Beginners Guide to Silverlight 4 PathListBox Control (Part–II)

In my previous article “Beginners Guide to Silverlight 4 PathListBox Control (Part-I)” I described about creating your very first PathListBox control in your Silverlight application followed by creating a Circular path to position the items in the circular edge. From that article, I think you are now familiar with it.

 

In this post, I will demonstrate you guys how to animate the items in a specific direction. This not only guide you for animation in PathListBox but also will help you understanding the StoryBoard creation (if you are very new to Silverlight). Read the whole article and at the end don’t forget to leave your comments.

Beginners Guide to Silverlight 4 PathListBox Control (Part–I)

Have you ever heard of PathListBox introduced in Silverlight 4 as Expression Blend 4 namespace? Yes, it is a new control added in the “http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/2010/controls” namespace. You can use this to position your data, text, images or other controls in the way of a single or multiple path controls. You can use your jig-jag path to set your contents or you can use circular or rectangular path to organize your content.

 

In this article, I will guide you to understand the functionality of this control. Also, I will guide you step-by-step to create your first PathListBox control demo application. Here we will create the above two samples where the collection of texts will position them in proper location on the edge of the circular path.

 

Readout the complete post to learn about it and at the end, if you have any queries or comments, please let me know. I will try to answer your queries as soon as possible.

“Searchable Add Reference” dialog using Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tool

In my earlier post on “Interactive ToolTip using Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tool”, I discussed about “Interactive ToolTip” feature which comes with the Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tool. In this post, I will share information about the all new “Add Reference” dialog which is fully searchable for assembly reference.

 

 

If you didn’t install the Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tool till now, you can download it from Visual Studio Gallery. You can also directly download it directly from here. Read the complete post to know more about the new “Add Reference” dialog.

How to pass values to Silverlight application from ASPX page using InitParameter?

Neither the Silverlight is new nor the init params. But, I found various people in different forums asking for the logic on the implementation part for passing value to Silverlight application from ASP.Net application. In this post, I will describe about it.

 

Here I will discuss on the InitParams and tell you how to use it to pass value from your .aspx page to your Silverlight application. Read the complete post and if you have any queries, don’t hesitate to ask me.

Interactive ToolTip using Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tool

Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tool is a set of extensions for Visual Studio 2010 Professional and above versions which actually improves productivity of developers. In this Tips & Trick, I will show you one nice extension behavior named “Interactive Tooltip”, which will make your development life easier.

 

If you didn’t install it till now, you can download it from Visual Studio Gallery. You can also download it directly from here. Read the complete post to know about it more.

How to use new Rupee Symbol of India in Silverlight?

In July 2010, Indian Cabinet selected a new Symbol for the Indian Rupee which looks like as the snapshot shown at the left side. In this post, I will describe you how to integrate the same symbol in Silverlight application.

As the Unicode is not present for that till now, hence we need to use some font to write the letter using that. Fordian Technologies has the font and you can download it from their official Blog. The latest version of the font is available here: Rupee Font Version 2.0.

Let us have a quick tutorial on it to create a Silverlight application with the new Rupee Symbol of India in it.

How to Create a Silverlight OOB Installer Wrapper UI Library?

Before starting with the next part of the discussion, let me ask you some questions. Are you a Silverlight developer? If “Yes”, how many times you create a Silverlight Out-of-Browser application? For that, how many times you create an UI and write code to instruct the user to install the application as OOB application. I think the answer will be “Many Times”.

 

To solve this, we will create a Custom UI Wrapper (like the above snapshot) which will have all the codes necessary to guide the user. Once this is done, we don’t have to write the same installation code again and again over the applications. Read through the description and don’t forget to leave your comments and suggestions.

Microsoft Released Silverlight for Symbian OS

Microsoft has released Silverlight for the Symbian OS, which will allow your Silverlight applications to run in some selected Nokia handsets. Earlier, Silverlight was only available for web on desktop for Windows, Mac operating system. Later Moonlight came out, which is the linux version of Silverlight. Then Microsoft released Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 and this is the time for Symbian platform targeting mobile devices such as Nokia N97, N97 Mini XpressMusic etc.

 

File Explorer using Silverlight 4 COM Interoperability

You all know that, Silverlight 4 has the feature to talk with COM APIs. In my earlier posts I already mentioned various Interoperability functionalities of Silverlight. You can see some articles in my Blog. In this article, I will show you how Silverlight can read your local files, folders and drives. At the end of this Article you will be able to open any file/folder/drive and read their attributes.

Here I will demonstrate by creating a small application like Windows Explorer and reading all your drives and their contents in the screen like below screenshot:



You will be able to open the drive and browse through it’s contents (subfolders and files). Interesting? So, read it out and learn Silverlight 4 a bit more. Don’t forget to leave your comments at the end.

Silverlight 4: Text to Speech application using COM API

Have you ever heard of Text to Speech engine? “Yes” I think. Yes, it is not a new thing in the Computer World. It was available since Windows 98 (as much as I can recall) but it is completely new in Silverlight. You can now use the Silverlight application to give an API call to the SAPI Engine which will convert the text to voice. Sounds Good? This is achievable using the COM APIs only.

 

Here I will describe you how to use COM API to give a TTS call to the SAPI Engine. After reading this topic here, you will be able to write your own code to develop your own application having the Text to Speech functionality in Silverlight 4.

Text Trimming in Silverlight 4

Have you ever tried Trimming your Text in Silverlight 2 or Silverlight 3? If yes, just recall the lines of code you wrote for trimming your text content and showing an Ellipsis (i.e. “…” three dots) at the end of the text. If you didn’t try it earlier, then just imagine what you have to do and how you will do. Also imagine the no. of lines you have to write.

In this post, I will show you how I can implement this feature the easy way. Stop!!! I will not write here a huge code nor I will use any library to do that. Microsoft has added this functionality in Silverlight 4. You just have to set the Enum value to the TextBlock property. Wao!!!

So, how to do that? Let us try it.

Community TechDays is Back – July 2010 to August 2010

Microsoft Community Techdays is back again, starting from July 2010 – August 2010 in 9 cities across India. Attend it and get trained on latest Microsoft Technologies. You can join these sessions In-Person and also can watch them online streamed from various cities. Registration is open for both In-Person and Online Event (Developers and IT Professionals)

 

 

Go and Register for it now at: http://www.communitytechdays.com/