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by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 12/19/2011 7:26:46 PM
There are several different patterns that can be used in JavaScript to structure code and make it more re-useable, more maintainable, and less subject to naming collisions. Patterns like the Revealing Module Pattern, Prototype Pattern, Revealing Prototype Pattern, and others can be used to structure code and avoid what I call “function spaghetti code”. One of my favorite features offered by both the Prototype and the Revealing Prototype patterns is the extensibility they provide. They’re quite f ...
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by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 12/13/2011 4:26:00 AM
I just released a new course for Pluralsight titled Structuring JavaScript Code in HTML5 Applications that covers different techniques, strategies, and patterns that can be used when working with JavaScript to encapsulate code, provide better re-use, simplify maintenance, and take variables and functions out of the global scope. The overall goal of the course is to show developers how to convert what I call “Function Spaghetti Code” into more encapsulated and modular code. The concepts covered ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 11/3/2011 6:35:30 AM
I had a great time at DevConnections Las Vegas this year and really enjoyed hanging out with existing friends as well as making some new friends. Thanks to everyone who attended my workshop and sessions. The slides from the different sessions are available to download below (click an image). For more information about onsite or online training, mentoring and consulting solutions for HTML5, jQuery, .NET, SharePoint or Silverlight please visit http://www.thew ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 11/3/2011 4:31:02 AM
I had the opportunity to present at the HTML5 Web Camp event in Phoenix, Arizona last month with Michael Palermo (one of my favorite speakers) and the recording of the event is now available online. Thanks to Scott Cate and the EventDay staff for taking time to record, index, and publish the event – they did an awesome job. I discussed using the HTML5 canvas along with JavaScript patterns to make your code more reusable and easier to maintain. Click the image below to watch the presentation. & ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 10/27/2011 2:09:53 AM
I had an opportunity to talk with Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell (the .NET Rocks guys) on their new show called The Tablet Show. It’s always fun talking with them since there’s never a boring moment or lull in the conversation. In this episode we talk about the new WinRT framework used to build Metro apps in Windows 8, the future of Silverlight, the drama some developers seem to love, and a bunch of other topics related to development including why Microsoft is moving toward the Start Screen ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 10/23/2011 6:01:05 PM
This is the fourth post in a series covering new line of business features in Silverlight 5. Implicit Data Templates Ancestor RelativeSource Binding Debugging Bindings in XAML Elevated Trust Enhancements Using pInvoke Running with Elevated Trust In-Browser Creating Multiple Windows in Out-of-Browser Applications Vector Printing Custom Markup Extensions In this post I’ll provide an overview of how pInvoke can be used in Silverlight 5 appli ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 10/17/2011 1:12:59 AM
John Papa and I just sent out a call for abstracts for the upcoming Spring 2012 DevConnections conference to be held in Las Vegas, NV. If you’re interested in presenting on client-side development topics such as HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, jQuery (or another JavaScript library), Silverlight 5, Windows 8 Metro style app development, or other related topics please submit session ideas. If you know someone else who may be interested, please forward the information. Here’s the official announcement tha ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 10/15/2011 3:25:02 PM
This is the third post in a series covering new line of business features in Silverlight 5. Implicit Data Templates Ancestor RelativeSource Binding Debugging Bindings in XAML Elevated Trust Enhancements Using pInvoke Running with Elevated Trust In-Browser Creating Multiple Windows in Out-of-Browser Applications Vector Printing Custom Markup Extensions In this post I’ll provide an overview of how data binding statements can be debugged di ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 10/7/2011 5:22:02 PM
This is the second post in a series covering new line of business features in Silverlight 5. Implicit Data Templates Ancestor RelativeSource Binding Debugging Bindings in XAML Elevated Trust Enhancements Using pInvoke Running with Elevated Trust In-Browser Creating Multiple Windows in Out-of-Browser Applications Vector Printing Custom Markup Extensions In this post I’ll provide an overview of the new ancestor relativesource binding fu ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 10/6/2011 11:58:45 PM
Silverlight 5 has a a lot of new features that are attractive to marketing and media application developers as well as Line of Business (LOB) developers. My company focuses on building LOB applications for customers so some of the new features related to that area of development really stood out to me. Over the next few weeks I’ll blog about a few of my personal favorites including: Implicit Data Templates Ancestor RelativeSource Binding Debugging Bindings in XAML Elevated Trust Enh ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 9/23/2011 9:20:28 PM
I’m working with a team on a new customer project that uses Entity Framework Code First on the backend for CRUD operations. It’s been a nice ORM to work with since it really simplifies the process of mapping relational objects to CLR objects and lets you do it through fluent mappings. Working with Plain Old CLR Objects (POCOs) is something I’ve always liked since they keep the code base super clean and shiny. I can’t say that I really miss the .edmx files that I used previously with the database ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 9/18/2011 2:54:00 AM
I don’t consider myself a “fanboy” of any particular company even though my consulting and training business focuses on Microsoft technologies. A "fanboy" is someone that sides with a particular company regardless of how good or bad something is. I go with what I feel is best regardless of company. The .NET framework is my preference for developing Web and desktop applications and Visual Studio is untouchable as an integrated development environment in my opinion. iPad is my preference for a ta ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 9/3/2011 7:27:48 AM
It’s challenging to keep up with all of the new technologies coming out so I’m really looking forward to the upcoming DevConnections conference in Las Vegas (Oct. 31 – Nov 3). It’s fun to go to a conference where I can jump into an ASP.NET MVC or jQuery session, listen to some SharePoint, Silverlight or Azure sessions, or as a bonus attend sessions on HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript patterns. It’s nice to have all of those choices at one conference. While at DevConnections I’ll be giving a full-d ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 8/30/2011 9:03:33 PM
Awhile back I was working on an ASP.NET MVC 3 project that required a lot of “standard” validation to be performed (required fields, validate lengths, some regular expression validation here and there, data type checks, etc.). Due to the number of classes involved I decided to go with the data annotations approach to keep things nice and tidy (some people love this, some people hate it – such is life :-)). As I dug more into the project I realized it was a fairly monumental task to create a meta ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 8/16/2011 4:03:00 AM
As Web technologies continue to evolve developers are required to learn new technologies in order to build successful web-based applications that stand above the crowd. This can be a challenging proposition especially for developers moving from desktop or Rich Internet Application (RIA) development frameworks. To help developers learn the latest HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript technologies, we built a sample application for demonstration at Microsoft’s MIX 11 conference called “Account at a Glance” ( ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 5/19/2011 8:57:30 PM
I had the opportunity to give a talk at TechEd 2011 about integrating security roles, user names, etc. into Silverlight applications which is always a fun experience. Because Silverlight runs in a sandbox and doesn’t have direct access to the IPrincipal or IIdentity objects it can be challenging to work with security when using WCF services or REST APIs (WCF RIA Services actually makes it pretty easy though). In this talk I discuss different options for securing a Silverlight application, disc ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 4/15/2011 12:42:49 AM
Security is a key component of applications and something that developers often struggle with to get right. How do you authenticate a user? How do you integrate roles and use them to show or hide different parts of a screen? These and other questions commonly come up as I talk with developers working on ASP.NET and Silverlight applications. I was recently presenting a workshop on Silverlight at the DevConnections conference in Orlando and had a question from the audience on how I handle securi ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 2/7/2011 7:00:35 AM
Many applications have the need to stay in-sync with data provided by a service. Although web applications typically rely on standard polling techniques to check if data has changed, Silverlight provides several interesting options for keeping an application in-sync that rely on server “push” technologies. A few years back I wrote several blog posts covering different “push” technologies available in Silverlight that rely on sockets or HTTP Polling Duplex. We recently had a project that looked l ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 1/24/2011 4:10:46 AM
In this post I'm going to walk through additional features that have been added to the album viewer application that I wrote about in a previous post. Topics that I’ll cover include using the Pivot control, navigating between screens using the NavigationService class and leveraging data binding along with the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern. The image below shows the application discussed in my last post on the topic. The user can search for albums by artist and view a carousel containing al ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 1/10/2011 7:25:00 AM
I have the opportunity to teach a lot of people about Silverlight (among other technologies) and one of the topics that definitely confuses people initially is the concept of dependency properties. I confess that when I first heard about them my initial thought was “Why do we need a specialized type of property?” While you can certainly use standard CLR properties in Silverlight applications, Silverlight relies heavily on dependency properties for just about everything it does behind the scenes. ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 12/21/2010 2:45:30 AM
The DomainContext available with WCF RIA Services provides a lot of functionality that can help track object state and handle making calls from a Silverlight client to a DomainService. One of the questions I get quite often in our Silverlight training classes (and see often in various forums and other areas) is how the DomainContext can be abstracted out of ViewModel classes when using the MVVM pattern in Silverlight applications. It’s not something that’s super obvious at first especially if yo ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 12/11/2010 8:56:58 PM
I love working with Web technologies and am looking forward to the new functionality that HTML5 will ultimately bring to the table (some of which can be used today). Having been through the div versus layer battle back in the IE4 and Netscape 4 days I think we’re headed down that road again as a result of browsers implementing features differently. I’ve been spending a lot of time researching and playing around with HTML5 samples and features (mainly because we’re already seeing demand for train ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 12/6/2010 12:12:36 AM
I had a great time attending and speaking at the Silverlight Firestarter event up in Redmond on December 2, 2010. In addition to getting a chance to hang out with a lot of cool people from Microsoft such as Scott Guthrie, John Papa, Tim Heuer, Brian Goldfarb, John Allwright, David Pugmire, Jesse Liberty, Jeff Handley, Yavor Georgiev, Jossef Goldberg, Mike Cook and many others, I also had a chance to chat with a lot of people attending the event and hear about what projects they’re working on w ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 11/14/2010 6:20:48 PM
I’m amazed at how quickly Windows Phone 7 applications can be developed. It’s really nice to leverage existing skills and apply them directly to phone development. In my previous post I provided a high-level look at what Windows Phone 7 has to offer and showed a few code samples to help get started. In this post I’m going to walk through the process of migrating an existing Silverlight application from Silverlight to Windows Phone 7. It’s an app that I built back in the WPF/e days (the very firs ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 11/14/2010 4:32:13 PM
Mobile phone development has exploded over the past few years and with the release of Windows Phone 7 there's a new mobile platform available that offers an extremely productive way to build applications and games. With Windows Phone 7 you can build Silverlight or XNA applications and take advantage of languages and tools you already know. In fact, if you're already familiar with Silverlight then you can instantly be productive building Windows Phone 7 applications since the same overall concept ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 11/13/2010 1:42:09 AM
Back in April of 2008 Spike Xavier and I got together and wrote a song just for fun that we titled (lamely enough), “Silverlight – The Song”. With all this “Silverlight is Dying” talk going around now days we decided to re-release the song in honor of the fact that Silverlight isn’t actually dying. Don’t believe me? Check out the Silverlight Firestarter event above if you want to hear about Microsoft’s future plans for Silverlight. Note: With all the noise around Silverlight lately I’ve hear ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 11/10/2010 6:27:58 PM
I’ve been playing with IE9 quite a bit lately and really like what I’m seeing in the browser. It’s fast, standards compliant (from what I’ve seen so far anyway), sleek and leaves a lot of room to display web content. However, I’ve been running into problems with “page not found” errors when trying to load ASP.NET or Silverlight web pages from Visual Studio 2010. I’ve also seen calls to web services fail sporadically when the calls are made directly from the browser (AJAX or Silverlight). I do ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 11/1/2010 7:35:00 AM
Disclaimer: My company does a lot of Silverlight consulting and training (among several other technologies including jQuery, ASP.NET and SharePoint) so I definitely have a stake in Silverlight. Update: Microsoft has made several statements about the future of Silverlight since I wrote this post which can all be summed up as “it’s not going away”. Read them at the following URLs: Scott Guthrie’s Blog Post on Silverlight Bob Muglia’s Statement on Silverlight I'm really ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 10/18/2010 4:51:14 PM
If you’re interested in getting started with Silverlight development or enhancing your existing skills check out the upcoming Silverlight Firestarter event running December 2, 2010. The event can be attended live in Redmond, WA or viewed online (both for free). Sign-up for the event here. I’m excited about the opportunity to speak at the event along with Scott Guthrie, John Papa, Tim Heuer, Jesse Liberty, Jaime Rodriguez, Yavor Georgiev and others. What is the Silverlight Firestarter? ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 10/1/2010 12:22:34 AM
Silverlight continues to grow in popularity as companies realize the different ways it can be used to build both consumer and enterprise applications. If you're looking to get started with Silverlight or simply want to enhance your existing skills we've planned some great sessions at Silverlight Connections Las Vegas (November 1-4, 2010). Whether you're starting from scratch or already experienced and looking to take your skills to the next level, there is definitely a session for you. Here's ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 9/15/2010 8:47:47 PM
I had the opportunity to give an online presentation today (download it here) for the LinkedIn .NET User Group (LIDNUG) about how the MVVM pattern can be integrated into Silverlight applications. Thanks to everyone who attended! MVVM is one of those topics that I really enjoy talking about since we use it everyday at my company with the applications we’re building for customers. It’s one of those patterns that can really promote code re-use, enhance testability and minimize maintenance once you ...
by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 9/10/2010 8:33:46 AM
Developing Silverlight applications has always been something I've enjoyed. I'm a big fan of the data binding engine that the framework provides and like the flexibility that XAML provides for building user interfaces. With all of the benefits Silverlight provides, the process of developing Silverlight applications hasn't always been as smooth as it could be especially if you relied solely on Visual Studio in the past. Silverlight 2 provided a read-only Visual Studio designer that didn't provide ...
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 ...
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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