I was working with WPF/Silverlight since March 2008 and learnt lots of things. I wrote lots of Articles on Silverlight and published in my Blog. Today I decided to share you some of the best practices you should follow while doing development in WPF/Silverlight. Hope, this will help you guys while writing XAML codes. Read and try to strict with the guidelines whenever you are modifying your XAML.

 

Feedbacks are always appreciated. Hence, don’t forget to leave your comments at the end. If you have any more points, please share it here. I will review them and add those here.

 

Update [08-Aug-2010]: On popular demand, I updated this post with some explanation on “Why?”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

 

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.

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.

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.

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/

Recently I was interested to work with the Physics Helper for Silverlight. I saw couple of demos on net which uses the Physics library for Silverlight to create good animations with Friction logic. Yeah, friction. You can drop a ball on a surface which will bounce over that surface. I found it very interesting and thought to create a Simple Demo for it.

Here I will demonstrate you creating a Sample Application using Expression Blend. You don’t have to write a Single line of Code using Visual Studio. Is it? Yes, lets start doing that.

Microsoft released Windows 7 last year which has lots of functionalities including a nice UI. Among those features one of the most user friendly feature is Pin/Unpin application to Taskbar. You can develop WPF or Windows Forms applications in which you can implement this feature. But do you know that this is also possible in Silverlight? Yes, Silverlight 4 has the power to talk with any other application using the COM API. You can read one of my earlier article [Silverlight 4: Interoperability with Excel using the COM Object].

 

In this Article I will show you how we can talk with the Windows 7 Taskbar. Read the complete Article and provide your feedbacks or suggestions.

Microsoft launched their Expression Studio 4 today (7 June 2010), as expected. It includes Sketch Flow, Expression Encoder, Expression Web and Expression Design. This release comes with the Upgrade version. If you already have the licensed copy of Expression Studio 3, it will auto update to Expression 4 and you need no new license.

You can download it from Microsoft Expression Studio site.

Please note that, if you are developing in Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 and want to use Expression Blend, don’t install this version of Expression Studio. Continue working with the Expression Blend 4 Beta and the Windows Phone 7 CTP Tools for developers. Once the Windows Phone SDK releases, there will be service pack for Expression Studio.

Sometimes we write the following code while working with EventHandler and that may create some problems. I will discuss this later on. Let us see the code:


                private void RaiseOperationComplete(EventArgs e)
                {
                    if(OperationComplete != null)
                    {
                        OperationComplete(this, e);
                    }
                }


In the above case, suppose two thread subscribed to the same OperationComplete handler and one unsubscribed the event. In such scenario the OperationComplete event will become null and for the next thread due to the event is null it will not execute. This happens mainly in multithreaded applications but you can't guarantee for single threaded application too.

So what to do? How can we make sure that our application will not come into such situation and work properly?

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.