Archives
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Final Release of Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2010 Released
If you haven’t already heard the news, the final release of the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2010 have been released! That’s great news for Silverlight developers and to top it off the crew up at Microsoft even snuck in a few new features including intellisense for styles (a big deal in my opinion) and the ability to easily manipulate Grid rows and columns. One of the most time consuming (and boring) tasks experienced by developers is also covered with the new “Go To Value Definition” feature that allows you to jump directly to style definitions with ease. That feature alone is worth the upgrade especially if you’re working with a large application that uses a lot of styles.
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Integrating HTML into Silverlight Applications
Looking for a way to display HTML content within a Silverlight application? If you haven’t tried doing that before it can be challenging at first until you know a few tricks of the trade. Being able to display HTML is especially handy when you’re required to display RSS feeds (with embedded HTML), SQL Server Reporting Services reports, PDF files (not actually HTML – but the techniques discussed will work), or other HTML content. In this post I'll discuss three options for displaying HTML content in Silverlight applications and describe how my company is using these techniques in client applications.
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Text Trimming in Silverlight 4
Silverlight 4 has a lot of great features that can be used to build consumer and Line of Business (LOB) applications. Although Webcam support, RichTextBox, MEF, WebBrowser and other new features are pretty exciting, I’m actually enjoying some of the more simple features that have been added such as text trimming, built-in wheel scrolling with ScrollViewer and data binding enhancements such as StringFormat. In this post I’ll give a quick introduction to a simple yet productive feature called text trimming and show how it eliminates a lot of code compared to Silverlight 3.
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Silverlight TV with Myself, John Papa, Shawn Wildermuth and Ward Bell
I had the chance to go on a live episode of Channel 9 while at DevConnections and had a lot of fun chatting about various Silverlight topics and answering some fairly unique questions posted on Twitter. Here’s more info on the episode from John Papa’s blog:
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Handling WCF Service Paths in Silverlight 4 – Relative Path Support
If you’re building Silverlight applications that consume data then you’re probably making calls to Web Services. We’ve been successfully using WCF along with Silverlight for several client Line of Business (LOB) applications and passing a lot of data back and forth. Due to the pain involved with updating the ServiceReferences.ClientConfig file generated by a Silverlight service proxy (see Tim Heuer’s post on that subject to see different ways to deal with it) we’ve been using our own technique to figure out the service URL. Going that route makes it a peace of cake to switch between development, staging and production environments.