Silverlight 4 is going to be launch today, the 13-April at 8:00 AM PST by Scott Guthrie. Come and join the Launch of Silverlight 4.

There he will provide updates on the progress made in Silverlight 4 and will provide the details of availability of the developer tools, runtime and other news. After the live event Channel 9 will be hosting interviews with Scott and other key members of the Silverlight and Expression teams. Don't miss the opportunity to see it online.
Published by on under News | Silverlight
It was a great start today in the morning when I checked my mailbox and found one mail from the webmaster of DotNetSpark.com congratulating me as the “Member of the month – March 2010” for my work contributed to the community. Here is the first couple of lines from the mail:
Dear Kunal,
Congratulations!! You are our monthly Winners for the month of March, 2010!!!
www.DotNetSpark.com proudly announces you as the monthly winner(March, 2010) for your sincere and tremendous contributions at
www.dotnetspark.com.
This is the consecutive second day of the month when I received such Award. Giving my thanks herewith to the DotNetSpark team for the honour given to me. Thank you.

Published by on under Achievements | Awards
It was the Sunday morning, when I received the mail from the webmaster of DotNetFunda.com mentioning the subject line “Winner of the month – March 2010”. I was really surprised that I have been selected as the Winner for contributing Articles to the DotNetFunda.com site. I am really very pleased that, my articles are helping people to learn more about .Net, Silverlight and WPF.

I am very thankful to all who encouraged me to write articles. Also, I will give a lots of thanks to the team who selected me as the Winner. Thank you DotNetFunda.

Published by on under Achievements | Awards

As you all know that, the Out-Of-Browser (OOB) functionality in Silverlight is not a new feature. It is available since Silverlight 3. Microsoft added the trusted application behaviour in Silverlight 4 Beta. In addition to this, they introduced one more additional functionality called “Chromeless OOB WIndow” i.e. “Customized OOB Window” in Silverlight 4 RC (Release Candidate). In this article, I will guide you to create a simple customized OOB Window Application in Silverlight 4 RC. After the end of this tutorial, you will be able to create a Customized OOB Window in Silverlight 4 which will look similar to this.

 

Read the Complete Article @ DotNetFunda.com

Published by on under Silverlight | Web
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Today morning I came across one news that, one of my another article on “Tips & Tricks: Customizing Visual Studio 2010 Start Page” came as “Articles of the Day” in Microsoft’s official WPF site: WindowsClient.net. I am really thankful to the entire team who gave my articles such honour.

 

Read the Original Article @ DotNetSpark.com.

Published by on under Achievements | News

Silverlight 4 Printing API Demo Silverlight 4 now supports printing functionality using the Printing APIs. Using the APIs, you can now print your whole application screen or a portion of the application. Also, you can customize the look while you printing your part/full application.

 

In this post, I will step you guys to the depth of the printing API. Don’t forget to share your thoughts. Suggestions are always welcome. This will help me to improve my articles.

 

Published by on under .Net | Silverlight

Microsoft has just released the Silverlight 4 RC with several changes in the Silverlight runtime & in the Silverlight tools. Though there are couple of changes since Silverlight 3 & since Silverlight 4 Beta but it supports most of the Silverlight 3 applications by using Quirks mode. In some cases your earlier application will break or behave differently.

In this post I will describe you both the breaking changes in Silverlight 4 since Silverlight 3 & Silverlight 4 Beta. But before going to the discussion on the breaking changes, let me tell you what is Quirks mode. Quirks mode is a behaviour by which your previous application will work on the new runtime. Simple example is that, if you have Silverlight 3 compiled application it will try to run in Silverlight 4 (some cases it will fail) using quirks mode but if you compile the same application in Silverlight 4 it will not use the quirks mode and through errors on the changes.

 

What’s new in Silverlight 4:

  • XAP Signing
  • Custom Chrome Window
  • WebCam/Mic Configuration Preview
  • Text position and Selection API
  • Pinned full screen mode on secondary display
  • Support for Private Browsing
  • RichTextBox XAML clipboard format
  • Elevated apps doesn’t have Sockets Security Restrictions
  • Support for querying printer page size and printable area
  • XmlnsPrefix & XmlnsDefinition attributes has been added

 

Breaking Changes since Silverlight 3:

So, lets start with describing the breaking changes in Silverlight 4 since Silverlight 3.

  • Mouse Wheel Support - Silverlight 4 controls (ListBox, TextBox, ComboBox, ScrollViewer, Calendar, DatePicker, DataGrid) now have support for Mouse Wheel.
  • Shared BitmapImage Source – Now Silverlight 4 will render the images properly if more than one Image controls are sharing the same BitmapImage source.
  • ImageBrush.ImageSource returns ImageSource – ImageBrush.ImageSource in Silverlight 4 now returns ImageSource instead of UriSource which could be WritableBitmap or BitmapImage.
  • Keyboard Navigation in TabControl – Keyboard navigation in TabControl was a feature in Silverlight 3 having an issue with the TabItem activation. Previously pressing Up Arrow activated the next TabItem and pressing Down Arrow activated the previous TabItem. In this release they fixed it to properly activate the TabItem. In Silverlight 4 if you press Up Arrow it will activate the previous TabItem & pressing Down Arrow will activate the next TabItem.
  • Automation focus in DataGridCell - DataGridCell now receives automation focus when currency changes in the DataGrid, rather than focusing on the other part of the DataGrid.
  • Hit Test while Toggling Full Screen Mode – While toggling full screen mode Silverlight 4 will now rerun hit testing. This allows controls that were under the mouse before toggling to update the MoouseEnter state if necessary.
  • Whitespace handling with Span tag – TextBlock and RichTextArea now accepts text content & creates implicit runs generating whitespaces between inlines separated by CRLF.
  • DisplayMemberPath & ItemTemplate recreates all containers – Silverlight 4 now recreates all containers by invalidating them while there is any change in DisplayMemberPath or in ItemTemplate properties of the ItemControl.
  • New XAML Parser – Silverlight 4 now includes all new XAML Parser along with the previous XAML Parser. As per the runtime version detected in the application manifest it will parse the XAML in the appropriate parser. Apart from that, it has now additional benefits like “Better XAML compatibility”, “Greater parsing correctness & consistency”, “Better feedback error mechanism”, “Performance improvement”.
  • Panels Clear() method calls InvalidateMeasure – If you call the Clear() method of the Silverlight 4 panel it will now explicitly call InvalidateMeasure.
  • Virtualizing Stack Panel now scrolls by 3 lines – Mouse Wheel scroll in Silverlight 4’s Virtualizing Stack Panel will scroll by three (3) lines instead of one (1) line.

 

Breaking Changes since Silverlight 4 Beta:

If you were exploring Silverlight 4 Beta this section will be most important for you. There are some changes in both the runtime & tool since the beta release. So before starting with that please read the same carefully.

  • Removed TextSelection.CanInsert – TextSelection.CanInsert is now no longer available in Silverlight 4.
  • RichTextArea changed to RichTextBox – RichTextArea now renamed to RichTextBox.
  • RichTextBox.TextDecorations no longer exists – RichTextBox.TextDecoration is not available now. Instead of it you can use Inline.TextDecorations.
  • Default value to RichTextBox.TextWrapping – Silverlight 4 now has a default value of RichTextBox.TextWrapping to Wrap. If you don’t want to wrap your content you have to explicitly set it to NoWrap.
  • HtmlBrush renamed to WebBrowserBrush – In Silverlight 4 HtmlBrush now renamed to WebBrowserBrush.
  • COM Interoperability – COM Interoperability types are now moved to System.Runtime.InteropServices instead of System.Windows.Interop namespace.
  • WebCam/Output Protection Support – There has been a huge changes in the webcam/output protection support:
      • CanEnableHDCP renamed to CanEnableHdcp
      • CanEnableCGMSA renamed to CanEnableCgmsa
      • VGA, DVI, HDMI, LVDS, SDI, UDIExternal, UDIInternal also renamed to similar naming convention
      • VideoFormat.Height and VideoFormat.Width renamed to VideoFormat.PixelHeight and VideoFormat.PixelWidth respectively
      • AsyncCaptureImage call now changed to CaptureImageAsync
  • NotificationWindow – NotificationWindow.Visible property has been changed to NotificationWindow.Visibility
Published by on under .Net | News