The Windows Phone Panorama control makes creating a wrap-around list of items very quick and easy to accomplish. In this short blog post I will show you how to create a nice panorama of a collection of photos. You will be able to take a set of your photos, drop them into this project and try out this sample right away. In Figure 1 you can see the sample application that you will create. I named it “My Life in Panorama” and it simply shows a list of pictures from your life. In this picture I show me at the top of Kilimanjaro in 2004.

Silverlight leaves a lot of choices up to you as a developer. For example, creating a menu or navigational system for your Silverlight application is pretty much wide open. There is a template navigational application that Microsoft supplies with Visual Studio 2010 that uses HyperlinkButton controls as the menus. However, if you have more than just a few menus, you will fill up the screen pretty quickly. It would be nice if you had a way to have expanding a set of menus, so you could have your top set of menus such as “Maintenance” and “Security” that would show up to the user, and then when you click on either one of these, they would expand to reveal each menu item as shown in Figure 1.

In my last blog post I showed you how to create a mirror image as shown in Figure 1. This simple image with a reflection is a nice effect, but it does look a little flat and not very interesting just sitting directly on the user control. In this blog post you will learn how to add a background using a border, a linear gradient and a drop shadow to give this reflection a little more depth and interest to the user’s eye as shown in Figure 3.

Adding images is very easy to do in Silverlight. All you do is add an <Image> element to your Silverlight user control with the Source property set to the path of where your image is located and that image will be displayed. So the following code will produce the image shown in Figure 1.

In Windows Forms applications you were able to get to your user's roaming profile directory very easily using the Application.UserAppDataPath property. This folder allows you to store information for your program in a custom folder specifically for your program. The format of this directory looks like this:

Hi All,

Back in October of 2009 I created a WPF login screen (Figure 1) that just showed how to create the layout for a login screen. That one sample is probably the most downloaded sample we have. So in this blog post, I thought I would update that screen and also hook it up to show how to authenticate your user against Active Directory.

One of the key concepts in XAML is that the Content property of a XAML control like a Button or ComboBoxItem does not have to contain just textual data. In fact, Content can be almost any other XAML that you want. To illustrate here is a simple example of how to spruce up your Button controls in Silverlight.