August 2008 Entries
I've just started a new project on CodePlex called Silverlight Contrib. The aim of this project is to offer the most comprehensive collection of free and open source Silverlight controls. The first drop is very small, but with support from the community, I hope to grow this collection into a full suite of controls that you can incorporate into your solutions. Interesting in Contributing? I really need your help for this project to succeed. I am currently seeking people that are interesting in working on the project with me. ...
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 Brian Hitney Topic: Introduction to ASP.NET MVC Tuesday, September 9th, 2008, is the next meeting of the Pee Dee Area .NET User Group. Brian Hitney will give us an introduction to ASP.NET MVC and how this affects the way you write ASP.NET applications. ASP.NET MVC is an alternative to the commonplace Web Forms framework. It helps to promote the following: Clear separation of concerns Testability - support for...
I thought it would be cool to try building a reusable container control so I came up with CoolMenu. You really have to try this one out to get the full experience, a screen shot just doesn't do it justice. CoolMenu is a Silverlight container control that gives you a nice wave-like effect as you move your mouse over the menu items. Clicking a menu item causes the item to bounce.
You could probably use this control in many scenarios. Other than the obvious menu navigation scenario, some potential possibilities include:
Card Game - Show your current hand
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When building custom controls, you often need to allow the user to add a collection of items to the control either programmatically or through XAML declaration. For example, suppose you are building a menu control and you need to allow the users of your control to add controls as children to your control. The ListBox is one such example: <ListBox Width="100" Height="300"> <ListBoxItem Content="Testing1"></ListBoxItem> <ListBoxItem Content="Testing2"></ListBoxItem> <ListBoxItem Content="Testing3"></ListBoxItem> </ListBox> ...
The SilverlightShow has just started a new contest for writing silverlight articles. This is a great opportunity to contribute to the community and have the chance to win some nice prizes at the same time. The contest starts today (Monday, August 18th, 2008) and concludes on Sunday, September 28th at 23:59 GMT. Check out the contest site for more information including rules and prizes! Good luck!
Last Thursday (August 7, 2008), I presented at the Greater Charleston .NET User Group. Before the meeting, I had the chance to see a demonstration of really cool carousel control written by Matthew Drake. I told him that I wanted to share it with the community and he gave me permission to post a demo on my site. He was actually planning to submit the control to the Silverlight Control Builder Contest. Unfortunately, there was some confusion about the deadline and he wasn't able to submit the control. I really think the demonstration of his control is cool because it...
I'd like to personally congratulate, Faisal, the winner of the Silverlight Control Builder Contest! Faisal submitted a really cool Fish Eye Grid control. A special thanks goes out to Faisal for taking the time to develop and submit a control for the Silverlight Community!
FishEyeGrid
Silverlight control for representing items in a grid that renders them with a fisheye lens effect. When the mouse is moved over the grid, the items transform (scale & translate) to a fisheye lens effect. Items under the cursor become larger while those farther away become...
So the Silverlight Control Builder Contest is now over and after all that excitement and anticipation from the community we got, a single, solitary entry. One person took the time to build a Silverlight control and submit it to our contest. I have to admit that we were expecting a little more of a response than that. We actually received more unique vendor contributions than we did contestants. To compound the disappointment, the contest site accumulated over 2,300 unique visitors with a total of about 9,500 page views throughout the duration of the contest, so it wasn't like nobody knew...
After posting my Treadmill application, Andrew Duthie suggested that it would be cool if I made it so you could drag your mouse along the speed and incline visuals and have them update instead of repeatedly clicking the plus and minus buttons. That gave me the idea for a new control. What if we built a gauge control that you could adjust in a similar manner as described above? That way, anyone could use it and furthermore, a properly designed control would allow us to define the "gauge" to be anything we would like and the control would work the...
I thought I would post the source code for a control that I typically demonstrate at my Silverlight presentations. I usually show this control at the end of my presentation, so I never really get to talk about the control as much as I like.
As you can probably infer from the image below, this control presents 4 stars/hearts/whatever and, by hovering your mouse over the control, you can change the state of the control. Clicking on a particular star will set the rating for the selector. I think this screenshot really illustrates the awesome skinning capabilities of Silverlight. Keep...
This is just a quick reminder to let you know that we are now down to one full week in the Silverlight Control Builder Contest. If you are considering entering the contest, but haven't yet, we have not yet received any (valid) entries so your chances of winning a prize are very high! All entries are due before August 11th, 2008!
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Controlling your Treadmill from Silverlight - Part 1
Controlling your Treadmill from Silverlight - Part 2
In the final post for this series, we will be expanding the usefulness of our application by adding a workout feature. This feature will allow you to craft workouts (in XML format of course) and then have the application execute them. The application will render a nice visualization so you can monitor your progress as you burn off those calories.
Separation of Concerns
As with any application, complexity...