverlight applications. Silverlight makes it really easy to bind data to different controls and move data from controls back into the original bound object without having to write any C# or VB code in many cases. Here’s an example of binding a ComboBox control to an object that defines a property named Branches: <ComboBox ItemsSource="{Binding Branches}" DisplayMemb ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 8/18/2009 7:06:00 AM
I’ve been hearing a lot of people talk about how Silverlight 3 can or can’t do various things lately throughout the blogosphere and Twitter. The sad part is that some of the people giving their two cents about what Silverlight can’t do haven’t built a “real world” application so I’m not sure how their opinion carries any weight (I know because I’ve asked a few of them). Their list of cons are typically based on what they heard on Twitter or various rumors floating around. As with any ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 8/16/2009 4:16:00 AM
Silverlight has an excellent data binding engine that allows data to be bound through XAML or programmatically with code. My number one reason for using Silverlight on client projects is the data binding support. Once you get into it and understand how it works it can save a lot of time when building applications. When you’re binding data to controls there will be times when the data needs to be modified or tweaked some on the way into a control or as the data leaves a control and go ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 7/30/2009 2:24:00 AM
Expression Blend 3 is a great tool for creating Silverlight or WPF user interfaces using design time tools and controls. If you haven’t tried version 3 you’re really missing out since it adds a ton of new time-saving features. While I really enjoy working in Blend, one of the things I’ve struggled with in the past is making code work better in Blend. If you’ve ever had an error like the following you know what I mean: What’s up with the error? In short, I’m declaratively ass ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 7/14/2009 3:43:00 AM
Silverlight 3 provides a new feature called “element to element” binding that allows one element to bind to another element’s property. It’s really useful when you want to tie two objects together so that when one object changes the other changes as well. A lot of the samples I see for this new technology tend to focus on using slider controls but I just don’t have a need for sliders most of the time (although it certainly depends upon what type of application you’re building). Here’ ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 7/13/2009 12:26:00 AM
I’m currently working on a large Silverlight 3 project for a client that will ultimately have hundreds of calls from Silverlight to WCF service operations. Initially I did things the standard way which is to define a client-side class that’s used to call the WCF service using the generated service proxy (I’m basically following a service agent type of pattern). The service agent class handles instantiating the WCF proxy object and calling the appropriate operations. Here are a ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 7/10/2009 5:54:00 PM
Silverlight 3 is now officially released and available for download! It’s definitely exciting for me personally because my company has been working on a Silverlight 3 client application for the past few months and really enjoyed the new features. Here are some of the key features Silverlight 3 brings to the table: Out of Browser Support Users can run a Silverlight 3 application in the browser or run it directly from the desktop even when they’re not connected to the Intern ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 7/7/2009 4:35:00 PM
Silverlight classes rely on the INotifyPropertyChanged interface and associated PropertyChanged event it contains to ensure that data binding stays up-to-date in an application. It’s a great feature because you don’t have to worry about ensuring that changes to object properties are propagated back to controls….Silverlight handles refreshing control values for you automatically as long as the class that’s being data bound implements INotifyPropertyChanged and property set blocks raise the ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 7/6/2009 8:40:00 PM
Silverlight’s AutoCompleteBox control provides a nice way to filter a list of items as the user types into a TextBox. If you haven’t used it before you can see an example here. In a previous post I showed how you could customize AutoCompleteBox to make it look and feel more like an editable ComboBox so that users can click a down arrow to see the list of items and also filter the items by typing into the TextBox. The solution I wrote about in the previous post relied upon a ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 6/30/2009 5:17:51 PM
One of the great features Silverlight offers is the ability to customize controls by using control templates. If you don’t like how a particular control looks you can modify the template and in many cases be ready to use the new control without writing a single line of C# or VB code. I’m working on a client application that uses the AutoCompleteBox found in the Silverlight Toolkit and needed a way to change it from a regular TextBox to more of an editable ComboBox. Fortunately ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 6/20/2009 10:43:29 PM
If you build ASP.NET applications then you’re used to working with controls a lot. Nearly everything you do requires accessing control IDs. If you need to retrieve data entered by an end user you need to reference the controls that contain the data. That’s just the way we do it in ASP.NET and if you’ve been writing ASP.NET applications very long its how you’re conditioned to think. Silverlight changes the game quite a bit due to the way you can bind data to controls. Wit ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 6/11/2009 6:01:39 PM
We’re currently working on a client application that captures time sheet information and needed the ability to completely customize the look and feel of DataGrid headers. Fortunately, that’s fairly straightforward to do in Silverlight 3 (or Silverlight 2 for that matter). Nearly all of the columns being used are DataGridTemplateColumn types (although that’s not required to customize headers) and changing the header is accomplished by using the HeaderStyle property as shown next: < ...
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