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.
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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.
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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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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. ...
’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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 the .\Source\Binaries\ directory) ...
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, ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 shop. ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Successful .Xap deployment with your CDN: Set the application/x-silverlight-app MIME type
If you host XAP files on a CDN or other host (such as Amazon S3), you need to have the server configured with the new Silverlight MIME type. You can find out specifics in the breaking changes reference. When you do not need to configure the MIME type: If your .Xap files and web pages ...
Introducing the AutoCompleteBox
The Silverlight AutoCompleteBox is now available. This guide covers the control’s properties, usage, and demonstrates how to hook it up to a JSON web service. Note: This post contains live Silverlight content that your news reader may not be able to display. The auto complete pattern is well-known, useful, time-tested. There’s been one in IE ...
AutoCompleteBox: Video introduction
A video introduction to the AutoCompleteBox control that shipped with the Silverlight Toolkit. This is a 720p HD video. I’m also publishing an introductory guide to the control that can be read here. Duration: 12m:55s Description: This video walks you through the AutoCompleteBox control and its samples that shipped with the Toolkit. Contents: Advanced scenarios ...
AutoCompleteBox: The 5 things you need to know
AutoCompleteBox works great with collections. You don’t have to connect it to a sophisticated web service. We named this control the AutoCompleteBox, not AutoComplete. Its different. It is a rich control that provides a set of suggestions, but not so much the old AJAX version that required you to wire the control up to ...
Sorry boss, I just released the new Silverlight Controls source code to the world.
Last night, I signed on to the CodePlex site and checked in the source code to all the Silverlight controls we’ve been working on night-and-day. Like an open source ninja! On just about any other team at Microsoft, I might have some major explaining to do right about now. In all seriousness, Shawn Burke is ...
Download reference docs for the Silverlight Unit Test Framework
The API reference documentation for the unit test framework is now available. Developers looking to take complete advantage of the more intricate features and presentation framework-specific functionality in the unsupported test framework should take a look. Written by developers, and not expert technical writers, don’t expect anything too earth-shattering. The download has no conceptual content. ...
Silverlight unit testing templates updated
Getting into the habit of unit testing your Silverlight applications is a little easier now. I posted updated templates for the Silverlight Unit Test Framework on the MSDN Code Gallery site. There are project and item templates for Visual C# as well as Visual Basic. Download the templates Direct download link to the templates (Zip, ...