News

The two new workshops are focused on getting developers up to speed on developing applications with Silverlight for the phone.

At MIX10, Silverlight 4 released an update, the Silverlight 4 RC (release candidate).  A few things have changed since the beta which was released in November.  If you haven’t read my guide to Silverlight 4 you may want to check that out.  The features still exist, but there are some changes to the implementations of some of the features as well as some new ones.  Please go read the previous post to familiarize yourself with the features.  This post will be complimentary to that and identify new/changed.

For those of you who have already been using Blend for designing applications for Silverlight or WPF, creating applications for Windows Phone will be a very familiar experience: Basically, authoring is almost entirely identical with the design experience for Silverlight. All your existing skills are still valid, and you can be immediately productive for the new Windows Phone platform.

It feels like it was only yesterday when we boarded the plane to fly to Las Vegas to Mix 2009, where we announced Blend 3 and SketchFlow. Thank you all so much for the wonderful reception you gave to Blend 3, by the way.

I can hardly believe it is time for Mix 2010 already – and that it’s time to introduce the next release of Blend…

Hopefully this post helps you get your own applications up and running with the release candidate.

Microsoft announced today, that new Windows Phone 7 Series will support Silverlight as one of 2 development frameworks. Second development framework will be XNA (will blog about it later). So, what’s new for Silverlight developers there?

First, we have familiar tools: Windows Phone applications with Silverlight will be developed either with Visual Studio 2010, either with new “express” version called Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone. This “express” version will enable development with both frameworks (Silverlight and XNA).

I’ll show how to change shape of your Out-Of-browser (OOB) application.

Note: the application has to be elevated application.

When building a complex data visualization application in Silverlight, I discovered a disturbing issue when dealing with multiple DataGrids on the same screen.  If the ItemsSource of a particular DataGrid gets updated as the result of a SelectedItem change in another DataGrid the child grid would not display any items.  Worse, adding code to query the ItemsSource of the child grid shows that does have a valid and correct ItemsSource, so why doesn’t it display?

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.