July 2009 - Posts
I’ve just started discovering Prism , mainly as a tool to help me use the MVVM with my apps. That said, by now, Prism proved itself with: Support for Commanding EventAggregator Unity integration Targeting both WPF and Silverlight EventAggregator is great...
Silverlight 3 includes a new type of a StackPanel , called VirtualizingStackPanel . VirtualizingStackPanel enables UI virtualization and is now the default items panel for the ListBox , with virtualization option enabled. If you want to turn UI virtualization...
Silverlight 3 puts the ICollectionView interface to some serious use and brings us the CollectionViewSource class, which provides a view on top of the data collection, meaning you can sort, filter or group your items within your view, without actually...
Silverlight 3 shipped with 2 built-in bitmap effects that can be applied to any UIElement – those are DropShadow and Blur. But not to worry, we can create and use a lot more effects, because these are pixel shaders, compatible with the ones built for...
Text readability is very important for any LOB application and since Silverlight 3 is aimed towards creating LOB apps, Microsoft decided to address the readability issue by supporting ClearType in the final SL3 release. The best thing is – it’s on by...
Want to create a new bitmap image in Silverlight? Want to capture a part of your application and use it as a brush? Silverlight has an answer for you – WriteableBitmap is a BitmapSource-derived class that you can manipulate in the runtime, either by rendering...
Doing non-linear animations with Silverlight 2 involved “playing” with key splines , and it took quite some time to get it right, even if using a tool like Expression Blend. Silverlight 3 puts some ease in this process by introducing the new, predefined...
After a week of spending my holidays, enjoying the sun and playing on the beach with my kids, it’s time to continue the Silverlight 3 countdown series… In the meantime, Silverlight 3 was officially released (it’s probably best to only reference the “Cream...
Silverlight 3 supports style inheritance through setting the BasedOn property. Although not as powerful as that in WPF, using this feature can significantly improve the maintainability of application styles – instead of duplicating several properties...
Another powerful Silverlight 3 feature is navigation. The concept is very simple: provide a space on your main page, which you’ll later fill with custom content – pages. You’ll be able to navigate through these pages (by using browser’s Forward/Back buttons...