Silverlight
The WP7 platform has native support for static splash screens. In the following post, I’ll show you how just how easy it is:
Create an image of size 480 x 800 in your favorite image editor.
Save the image as a JPEG. At the moment it looks like the file type must be a JPEG to work.
Include the image in your solution and set the Build Action as Content....
Time is almost up on the 2009 Silverlight Control Builder Contest! So far, we have received 8 entries. Yes, we have a real contest this year. If you are planning on entering the contest, make sure you have submitted your entries before 9/19/2009 at 12:00 AM EDT.
The deadline for the Silverlight Control Builder Contest is approaching fast, we only have 12 days remaining! However, if you are planning on entering the contest, you still have time. We have already received some great entries and I hope we will see more before September 19th.
With the deadline approaching, I’ve enlisted help from some of the most prominent Silverlight community champions! These guys will be helping me judge each of the entries we receive. A special thanks goes out to Dave Campbell, Pete Brown, and Shawn Wildermuth!
Dave Campbell
Pete Brown...
With all of the new features introduced in Silverlight 3, it’s easy to see how some features get very little coverage (or no coverage at all). The ItemContainerGenerator is one of those features. When building controls based upon the ItemsControl, there are many cases when you need to obtain the container for a particular item. To perform this task in Silverlight 2, you had to develop your own crude implementation of the ItemContainerGenerator. Fortunately for us, the ItemContainerGenerator is now baked right in! The ItemContainerGenerator for a particular ItemsControl is exposed by the ItemContainerGenerator property: ...
Right on the heels of the Silverlight 3 announcement, the 2009 Silverlight Control Builder Contest was just announced. The concept is simple, build a control using Silverlight and submit it to the site. The top 3 entries will win some really cool prizes!
Based on feedback gathered from last year, the contest is much improved:
The contest is world-wide this time!
Extended contest duration. This year, the contest lasts until September 19th, 2009 at 12 AM EDT.
Silverlight 3 entries are accepted (of course!)
Contest...
I noticed the other day that Storyboard has a SetTarget method, but it does not have a corresponding GetTarget method. So how can you find the target of a Timeline child? Fortunately, Storybard has a GetTargetName method, we can use this method to obtain the name of the target and then search parent container’s children for a matching child. Suppose we had the following code: <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot">
<Grid.Resources>
...
In many situations, it is important that your Silverlight appilcations load as quickly as possible. For example, when building a Silverlight Advertisement, the user should not experience a significant load time. The advertisement should load just as fast as the other page assets. But how do you achieve this when your application includes heavy-weight resources, such as video or images? Of course you could pull these individual assets from a server during runtime, but if your assets are packaged inside the XAP package, you need a better solution. The most common solution I have seen is to build a...
In my spare time, I have been re-writing the Star Selector control that is part of Silverlight Contrib. I re-wrote this control because there were several things I wanted to accomplish. This re-write includes quite a few new features. I will highlight them in the next few sections:
Half-Star Selection
The control supports enabling half-star selection. To enable or disable this feature, simply set the AllowHalfStarSelection property accordingly. The default value is false.
DisplayValue and Value Property Data Types
The DisplayValue and Value properties have been changed from an Integer to a double data type. This allows you to select half-stars and the...
As you probably already know, there are quite a few ways to pass data to a Silverlight application. Use InitParams in the Silverlight plugin declaration Read data off the querystring Use WebClient to request a value Interact with the HTML DOM to pull a value from the hosting page But what do you do if you don’t have control over the hosting page? Really, your only option is to make a call to a web server using WebClient. But even that...
As you may already know, we are merging Silverlight Contrib and Silverlight Extensions into one super-ultra-mega project. Last month, we held a poll to let the community decide the name of the consolidated project. Which played out in the following way: So it’s a no-brainer, obviously the community wants to keep the Silverlight Extensions name moving forward (and we will). In the next few months, both teams will be working to consolidate the code bases into a single code base. This will take some time, but moving forward, it will make for...
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