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Silverlight 2 .NET CMS and Controls

"This site is dedicated to bringing high quality Silverlight 2 controls to Silverlight developers for free. There are over 20 controls and these can be downloaded for free along with example source code and tutorials,"

CHECK THESE OUT!

http://www.vectorlight.net/

Trying your Cloud with Lie Mesh

"One of my favorite Windows Live applications is Live Mesh. There hasn't been much exposure for this application because it's still in beta. For those of you who don't know what Live Mesh is, I'll give a short introduction before I get into the overview." - [More]

http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/02/28/tying-your-cloud-with-live-mesh

VSLive: Microsoft's Four Rich Client Platforms

"SAN FRANCISCO -- Third party developers and Microsoft project leaders this week showcased applications developed with Redmond's four rich client technologies: Windows Presentation Foundation, Silverlight, Windows 7 Touch and Surface.
In a keynote address at VSLive! Wednesday, Tim Huckaby kicked off a demo-heavy keynote with a 3D data visualization application developed by his company, InterKnowlogy, for a large hospital in Salt Lake City. Huckaby, one of the first MVPs and a former developer-architect at Microsoft, is an expert on Microsoft platforms. " - [More]

http://reddevnews.com/news/article.aspx?editorialsid=10646

Microsoft's glimpes of hte future

"REDMOND, Wash.--At Microsoft's TechFest, it takes a little imagination to see how the research technologies might eventually come to market. A new video from Microsoft shows in an elegant, if utopian way, what it might look like if all of those gadgets came together several years hence. Earlier on Friday, Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop showed the video in a speech at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business. " - [More]

-- Watch the video at the bottom of the article

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-10173982-75.html

SL for Business Apps

"Silverlight 2 has a lot of features that make it ideal for business applications. When you try to put it into an architecture there are some areas that really need addressing such as what patterns to use (if any), how to make it testable (if that is your sort of thing), how to make it scalable (which should certainly be on your list), how to make it modular, and how to make it loosely coupled. I'll address each of these briefly to give you an idea of what they are and how they can be accomplished:" - [More]

http://www.insideria.com/2009/02/silverlight-for-business-appli.html

Read and Dispaly RSS feed in SL DataGrid

"The SyndicationFeed class in Silverlight 2 makes it easy to parse the feed response. The process of reading a feed is as simple as reading a RSS/ATOM feed using the WebClient class, load the stream into the SyndicationFeed class and bind it to a Silverlight UI. Let us see how to read and display feed in a Silverlight control:" - [More]

http://www.dotnetcurry.com/ShowArticle.aspx?ID=252&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1

Descry - Data Visualization

"Decry Project: This is a set of four interactive visualization samples that we are releasing as a part of Project Descry. This CodePlex project makes available the source code for each visualization as well as all the source design assets for the entire project. You are welcome to download, extend, learn from and contribute to the project." [More]

http://www.1whome.cn/index.php/2009/02/27/wikipedia-richard-gere-gerbil-data-visualization-toolkit-for-silverlight-descrywpf-wonderland/

Hypervideo put to work

"Eric Mork (of Sparkling Client) has created a site with videos using Joel Neubeck & Tim Heuer's video player that makes terrific use of Hypervideo. Eric creates short teaching videos, and embeds markers in each.  When the video hits each marker, the table of contents is updated in a separate but related window,  and the code associated with what Eric is teaching is shown in a third window. The integration is a work of art." [More]

http://silverlight.net/blogs/jesseliberty/archive/2009/02/27/hypervideo-put-to-work.aspx

Live search from SL

"Tapping the full potential of RIA applications means involving remote Web services. In this article, I’ll present techniques that demonstrate how to communicate between Silverlight and Live Search using Silverlight’s services infrastructure."

http://johnpapa.net/silverlight/live-search-from-silverlight/

MVVM

"Implementing MVVM in Silverlight" - a UI perspective

"During the course of our current project we have been through a few iterations of our development process, with one goal being to find the best way for us Designers to work in Expression Blend on data driven controls.  There has been a bit of pain involved along the way and we’re yet to find an ideal solution.  As a result, I’ve been interested in the discussion taking place on blogs and Twitter on the subject of ‘Blendability’ and the proposal of the Model-View-ViewModel pattern as a route to this goal." [More]

http://www.space-scape.com/index.php/2009/02/27/implementing-mvvm-in-silverlight-ui-perspective/

"How the Presentation Model aka MVVM could look like when using Silverlight 2.0"

Five part series:

http://vincenthomedev.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/how-the-presentation-model-could-look-like-when-using-silverlight-20/

Sea of change

While I agree with what is being said it appears he is referring to WPF where is is using the WCF throughout the article instead.

But, like I said, I think there is a sea of change and it is here!

http://visualbasic.about.com/b/2009/02/26/day-3-sea-change-again.htm

Fon Size Tip for SL

"I often forget that font size is pixel-based instead of point-based when working with Silverlight. Designers using Expression Design will set the point size for Text fonts because that’s what available to them." [More]

http://alanle.com/?p=144

SL Drag and Drop Manager

"A few weeks ago, I started thinking about designing custom controls for Silverlight, controls I could re-use in various projects.  Instead of just playing around, I figured I might as well make something I could put to use.  Seeing I didn’t find a true, free drag ‘n drop control, I decided to make one myself." - [More]

http://kevindockx.blogspot.com/2009/02/silverlight-drag-and-drop-manager.html

WPF/SL control with Semi-Transparent Backgound

"Yesterday I was trying to create a control with a partially transparent background,. I am writing this because what I thought was so straight forward, was not. Here is a simple example:" - [More]

http://www.dev102.com/2009/02/26/creating-a-wpf-silverlight-control-with-a-semi-transparent-background/

SL MVVM Problem

"Well, I’m struggling with a few items with Silverlight, MVVM and databinding. After reading this good article here on msdn http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd458800.aspx. I ran through the sample, looks pretty good, etc… Few problems though…" - [More]

http://blogger.forgottenskies.com/?p=325

Create Change Events for SL Properties

"This post shows how you can create property changed event if such event is missing from base class. When you need property change event for some property defined inside a base class library you may try this trick. This is specific for Silverlight and uses template bindings." - [More]

http://www.cellbi.com/Content/UI/Views/BlogItem.aspx?page=487&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1

Windows Mobile 7 due enxt Year

http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2009/02/26/windows-mobile-7-due-next-year-screams-steve-ballmer/

http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/02/25/ballmer-windows-mobile-7-coming-in-2010

Expression Media SP 2

"Microsoft Expression Media 2 Service Pack 1 was released in October 2008, and now, just under four months later, SP2 is out via Microsoft Update and the Mac AutoUpdate." - [More]

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/02/microsoft-expression-media-2-sp2-arrives-for-windows-and-mac.ars

Detecting Design Mode in SL

"One of the things I’ve been trying to getting a better understanding of is how to make the Silverlight projects I work on more blendable:" - [More]

http://blogs.sqlxml.org/bryantlikes/archive/2009/02/25/detecting-design-mode-in-silverlight.aspx

ElementName binding in SL via Attached Behaviours

"As a relative newcomer to Silverlight I was happily greeted by the warm feeling of familiarity when I started developing. It is surprisingly easy to make the transition from WPF to Silverlight developer, with most of the core concepts being just the same. However, there are some parts of the WPF framework that you start to miss. One of those is ElementName binding. " - [More]

http://www.scottlogic.co.uk/blog/wpf/2009/02/elementname-binding-in-silverlight-via-attached-behaviours/

SL Unit Testing, Rhinomocks, Unity and Reshaper

"As most of you who’re familiar with my work know – I’m a huge supporter of the open source community. I also hold firm to a belief that the Microsoft .Net ecosystem is truly great due to community and vendors innovation. During this article I’d like for us to go over 4 open source initiatives: The Microsoft’s Silverlight Unit Testing framework, RhinoMocks , Microsoft Unity and the Silverlight unit testing plug-in for Resharper. " - [More]

http://silverlight.net/blogs/justinangel/archive/2009/02/25/silverlight-unit-testing-rhinomocks-unity-and-resharper.aspx

A New Look for Visual Studio 2010

New VS2010 look demoed, with screen shots of the new WPF interface:

"At the PDC and TechEd EMEA last year we described our new editor support built on the WPF technology in .NET Framework 4.0.  Today I’m happy to reveal the new UI for Visual Studio, also built on WPF:" [more]

http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2009/02/20/a-new-look-for-visual-studio-2010.aspx

Expanding the colur palette in Design and Blend

"Kuler is an Adobe site allowing you to set up and save your own colour palettes. So… “Surely Adobe is not producing something for Microsoft Silverlight?” I hear you say…  Well, no. But, the good guys at Codeplex have developed a set of tools called ‘Colorful‘ that allow you to get the Kuler colour palettes inside the Microsoft Expression Design and Blend interface. Once you download the tools and go through a couple of steps that I will explain shortly, you end up with an additional window inside Design and Blend that looks like this;" - [more]

http://www.silverlightbuzz.com/2009/02/25/expanding-the-colour-palette-in-expression-design-and-blend/

Calling Web Services from SL using IIS 7.0 and ARR

"So after looking at this, I immediately thought about ARR (Application Request Routing) which is a new extension for IIS 7.0 (see http://www.iis.net/extensions) that you can download for free from IIS.NET for Windows 2008, that among many other things is capable of doing this kind of routing without writing a single line of code. This blog tries to show how easy it is to implement this using ARR. Here are the steps to try this:" - [More]

http://www.oxadox.com/article/womenhealth/2009-02-25/99551.html

Anatomy of a SL Game

"Last week I created a document that incorporates my experiences developing the Shock Silverlight online game so far. The document discusses the basics of online games in Silverlight and has a lot of practical examples (code) and a working project that you can use to build your own game. Don't make the mistakes I did! Happy coding! " [More]

http://blogs.msdn.com/nikola/archive/2009/02/05/anatomy-of-a-silverlight-game-avoid-common-mistakes-when-building-silverlight-online-games.aspx

Handy Snippets

"Here’s the short guide to the snippets.  A little more detail follows.

* sldp A basic Silverlight DependencyProperty

* sldpc A Silverlight DependencyProperty with a property changed callback

* sldpa An attached Silverlight Dependency Property

* slevent A really basic event definition

* slsbc An inline, anonymous Storyboard.Completed handler (check
this one out, it’s cooler than it sounds)

* slpanel A really simple implementation of a panel

* slrss A super basic collection class that loads an RSS feed

* slvc The boilerplate code you need to create a value converter
" [more]

http://blog.nerdplusart.com/archives/silverlight-code-snippets

MVVM in Silverlight

"Luckily for Silverlight 2, the WPF community has rallied behind a pattern called Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM). This pattern is an adaptation of the MVC and MVP patterns in which the view model provides a data model and behavior to the view but allows the view to declaratively bind to the view model. The view becomes a mix of XAML and C# (as Silverlight 2 controls), the model represents the data available to the application, and the view model prepares the model in order to bind it to the view." - [More]

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd458800.aspx

Isolated Storage in SL2

"In the August 2008 MSDN Magazine CLR Inside Out column, Andrew Pardoe gave a brief overview of isolated storage in Silverlight 2 ("Program Silverlight with the CoreCLR"). In this column, I'll provide more details on isolated storage in Silverlight along with some best practices for using it in your own apps. " - [More]

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd458794.aspx

Thanks for the Grid, but I still love my Canvas

"When Silverlight 2 was first released, we all caught our first glimpse of a new layout control, the “Grid”. Back in the SL1.0 and SL 1.5 Alpha the community asked for more choices then just a Canvas and Microsoft delivered. In fact, they gave us three, the Canvas, Grid and StackPanel. Microsoft even took it to the next level and replaced the Canvas with the Grid as the new default LayoutRoot within all UserControls." - [more]

http://joel.neubeck.net/2009/02/silverlight-grid-canvas/

More about the layout system

"I recently posted about the Silverlight Layout System (and now have posted videos on the subject here and here). But this can get quite confusing and a reader posted this question: You mention PreArrange() and it is called but you are not clear on which of the functions should be used in it.  I am also not clear on where "item" and "center" are defined. -- This gives me an opportunity to do a better job explaining how the location of each object as it moves around the carousel, is determined." [More]

http://silverlight.net/blogs/jesseliberty/archive/2009/02/21/more-about-the-layout-system.aspx

Carousel Videos

"I'm very pleased to be able to announce that the videos Creating a Carousel Part 1 and Creating a Carousel Part 2 are now available.  These videos cover the material that is also discussed in my two part blog entry (beginning here) including such advanced topics as

•The Silverlight Layout System
•Overriding MeasureOverride and ArrangeOverride
•Matrix Transforms
•Adding Attached Dependency Properties
•Programmatic Animation" - [More]

http://silverlight.net/blogs/jesseliberty/archive/2009/02/19/carousel-video-posted-parts-1-and-2.aspx

Deep Zoom Composer Update

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=457b17b7-52bf-4bda-87a3-fa8a4673f8bf&displaylang=en

Prism V2

"The Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight (also known as Prism) has been updated to version 2." - [More]

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/02/prism-version-2-arrives.ars

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Continuum/Prismv2/

SL LinkLabel Control

"In Silverlight there is a TextBlock control that is used to display simple text. However in many cases you need to display hyperlinks in the text. This article focuses on how to build such control and provides full source code for it." - [More]

http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/Silverlight-LinkLabel-control.aspx

Certifiable? Microsoft Wants to Know

"Are You Certifiable? (http://www.areyoucertifiable.com) is a Silverlight-based quiz game which will dig deep into the mental resources of technicians and developers alike in the process of determining who can meet and who can fly beyond the rigorous standards of Microsoft Certification. The game is a unique approach which will not only spread awareness of the benefits of MS Certification and the Second Shot promotion, but also provide a valuable primer for professionals interested in taking an exam" - [More]

http://www.gamersdailynews.com/story-8712-Certifiable-Microsoft-Wants-to-Know.html

SL Party is Just Starting

"In addition to giving Silverlight developers the ability to stream binary data into Web applications with Silverlight 3, Microsoft needs to include user interface controls that are flexible and customizable, said one source who requested anonymity. Microsoft has traditionally looked to its partners for this, but developers would like to see this come from the software giant itself, the source added." - [More]

http://www.crn.com/software/214303739

CBS Picks up Silverlight

"CBSSports.com has chosen Microsoft's Silverlight media player to stream March Madness games on its site in high quality. Last year, more than 4.8 million unique users watched March Madness college baskeball games on CBSSports via March Madness on Demand, which lets viewers watch on a first-come, first-served basis, according to the Sports Business Journal." [More]

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/162148.asp?from=blog_last3

http://newteevee.com/2009/02/15/cbs-gives-march-madness-gives-a-high-quality-makeover/

Microsoft Thrive

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/02/new-microsoft-thrive-website-targets-it-pros.ars

Silverligth ComboBox

"I find Silverlight amazing.  If you begin digging into the controls included with the base Silverlight install you will find an incredible structure for almost all the controls.  The part I love the most is the ItemTemplate or more specifically the DataTemplate. As an example I’ve taken a standard ComboBox and displayed a list of custom business objects very easily.  No more limitations of only a value and text representation." - [More]

http://13sides.com/post/Silverlight-ComboBox.aspx

YDN SL Developer Center gets update

"We updated the Silverlight Developer Center today for Silverlight 2.0. The goal of our update is to cover the basics and provide a reference for common tasks that developers will come across during RIA (rich internet application) development." [More]

http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2009/02/ydn_silverlight.html

SL Smooth Streaming Goes Public

"After giving Akamai Technologies Inc. (Nasdaq: AKAM) a head start in the deployment of its adaptive streaming technology for Silverlight, Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) is now offering up "Smooth Streaming" capabilities to other content delivery networks (CDNs) and content publishers as part of a public beta that begins today." - [More]

http://www.contentinople.com/author.asp?section_id=450&doc_id=172478

Microsoft Elevate America

"On Sunday, Microsoft launched a new Web site, Microsoft Elevate America, a portal designed to assist consumers, students, and other interested parties with some basic computer skills. A complementary version of the site will be offered to state governments, including Florida, Oregon, and Washington with discounted certifications." - [More]

http://www.appscout.com/2009/02/microsoft_providing_some_onlin.php

Extending the SL DataGrid with Attached Props

"One of my customers has been using the Silverlight 2 DataGrid and came to me with a request:  How do you make a column take up all of the rest of the available space (like the Grid * column width)?  If I were doing this in MFC or Windows forms, I’d probable use inheritance to add this functionality but in Silverlight I thought about using a Custom Attached Property.  The benefit of doing this is that it the code is very self-contained, it doesn’t add complexity to the grid class, and can be put into the declarative XAML.  You can see this in the DataGrid StarColumn attribute in this DataGrid.  In this instance, the third column will resize to the rest of the grid width:" - [More]

http://blogs.msdn.com/synergist/archive/2009/02/23/extending-the-silverlight-datagrid-class-with-a-custom-attached-property.aspx

Extracting Styles from SL Controls

"There are various times where you often find yourself needing to change styles and then the key problem here is that you can’t grab hold of the styles. A classic example is that of trying to style things in the Silverlight Toolkit. " - [more]

http://msdnrss.thecoderblogs.com/2009/02/23/extracting-styles-from-silverlight-controls/

MIX09 ticket winners

"Last week I posted a simple quick request for you to be inspired and have some fun with Silverlight and win a chance at a free registration to MIX09.  The deadline has come and gone and here are the winners:" - [More]

http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/02/23/mix09-winners-silverlight-contest.aspx

Human Clock

"On my flight back from Seattle I started sketching my first idea for a Silverlight project. I had two objectives. The first was to test out the new C# and Silverlight goodness I learned on Friday and the second was to make the project somewhat useful. So I decided I would make a clock." - [More]

http://panchadsaram.com/2009/02/22/human-clock/

Silverlight Chrome hack

"Officially Google Chrome is not a supported browser, but most (your mileage may vary) Silverlight applications run.  Since the detection scripts are Ms-PL licensed, you’re welcome to change them to fit your needs.  The official copy on the release site will map to the supported matrix for Silverlight for now.  If you want to add support for Google Chrome, here’s what you’d do." - [More]

http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/02/11/moonlight-and-silverlight-detection-google-chrome-user-agent.aspx

SL 2 Minor updates GDR 1

"Yesterday a minor update to the Silverlight 2 runtime was released.  You may see terms of “GDR 1” floating around.  That’s pretty much an internal term at Microsoft referred to as “general distribution release” – yeah, I know we have a lot of random terms.  Think of it just as an incremental update.  If you are curious for Silverlight’s entire release history, you can view that here." - [More]

http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/02/19/silverlight-2-gets-minor-update-gdr1.aspx

Free e-books from Microsoft

* Programming Microsoft LINQ

* Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 3.5

* Introducing Microsoft Silverlight 2, Second Edition


http://birbilis.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2335BBEF59B92C54!830.entry

Will Silverlight 3 wipe the smile off Adobe’s face?

"When Microsoft shows off the next version of its Silverlight technology at the MIX09 Web Design and Development Conference in Las Vegas next month, many commenters will .." - [More]

http://www.silverlight-travel.com/blog/2009/02/14/will-silverlight-3-wipe-the-smile-off-adobes-face/

Fun with panoramic photos

"There are three groups of options that you can select:

•Stitch – allows you to select type of camera motion used to create the shots. You have choice between 3 types of planar motion, and rotating motion, but most of the time you can leave it on Automatic.

•Crop – while in WLPG you have to crop your images manually, here you can do it automatically or adjust the crop before saving the output image.

•Export – the output image can be saved not only as a single bitmap image (JPEG, TIFF, BMP or PNG), but also as multi-resolution tiled formats like HD View and Silverlight Deep Zoom.

But the best feature is that you can preview your scene in 3D. And with enough photos you can even create a 360 degree view all around you. This view also allows you to adjust panorama’s center and curvature, and even change the type of projection from planar to cylindrical or spherical." - [More]

http://geekswithblogs.net/kobush/archive/2009/02/15/129419.aspx

The Layout Model

"I have finished a video, to be posted soon, on how to build a Carousel control. Along the way, I had the opportunity to explore the Silverlight Layout System (SLS) and will describe this fascinating corner of Silverlight 2 in this and future blog entries." - [More]

http://silverlight.net/blogs/jesseliberty/archive/2009/02/15/the-layout-model.aspx

Wait messages and asynchronous calls

"Say that you want to present a message to your user while he waits an asynchronous call to be completed. However, given the nature of the call, you can’t control how long it will take to complete, and thus that message may be just a quick blink in the screen. But what if you still want that message to be readable, even when the call answers almost instantaneously?" - [More]

http://www.nerdcore.com.br/blog/?p=41

Data Visualization with Physics

"Along these lines, I had an idea to make a standard bar graph a bit more interesting by using physics to have a kind of "Bucket Graph" where symbols drop into "buckets." This adds absolutely no value to the interpretation of the data, but I thought is would make a cool visual effect. So here is what I came up with:" - [more]

http://www.andybeaulieu.com/Home/tabid/67/EntryID/137/Default.aspx