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)

 

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Go and Register for it now at: http://www.communitytechdays.com/

Published by on under News |
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. Surprised smile Is it? Yes, lets start doing that.
Published by on under .Net | ExpressionBlend
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].

Silverlight 4: Interoperability with Windows 7 Taskbar using COM

 

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.

Published by on under .Net | Interoperability
image 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.
Published by on under ExpressionBlend | ExpressionStudio
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?

Published by on under .Net | Silverlight

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.

Published by on under .Net | C# 4.0
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.

Published by on under .Net | Silverlight
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.

Published by on under .Net | Silverlight
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?

Published by on under .Net | Tips
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.


Published by on under .Net | Silverlight