In my previous posts I discussed about “How to work with Notification API?” & “How to Capture Video from Default Webcam?”. In this post I will describe about the another cool new feature (“How to use the all new Right Click Context Menu?”) of Silverlight 4.

Silverlight 4 has now support for right click. You can now register the event “MouseRightButtonDown” & “MouseRightButtonUp” to any FrameworkElement. Hence, no need to use JavaScript to disable the right click option. If you want to disable the right click option then just implement those events with:

e.Handled = true;

Now if you want to implement a Context Menu on right click, create the Popup Context menu & position it to proper location. The following code will create the context menu:

private Popup CreateContextMenu(Point currentMousePosition)
{
    Popup popup = new Popup();
    Grid popupGrid = new Grid();
    Canvas popupCanvas = new Canvas();

    popup.Child = popupGrid;
    popupCanvas.MouseLeftButtonDown += (sender, e) => { HidePopup(); };
    popupCanvas.MouseRightButtonDown += (sender, e) => { e.Handled = true; HidePopup(); };
    popupCanvas.Background = new SolidColorBrush(Colors.Transparent);
    popupGrid.Children.Add(popupCanvas);
    popupGrid.Children.Add(CreateContextMenuItems(currentMousePosition));

    popupGrid.Width = Application.Current.Host.Content.ActualWidth;
    popupGrid.Height = Application.Current.Host.Content.ActualHeight;
    popupCanvas.Width = popupGrid.Width;
    popupCanvas.Height = popupGrid.Height;

    return popup;
}

CreateContextMenuItems() will add some context menu items, on click it will show which menu item has been cllicked by you. Upto this I only talked about the creation of the customized context menu. Now we have to show it on right click inside the Silverlight application. In my example, I added a Border control which has the right click event registered. Now check the below implemented code which will be responsible for showing the context menu:

void brdRightClickZone_MouseRightButtonUp(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs e)
{
    txbMessage.Text = "Right Clicked";
    Point currentMousePosition = e.GetPosition(LayoutRoot);
    ShowPopup(currentMousePosition);
}

private void btnRightClick_MouseRightButtonDown(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs e)
{
    e.Handled = true;
}

On right mouse down, I am setting the e.Handled = true. This ensures that, this will not show up the default Silverlight context menu & the right mouse up implementation will popup the customized context menu at the current mouse position.

What next? Download the sample application created by me & implement your own logic to create the customized context menu which will open on right click on your silverlight application.

Download Sample Application:  Silverlight 4 Right Click Context Menu Demo

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Silverlight Notification API is a new feature introduced in Silverlight 4 Beta 1. If you are developing your application using Silverlight & want to show some notification message like Outlook to the user, then you can use this. Remember that, this feature only works out of browser.

To develop Silverlight 4 application you must need Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 which you can download from the Microsoft site. If you are using Visual Studio 2008 then you can install Visual Studio 2010 side by side too. After you installed the studio, just go with the installation of the “Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010”.

After you setup your development environment create a new Silverlight 4 application using Visual Studio 2010. This will automatically create a page “MainPage.xaml” for you. Add two buttons in your XAML. One is to install the Silverlight application as out of browser & another is to show the notification.

<Button x:Name="btnInstall" Width="150" Height="20" Content="Install OOB" Margin="5"/>
<Button x:Name="btnShowNotification" Width="150" Height="20" Content="Show Notification" Margin="5"/>

For implementing the Silverlight out of browser feature follow my earlier post: “How can you implement Silverlight 3 Out-Of-Browser feature?” Now go to the code behind file “MainPage.xaml.cs” & implement the click event for those. On page load, if it is running out of browser then create the notification window instance:

// Initialize a new instance of Notification Window
notificationWindow = new NotificationWindow();
notificationWindow.Height = 50.0;
notificationWindow.Width = 300.0;

Create your custom notification panel either using XAML or code behind. You can go for a nice looking UserControl. Here for example I will use a TextBlock inside a Border to show a simple message.

Border border = new Border()
{
    Background = new SolidColorBrush(Colors.Gray),
    Height = notificationWindow.Height,
    Width = notificationWindow.Width,
    Child = new TextBlock()
    {
        Text = "This is a Custom Notification from Silverlight 4",
        Foreground = new SolidColorBrush(Colors.White)
    }
};

Now, on “Show Notification” button click event check for whether it is running out of browser. If so, assign the notification panel you created to the content of the notification window instance & call the show method of the notification window. Here you have to pass the duration of the visibility of the notification in milliseconds.

notificationWindow.Content = border; // add the custom notification panel
notificationWindow.Show(2000); // show the notification

Now run your application & click on the “Install OOB” button. This will install the Silverlight application and open the desktop version of it. Click the “Show Notification” button to show the notification at the right bottom corner of your desktop.

Download Sample Solution:   Silverlight 4 Notification API Demo

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