News

This is the much requested Silverlight 3 version of my Blackspike theme – same rules apply, you can use it for any project personal or commercial.

The Silverlight 4 beta came with a version of MEF that had 3 catalogs – namely AssemblyCatalog, TypeCatalog and AggregateCatalog. They’re pretty easy to understand and I made a screencast on the topic here. The Silverlight 4 preview toolkit came with a PackageCatalog that is really useful as it works with another class Package to download separate XAP files and expose their exported components to MEF.The new MEF drop on codeplex has an evolution of those classes called the DeploymentCatalog. I wrote about it here and here.

My many thanks go out to everyone who has spent time helping people learn how to use Silverlight/WPF Data Visualization!

I’ve created my list of favorites tools and libraries and posted them to the Downloads page on the Project Rosetta site. After posting the updated list yesterday I realized I missed two big ones: SilverSprite and Balder.

Breaking the new list down into categories, I ended up with 3 Essential, 4 Optional and 10 Specialty downloads.

The recent wave of earthquakes (no pun intended) being reported in the news got me wondering about the frequency and severity of earthquakes around the world. Since I’ve been doing a lot of Silverlight development lately, I decided to scratch my curiosity with a nice little Bing Maps application that will show the location and relative strength of recent seismic activity.

I could have used the title “Ditching Client Service Proxy” or “Avoiding Add Service Reference”, but that’s not what the meat of the post is about. However, that is essentially the goal of this post. The client service proxy generated when you use “Add Service Reference…” to reference your web service from your client project is used by almost every demo I know. It quickly generates a proxy class for you that at first blush is “the bee’s knees”.

Silverlight 4 is now supporting the commanding that we’ve come to love from WPF. Commanding was a foundational feature for MVVM. It’s what enabled us to bind to methods on our view models.

Add the control assembly to your Silverlight project. Then, add an XMLNS prefix to your Silverlight page where you’d like to use the control.

There are two properties of interest that should be set or bound: SourceCode (the actual source text), and SourceLanguage

Silverlight provides a variety of brushes that can be used to paint just about any area in your app: from text to shapes to borders. The most common brushes are for painting color and images: SolidColorBrush,LinearGradientBrush, RadialGradiantBrush, and ImageBrush.However, today I paired the less common VideoBrush with an unusual visual element.

As part of the CRE8 Conference last week in Miami, August de los Reyes and I presented a collection of the cool videos, websites and customer stories. Here is a great list for you with the best of best in Silverlight and UX.