Silverlight 4 has the capability of accessing the COM object using the COM API. You can access any program installed in your PC using those APIs in Silverlight. You can open Notepad, Word, Excel or Outlook from Silverlight application.

 

Here I will demonstrate you the step-by-step tutorial on opening an Microsoft Excel book followed by data sharing between the Silverlight application and the Excel Sheet. Here we will use a DataGrid which will load some customer information. Then we will pass the data to the Excel Sheet and then we will modify the data in the external application (i.e. inside the Excel sheet). You will see that, the modified data will reflect automatically to the Silverlight Application.

The final release of Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 and the RIA services is out and you can download it from Microsoft Download site.

Read the complete Blog post made by Scott Guthrie regarding the Release of Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 and WCF RIA Services.

In this article, I am going to discuss with you regarding the Drag and Drop functionality inside a Silverlight ListBox control. This article will also cover the Drag and Drop operation between two ListBox control. We will use here the Silvelright 4 Toolkit to implement the feature.


Drag & Drop functionality is not present in Silverlight ListBox by default. Hence, there was a big problem implementing the feature. We had to write a huge code for this feature. But using Silvelright Toolkit you can do it very easily. You can download the Silverlight 4 Toolkit from the CodePlex Silverlight Toolkit site.

Silverlight BusyIndicator is not a new thing in Silverlight. It was first added in Silverlight 3 Toolkit in November 2009 release (if I am not wrong). In this post I will describe about this for those who wants to know about it.

So, What is this Busy Indicator? Busy indicator is a tool which you can add in your Silverlight application to show a loading indication to your user while saving some sort of operation in database. Generally it is useful when you calling your WCF Service to store something in server or retrieving some data from server.

You all know that Visual Studio 2010 is now available in its RTM version. There are lots of features available in Visual Studio 2010. In this tip, I will talk about the incremental search functionality available inside it, which is very useful in day to day life of coding.

So, what is the incremental search? Incremental search is a mechanism in Visual Studio 2010 by which you can search and focus on the searched keyword without any UI blocking from the user end. You don’t have to open the find dialog while searching for a specific keyword in your editor window. Interested to know how it works?

In my last chapter i.e. "Silverlight Tutorials Chapter 2: Introduction to Silverlight Application Development" we discussed on how to create a new Silverlight project, the structure of the project solution and later in this chapter we discussed on UserControls and various ways of development. After reading that chapter you are now comfortable to create Silverlight application and UserControls for your application.

Today I am publishing the 3rd Chapter i.e. "Introduction To Panels". In this Chapter I will describe about different Panels available in Silverlight. After reading this chapter you will be familiar with various types of Silverlight Panels. As this tutorial is mainly targeted for Silverlight 4, hence you will find some panels unavailable in the earlier versions of Silverlight.

Silverlight 4 now came up with the support of Command Binding. Using Command binding you can easily develop your Silverlight MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) applications where your view will not know about data. In this article, I will describe you the Command binding feature in Silverlight 4 Step-by-Step.

In this example, I will create a Customer View which will load the customer information from the code behind once we click the button “Load Customers”. The button will have a command associated with it to load the records instead of loading on click event. This ensures that the view will have less code & no relation with the data.

Hope, you read my first chapter of the Silverlight Tutorial “Silverlight Tutorials Chapter 1: Introduction to Silverlight”. In that post, we learned about the very basic informations on Silverlight, it’s System Requirements, pre-requisite to create a Silverlight application, XAP file, XAML file and hosting a Silverlight application.

In this chapter we will first discuss on how to create a new Silverlight project and the structure of it. Later in this chapter we will discuss on UserControls and various ways of development. After reading this chapter you will be able to create a HelloSilverlight application and UserControls for your application.

Couple of days ago, I started working on writing Silverlight Tutorial for Beginners on request of Mr. Sheo Narayan (Web Master) from DotNetFunda.com. I was busy for last few days to publish it online. I was really excited for it. Today, I am announcing my first Chapter of the Silverlight Tutorial for the public view. It will be a continuous process to complete the full tutorial. Please keep an eye for the next publication.

Please don't forget to provide your comments or suggestions.

In this chapter of the tutorial, you will learn about the very basic information on Silverlight i.e. what is Silverlight, what is the System Requirements for installing Silverlight and the pre-requisite to create a Silverlight application. After reading this chapter you will come to know about XAML, XAP file, Application XAML and how to host a Silverlight application.

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.