Archives
-
Migrating a Silverlight Application to Windows Phone 7–Part II
In this post I'm going to walk through additional features that have been added to the album viewer application that I wrote about in a previous post. Topics that I’ll cover include using the Pivot control, navigating between screens using the NavigationService class and leveraging data binding along with the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern. The image below shows the application discussed in my last post on the topic. The user can search for albums by artist and view a carousel containing album covers. From there they can move the carousel right or left using the arrow buttons and select an album to view more information. -
Demystifying Silverlight Dependency Properties
I have the opportunity to teach a lot of people about Silverlight (among other technologies) and one of the topics that definitely confuses people initially is the concept of dependency properties. I confess that when I first heard about them my initial thought was “Why do we need a specialized type of property?” While you can certainly use standard CLR properties in Silverlight applications, Silverlight relies heavily on dependency properties for just about everything it does behind the scenes. In fact, dependency properties are an essential part of the data binding, template, style and animation functionality available in Silverlight. They simply back standard CLR properties. In this post I wanted to put together a (hopefully) simple explanation of dependency properties and why you should care about them if you’re currently working with Silverlight or looking to move to it.
-
Top 10 Posts in 2010
Blogging’s a lot of fun and a great way to share what you’ve learned. It’s also a great way to learn based upon comments people leave that help you see things in an entirely new way in some cases. Since we’ve now moved on to 2011 (Happy New Year’s!) I wanted to list the Top 10 posts from my blog during 2010 based on individual views. Thanks to everyone who follows my blog and adds comments from time to time. Here’s wishing everyone a great 2011!
