March 2009 Entries
In my opinion, one of the coolest new features in Silverlight 3 is Cached Composition. Cached Composition is a performance enhancement feature that will allow visual elements to be cached as bitmaps after the first render. After caching occurs, the application can effectively bypass the render phase for the cached visual elements and simply display the cached elements instead.
This is a huge plus for scenarios with scrolling objects! Before Cached Composition, Silverlight would re-render the object for each frame, even if the object itself never changed. With Cached Composition enabled, the object is cached and Silverlight can render the object...
Before Silverlight 3, you had to do perform some less-than-ideal tricks to achieve a drop shadow effect on your text. In fact, the most decent trick I could find had to rely on the TextBox control and not the TextBlock control since you cannot re-template a TextBlock control. But even that technique was not optimal since you couldn’t get a truly smooth shadow. Well, that was then an this is now! In Silverlight 3, you can do the following: <TextBlock
Foreground="White"
Text="Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet"
...
As promised, I am posting my slide deck and code from my Silverlight Advertising presentation at the 2009 Charlotte Code Camp. The turnout was great and I had some good questions! The Charlotte guys hold an excellent code camp. I always enjoy making the trip! Download Presentation
The Silverlight Contrib and Silverlight Extensions projects will be merging into a single project soon. By consolidating the two projects we hope to provide an even more valuable resource to the Silverlight Community. Before the consolidation, both projects were hosted on CodePlex and shared the same Ms-PL licensing. This will not change, however, there will be only one unified project moving forward.
Obviously, both teams are fond of the names chosen for their open source projects, so we decided it would be best if we let the Silverlight community decide which name to go with moving forward. Whichever project name receives...