There are many new feature announced to support Text advancements in Silverlight 5 Beta. Among them, one is the character spacing. This feature adds spacing between characters inside a TextBlock, RichTextBox and other control elements.

 

In this post we will demonstrate the use of this new feature and also showcase a simple demo to make you understand better. Read it and start learning Silverlight 5 features.

In my latest two tips we have seen that we can customize the string using Run, Span tags as well as StringFormat in the XAML page. What about if I want to format it for proper DateTime, Currency or Numeric style? As I told you in my last post that, we can achieve the same using the StringFormat parameter in XAML too.

 

Here in this post, I will demonstrate you the process in depth. Read to know more about it and make your life more comfortable designing your Silverlight application.

Yesterday in this post "Tips: Formatting Silverlight TextBlock Control", I shown you how to use various tags like Run, Span, Bold, Italic and Underline to format the text of TextBlock control, present in your XAML code. I also described the use of Run to bind multiple strings inside a TextBlock control.

 

Today in this small post, I will show you a different method to concatenate multiple text content inside a single control. This tip will help you next time while doing the same. Read to know more.

In general we use multiple TextBlock controls inside a StackPanel to format a single line. In this post I will show you a different way to format a single line. This is very useful if you want to bind any data in the middle of the text string. Also this is useful if you want to format the line with multiple formatting option. Read to know more about it.

Many of you don't aware of it in depth, mainly the freshers who just started doing their hands dirty with the light of Silver. In this post I am going to describe you about AppManifest.xaml file and it's uses in depth. Read the complete post to know more about it.

 

Don't forget to leave your feedback and/or any queries at the end of this post. Appreciate for reading this post.

Today, I received my Code Project MVP Certificate by courier. This is my first MVP Certificate from CodeProject. Feeling very proud to be part of the Global MVP team. I am happy that, my contribution towards community and their regular support gave me the chance to achieve this. This recognition I will contribute to each and every supporter of mine, who helped me in various way to achieve this award.

In this post find the certificate that I received.

In this post, I am going to give a Tip of using Expression Blend to create a Gradient color from any color pattern. Sometime, you might have a color pattern that you have to use in your UI and don't know how to pick the exact color to your UI. This simple post will help you to understand it properly.

After reading this post, you will be able to pick any gradient color from a pattern and use as easily as 1-2-3. Hope, this will help you. Feedbacks are always appreciable.

That's a good question came up after the series in my blog. Someone asked why should one use Custom Control instead of User Control? Hence, let's extend the series and discuss about that. I apologise the delay of this post. I should explain this at the start of the series, but actually my goal was to explain you how to create and use Custom Control in Silverlight.

 

It is better to do it later than never. Also, you are now familiar with Custom Control creation. Hence, start describing it. You will come to know more about this here. As always, don't forget to share your feedback at the end of this page.

Here is the last chapter of the series for Silverlight Custom Control. In this article, we will learn how to access the template parts from code behind to do various operations in the UI front.

 

Hope, you read the previous three articles and familiar with the Custom control as of now. This article will help you to understand accessibility of the template parts from the code. So, let's start discussing now. Appreciate your feedback as always.

Continuing to our 2nd chapter of the series here on Silverlight Custom Control. In this chapter we will discuss on dynamically setting the Content and other properties to our Custom Control that we implemented earlier. After reading this article, you will be able to create properties and set content dynamically to your control.

 

So, lets start describing them and learn something again today. These series of posts are mainly targeted for beginners but anyone can read it to refresh their learning. Don't forget to leave your comment at the end of the post. Any queries, please drop a line. I will try to help you as early as I can.

This is a continuation to my previous post "How to create a Custom Control in Silverlight?" In this tutorial part, we will discuss on the template and modify our basic template to give a better look as per our need. In this chapter, we will learn about template Part and how to modify the existing template.

 

Read out more to learn in depth about Custom Control in Silverlight. This will benefit you not only for Silverlight but for WPF and Windows Phone 7 development too. At the end, never forget to provide your feedback.

I am working on Silverlight since 3 years and during the initial period I had a fear on creating Custom control. I was more confident creating UserControls during first one and half year of my job. But when I started working on custom controls, I came to know the power of custom control and all the fear gone out of my eyes.

 

It's around 2 years, I am working on it and every time I am exploring some great stuffs. Though it's a long time since Silverlight launched; still, I am seeing the same fear on others and hence decided to write a good series on it (explaining all the details), which will be beneficial for beginners.

 

In this tutorial part, we will discuss on "How to create a Custom Control in Silverlight". This is very basic and will be helpful for a beginner. Don't hesitate to leave your feedback at the end. If you have any query/suggestion/feedback drop a line here. I will try to answer you as early as possible.

In this post, I will share you some important Shortcut keys of Microsoft Expression Blend 4. If you are working with Expression Blend 4, this will definitely help you to improve your daily productivity work. Keep the list with you always to best use of the Shortcut keys in Blend 4 while designing your XAML page.

 

If you have more shortcuts, please share those to me and I will include them here as the key resource. Thanks for your support.

You might know that, LightSwitch is now in Beta 2 stage. Microsoft released it few days ago. I have a series of Tutorial on LightSwitch Beta 1 where we discussed on creating database tables using the LightSwitch table designer.

 

In this tutorial, we will discuss how to attach an existing database table available in your SQL server database. This was also available in Beta 1 release. This time we will discuss with the latest version. Read the full post and at the end leave your feedback.

Microsoft is going to release Internet Explorer 9 RTM on Monday, 14th March 2011. Currently it is in Release Candidate and if you want to try it out, can download the RC version from net. Internet Explorer 9 has lots of new features and enhancements which will give you much faster and secure web experience.

 

In this post, we will discuss about the history of Internet Explorer which will include various Internet Explorer versions and their features.

You all might know about ReSharper tool. The current stable version of ReSharper is v5. The ReSharper team is currently working on their development to release the next version of ReSharper i.e. v6.

The new version of ReSharper has some cool new features like JavaScript, CSS and XAML support. It is currently in the early development stage and user has right to try out the new features and give feedbacks to improve them.

Yesterday I installed the new EAP release and tried out some cool feature. Among them one is: "Color support in XAML page". In this post, I am going to describe it to you. Read out the full post to learn about it.

The Add Reference dialog is not a new one in Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools, but in this release they updated this dialog with Multi Targeting feature. What is this multi targeting feature? If you are using the new Add Reference dialog of Productivity Power Tools since it was released, you might find that, some dlls are not available there if your project is targeting Client Profile.

 

 

This post will discuss about this. Now, using the updated add reference dialog you can see all dlls which are not available in Client Profile framework. This also give you option to add those assemblies in your project. So, let's discuss on it.

You might know about the Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools extension, which has several features on top of the Visual Studio's default IDE features. Recently, they released the new version which has some other benefits over the previous versions.

 

 

In this post, I am going to discuss on the Quick Find feature of the new Productivity Power Tools. Read the full post to know more about it.

Telerik has a great collection of Silverlight controls named as "RadControls". These controls are built on Microsoft Silverlight and includes 40+ UI controls for building rich line-of-business Silverlight applications. They have some great themes to support those controls.

 

Some of my readers asked me to write articles on Telerik RadControls. As I received a couple of request, hence thought to start with that. I will write a series of articles on my exploration on that and this is the first one of them. Read to know more about it.

Today morning I received the great news that, I have been awarded as CodeProject Most Valuable Professional (MVP). It's definitely a great achievement for me.

 

Last year I wrote 32 articles, added 37 small blog articles, 8 Tips & Tricks in CodeProject; also I answered some queries in Technical forums. I was an active GIT forum member too. All this effort gave me the fruit. Last year, received the Microsoft MVP award for Silverlight and this year from CodeProject. Wuhu!!!