Silverlight - Mike Taulty's Blog

Following on from this post . As expected, porting my Utilities library to WPF wasn’t too difficult. It was a matter of creating a WPFUtilities class library, adding the existing source from Utilities as linked code files and then referencing PresentationCore and PresentationFramework and hitting build. then again, there were only a couple of very basic classes in there so it’s not too surprising. Next, I thought I’d try and port my Security project and so created another Class Library project WPFSecurity and added the existing source files as linked files again. This project though is a bit more complex in that it has 2 sets of WCF service references in order to call the Authentication and Role services made available by ASP.NET. I need to add service references to my WPFSecurity project and try and ensure as few code changes as possible by doing that. In adding the references, I made sure to use the same proxy namespace names; and also all references in Silverlight are asynchronous and so my...

Following up on this post I thought the first control I’d build would be a graph control so I just referenced the Silverlight Toolkit for its graphs and very quickly had; <UserControl x:Class="SilverlightApplication6.Controls.ChartDisplayControl" xmlns=" http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x=" http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:charts="clr-namespace:System.Windows.Controls.DataVisualization.Charting;assembly=System.Windows.Controls.DataVisualization.Toolkit" xmlns:localCtl="clr-namespace:SilverlightApplication6.Controls"> <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> <RowDefinition Height="*" /> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> <TextBlock Text="Historical sales data for product" /> <TextBlock Margin="5,0,0,0" Text="{Binding ProductName...

Following up from this post , I set about building some services to power my application’s data requirements. These aren’t perfect by any means but they’re enough for a sample application to get going with. Working from the sketch of how the services need to look given at the end of the previous post , I put together a LINQ to SQL diagram; and left LINQ to SQL to do concurrency checking based on every column in the Product table ( I only plan to modify the Product table ) which is its default if I remember correctly ( and, usually, overkill but it’ll do for me here ). And I then produced a rough service interface; public class L o o k u p D a t a I t e m { public int I d { get ; set ; } public string T i t l e { get ; set ; } } public class P r o d u c t S a l e s { public string M o n t h Y e a r L a b e l { get ; set ; } public decimal T o t a l S a l e s { get ; set ; } } public class P r o d u c t S e a r c h R e s u l t { public int P a g e { get ; set ; } public int T o t a l P a...

I was at the NxtGen Fest 09 event in Cambrdige today talking about Silverlight 3. A truly fantastic day with a cracking start from Professor Chris Bishop of Royal Institute Christmas lectures fame;   who was talking about 3rd generation artificial intelligence technologies. There were other great sessions from Dinis Cruz, Chris Hay amongst others. By contrast to Chris’ talk, my talk was the fairly mundane topic of; I had an interesting problem with a demo where a Silverlight client was calling a web service and I was serving up that service from Cassini and the project had been left to use dynamic ports ( by mistake ) and the port changed during the demo and the client couldn’t find the server. Truly foxed me but I took the British route of; and tried to fix it with the debugger before giving up and moving on so hopefully ( if you came along ) your enjoyment was improved by seeing me wrestling with Visual Studio rather than reduced by it :-) The slides from the talk are here for download and all the demos...

I found myself reading this post today as I wanted to build a Silverlight control which is a little like Viewbox in that it has ( let’s say ) a single lump of content that it wants to display and I was struggling to find the right base class for it. Why? Because in WPF there are methods like AddLogicalChild on FrameworkElement whereas in Silverlight you don’t have this so you have to look for a control to sub-class which already has some notion of content ( like ContentControl perhaps :-) ). Anyway, it’s an interesting read to see how Viewbox had to function a particular way when implemented by the Silverlight Toolkit team and ( if you look at the beta bits for Silverlight 3 ) you’ll find that it now works as you’d expect especially when you write XAML like; <controls:Viewbox>             <TextBlock                 x:Name="xyz" />        ...

What with all the high-tech announcements around “ Project Natal ” I thought I might head the other direction and play with something a little more on the low-tech end of the spectrum; a Silverlight 3 version of Pong :-) I tried to be reasonably retro here and reproduce the original look and feel somewhat ( didn’t take me long to draw those 2 lines in Expression Blend ). You can run the application from here – not sure it really makes for a two-player game these days but I spent a few minutes playing against myself. (keys involved are left, right, up, down, space to start, N for new game, L/S for load/save UI ) A couple of interesting things drop out from this. One is that I ended up using the new Viewbox control because it is easier for me to program against a game like this using the absolute layout capabilities of a Canvas but I still want a resizable UI. So…I program against a fixed size Canvas and then just drop it into a Viewbox to get a cheap-and-cheerful form of resizable UI. The other is that I added...

I’m just back from DevDays where I had a really great time and delivered a 2-part session on; What’s Coming in Silverlight 3 and another single session on; Beyond Silverlight with WPF if you came along to my sessions then thanks very much for doing that and I hope that you enjoyed them and the conference generally – I’ve been twice now and I think it’s one of the best that I’ve been to and so thanks to the organisers for inviting me back there this year and putting on such a great show. The slides for the talks can be found here   – there weren’t many slides for the Silverlight talks and a few of the slides were borrowed from Scott Guthrie’s talk at MIX09 where he talked about Silverlight Momentum. In terms of code/demos. My Silverlight talks were really ones where I built up pretty small examples as we went along. What I think I showed was as below ( please remember that these demos were meant to be simple rather than the best example of what the technology can do :-) ); Graphics and Media Perspective transforms...