MIX’09 – the intersection of design & technology… Silverlight Toolkit FTW!
If you're headed to MIX'09, there are some great talks available on the Silverlight Toolkit, Silverlight controls, rich Internet applications, and more...
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A prototype tool for designers and developers: converting XAML to ISM themes and back again
The Silverlight Toolkit contains implicit style management features that let you create a nice theme – buttons, checkboxes, you name it – and have it automatically applied to an application. Nearly half a year ago, I worked with Mehdi to create a rather simple, but functional, tool prototype for working with Xaml theme files and ...
Recently posted...
Asynchronous test support – Silverlight unit test framework and the UI thread
A discussion about the asynchronous, on-the-UI thread test features and methods found in the Silverlight unit test framework, along with some history.
CloudFront. Cloud Files. Others?
In the interest of offloading my dedicated web server, and experimenting with the latest in distributed computing and storage, I find myself switching between different web file storage technologies quite often.
The availability of distributed content delivery network (CDN)-like services for files to developers has only just started to begin. S3 was a first step; Silverlight ...
Unscientific SSD build time comparison
A few days ago I mentioned that I’ve been using an SSD drive in my desktop workstation at home, with pretty great success. The Intel X25-M is where it is at – give it another half year for the prices to become reasonable and I bet you’ll see more folks adopting it.
Eric Hexter was wondering ...
The Silverlight Toolkit team is on top of your feedback
Earlier this week, Jesse Liberty posted some great tips for providing the Silverlight Toolkit team the right amount of information to help solve your issues. On the team, we’re all out there looking and responding to the feedback – so you’re often going to get a response by the actual developer or designer that created ...
SSD rocks my development environment
Visual Studio 2008 Team System installed in 3 minutes. Thank you Intel!
I’ve been hearing so much about the higher-end Solid State Disks that are out there on the market. Like a virus, it is slowly infecting more and more people. This past week, I made the jump and picked up an Intel X25-M 80GB SSD ...
Silverlight MsBuild tricks – video
Build Silverlight apps and libraries without having to install the SDK in your build lab, following this video. A re-post.
Building Silverlight code on machines without the SDK (guide & video)
A guide and walkthrough video showing how to setup a source enlistment to build Silverlight apps on machines without Silverlight or the SDK installed.
Customizing AutoCompleteBox to update SelectedItem on commit, without changing the control
This post presents a quick story about some of the process we use on the Silverlight Toolkit, plus a downloadable project that shows how to customize and extend AutoCompleteBox to only update the SelectedItem when the user commits their suggestion choice (enter key or clicking an element) instead of when the up/down arrow keys are ...
UniformGrid for Silverlight
One of the primitive layout panels in WPF is the UniformGrid. Here’s a Silverlight port of the control. I use this panel a lot in quick apps because it just works, and I admit I’m a little too code-lazy in the XAML editor to type Grid.Row a few times. So, figured I’d share.
The UniformGrid ...
MergeDefaultStyles build task improves control development (w/source)
The Silverlight Toolkit team uses a custom MsBuild task called “MergeDefaultStyleTasks” to merge multiple XAML resource dictionaries into generic.xaml. Here’s the details on it, and the source.
NUnit & the Silverlight unit test framework
Did you know that you can run NUnit tests with the Silverlight unit test framework? In this short guide, I talk about updating NUnit to build for Silverlight, wiring up test projects, and a download with everything you need to get started.
This isn’t a "metadata redirection" trick – but the actual NUnit assertions and metadata ...
Using the Silverlight Toolkit? Let us know!
Are you using the Silverlight Toolkit on your site, or in an app? It’d be great if you could post a little bit about the control(s) you’re using and the URL to your app, if you’d like to share. Just comment on this post!
The Silverlight Showcase is a great way to share your work with ...
A bunch of AutoCompleteBox posts
Here’s a collection of key posts about the AutoCompleteBox control that can be found in the Silverlight Toolkit. A lot of people were out on vacation last month and may have missed these posts during their new years’ newsreader purge.
If there’s something missing, or a post you’d like to see, please leave me a comment!
The ...
AutoCompleteBox tip: Writing a new text filter in VB
The default text filter used in the AutoCompleteBox control works well in most situations. I’d like to share an improvement that adds search engine-like "AND" operator support.
In this short guide, we’ll change the text filter to support search strings like "b gates" matching to "bill gates" by splitting the search words and using them as ...
My most popular Silverlight posts in ‘08
By far, the best thing to happen in ‘08 was the formation of the Silverlight Toolkit team and the high-quality open source releases it has given the community in calendar year ‘08. As you probably know, I also had my hand in plenty of the Silverlight testing story, so this post brings these things together.
Here ...
‘09 blog housekeeping & thanks
I hope that you’ve had an excellent new year; I’m pretty excited for what is in store for the next twelve months. Here’s some general notes & blog information.
Last year we took Silverlight from a simple plugin & a brand name to a complete platform powered by .NET.
With a tough economy, the pressure is on ...
AutoCompleteBox – SelectedItem design change – source code download
One piece of feedback that has been recently made clear is that of the community on the AutoCompleteBox’s SelectedItem property. Thanks for letting us know that this is important. In this post, I’m providing a fix for this new, and admittedly better, behavior.
The request started on the Silverlight.net forums and then was opened up as ...
Silverlight ListBox with text searching
My "TextSearchListBox" control for Silverlight derives from ListBox and enables the text searching capability that many of us have come to expect in applications. The experience is a great improvement over the standard ListBox, and was simple enough to build out this evening.
I’ve attached the complete project and source code and hope that you find ...
Help us improve the Silverlight Toolkit CodePlex site
Hi, it’s the giving time of the year… One thing we would love to do on the Silverlight Toolkit is embed Silverlight content in our CodePlex site, to help everyone better interact with and understand the capabilities of Silverlight and controls.
It’d be nice for us to offer samples, control examples, and other Silverlight content on ...
Adding page up and down support to AutoCompleteBox
Supporting the page up and page down keys for browsing through auto complete suggestions is one feature that we decided not to include in the production control to improve the flexibility of the control, plus the actual code is a little hacky.
If you have an application where your users are going to be exploring large ...
AutoCompleteBox without cycling navigation
An occasional request I hear about the AutoCompleteBox control in the toolkit is about the cyclical navigation in the list box of suggestions. If you’re browsing through a list of items, pressing the down arrow, eventually you’ll reach the bottom – and then be cycled back to the top of the list.
This cycling behavior is ...
R# integration for the Silverlight unit test framework
If you’re a ReSharper user, check out Einar Ingebrigtsen’s blog, he’s updated his Silverlight unit test runner for R#.
The original post about this technology is here.
Silverlight AutoCompleteBox: What’s new in the December release
Here’s the list of changes, new functionality, and breaking changes between the two official Silverlight Toolkit releases so far. I covered key differences in the previously published "AutoCompleteBox: The missing guide," a must-read for anyone developing with the control. This will also guide application developers in updating their existing code.
AutoCompleteBox is one of the core ...
Silverlight Charting: Creating rich data point tooltips
A few weeks ago I sat down, built a simple app using the DataVisualization control assembly (charting) from the Silverlight Toolkit December 2008 release, and then started gold plating it with a few additional features and tricks. I was pleasantly surprised that retemplating is the key to customizing most of the charting experience, just as ...
Announcing the availability of the Silverlight Toolkit December 2008 release
The sophomore release of the Silverlight Toolkit, today’s December release is out. You’ll find new themes, a fresh new sample app, fine-tuned components, and a bunch of features and fixes as requested by the community. More of the controls are accessible, the APIs are well baked, and, as always, its out there with a completely ...
Reid Borsuk releases an MD5 implementation for Silverlight 2 in pure open source goodness
I was pleased to see that earlier today Reid Borsuk (of Microsoft’s CLR security team) released his MD5 implementation (pure transparent Silverlight code) to the MSDN Code Gallery earlier today. This will open the door for developers looking to interact with services and data systems that still use MD5. This release is licensed with the ...
Silverlight unit test framework – updated source and binaries now available
The latest release of the Silverlight Unit Test Framework is now available for download. This release contains a few simple bug fixes and was built with the RTM version of the Silverlight Tools.
Download it today!
Binaries and control sample tests, part of the Silverlight Toolkit download (you’ll find the bits in ...
Creating a testable WebClient for Silverlight unit testing
Testability is important to today’s developers, and without a mocking framework available for Silverlight developers today, it is possible, albeit with a little extra work, to create testable components.
Maurice de Beijer has blogged about his solution for creating a testable Flickr web service API. He’s created TestableWebClient and TestableOpenReadCompletedEventArgs types to assist with this, and ...
AutoCompleteBox control: The missing guide
This is a comprehensive developer’s guide to using AutoCompleteBox. With the initial Silverlight Toolkit release, we focused on providing API reference documentation. This is "the missing guide" that covers the full breadth of the control.
Along with the next toolkit release, I will release guides on the ISelectionAdapter interface and more involved customizations that people have ...
Managed Html Controls source code
In early October I blogged about the managed wrapper for client-side HTML controls that we use in the Silverlight unit test framework.
If you were intrigued by it, you’ll be happy to know that the source code is published and part of the Silverlight unit test framework’s source code, part of the ‘Quality’ section of the ...
Build a highlighting AutoCompleteBox (like IE8 and Firefox 3) in 5 minutes
The auto complete functionality that IE and Firefox provide in the URL address bar is nice: both these browsers (and many other auto complete implementations) highlight the text that you’ve typed, inside the results display.
If you use the Silverlight Toolkit’s AutoCompleteBox control, and pair it with a fun SearchMode like ‘Contains’, you’re able to ...
Toolkit posts: "Silverlight in Style," dependency properties in WPF and Silverlight, and TreeView expansion
The Silverlight Toolkit site is a great starting point, but a lot of the important conversations that we’re having with customers are happening elsewhere: on blogs. I thought I’d take a moment to share some important resources to show you just some of what’s being talked about.
Toolkit blogs
Instead of banding together to create one über-blog, ...
Silverlight 2 Unleashed by Laurent Bugnion
If you’re looking for a great overview of all things Silverlight 2, Laurent Bugnion’s Silverlight 2 Unleashed book is a great introductory book for web developers, designers, and folks new to the Microsoft web/client platform. Amazon delivered my copy in the pouring rain today, so I immediately took it up to my neighborhood coffee ...
Editable Silverlight ComboBox
Tim Heuer posted today about using the AutoCompleteBox control (Silverlight Toolkit) to enable editable ComboBox scenarios in Silverlight apps.
This was originally one of the more complex samples that we included in the toolkit sample project, and Tim has done a great job boiling it down to the essentials, complete with step-by-step code.
Definitely check it out ...
Silverlight Unit Test Framework source code released
A week ago, we gave the world the first release of the Silverlight Toolkit. Shawn Burke told you that we’re agile, and that we have a neat release model. The fun continues!
Today, the source code to the Silverlight Unit Test Framework is available with the same open source license. It is checked in to the ...
Unblocking downloaded CHM documentation files on Windows Vista
If you’ve ever downloaded a CHM documentation file and received a "Navigation to the webpage was canceled" message, you need to ‘Unblock’ the CHM file before opening it. This was a security improvement in Windows Vista, and there’s no clear message that indicates that you need to jump through this hoop.
I saw a few reports ...
Getting Expression Encoder 2 SP1’s media player template to work with CDNs and cross-domain embedding
The new Silverlight 2 media player that Expression Encoder 2 SP1 ships with is great. You can encode video and output Silverlight content in minutes. With SP1, when you select one of the new templates, the only bits generated are your video asset + thumbnail, a single media player .Xap file, and a sample .Html ...
Renaming Xap to Zip is dead. Long live renaming Xap to Zip!
Teach Windows to treat Xap files as first class compressed folders with this simple registry entry. After applying, you’ll be able to open .Xap files and view their contents, and get the same shell experience as Zips have:
If you’ve ever had to do the "rename .Xap to .Zip" routine while doing Silverlight development, then ...
