DarksideCookie

Welcome back! Or possible Welcome! Sort of depends on if you saw my previous post… Anyhow, you have probably figured out that it is time to go on with even more binding information. In the previous we looked at the basic binding syntax and functionality. So, what’s left? Well, a bunch of small, medium and large details…

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If you have read anything I have written in the past, you are probably familiar with the fact that I am a huge fan of MVVM. There will have to be a lot of convincing before anyone gets me to switch pattern when working with Silverlight. There are several things one must learn and understand before one can use MVVM well.

There is the obvious part of learning the actual pattern and how it works. Learning how to build a good viewmodel, which is dependent on the data model and time and other circumstances. I know that there are a lot of people out there, especially bloggers, that will tell you that you have to build something according to this or that and be a true purist to be a good developer. However, a lot of these people forget that most of us do actually have clients that don’t feel like spending 2 months or $10.000 just to get it to be a perfect solution. In most cases one must adhere to this and make the best of the situation.

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Or at least in IE 8. I haven’t been able to try this in IE 7 or even the dreaded IE 6, but it is flawed in my browser. If you try opening a new window by calling HtmlPage.PopupWindow and try to have it resizable it does not make it resizable. (BTW, Silverlight calls the property Resizeable, while Live Writer tells me it should be spelled Resizable…hmm…I’m Swedish, but that gives me mixed signals…)

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I had this application that I had built for Microsoft while Silverlight 3 was still in beta. And then when SL  3 went RTW, a feature stopped working. Or as I found out, stopped working partly. After a bit of fiddling, I found a way around it, but it is still annoying. This is the story of finding my first Silverlight 3 RTW issue…

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The last week and a half, I have together with a handful of people at Intergen, built a new Silverlight site for Microsoft. I call it a Silverlight site instead of a Silverlight application, since it is actually an entire site. We created the whole experience inside Silverlight instead of having Silverlight “islands” on AJAX/HTML page. The project has been intense and fun. It is kind of interesting to see how much you can get done in such a short timeframe.

On Thursday the 2nd we had more or less nothing but a few line drawings from our design guy Dave. At the end of Friday, we had a skeleton, that is a more or less fully functional site without any layout. ListBoxes on a white page just showing that the data was coming from over the wire from our WPF services.

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I have just gone through a project that used mouse wheel scrolling of different elements in the application. There are probably a LOT of different ways of doing this, and this is absolutely not something new. But I wanted to make the solution re-usable by using attached properties.

The only issue with handling the scroll wheel is that Silverlight doesn’t support that, and does not expose an event for that. So you have to roll your own. This is not hard to do. All you have to do is handle the mouse wheel events from the browser using the JavaScript bridge.

On a side note, I did actually find this blog that talks about using UI Automation to handle the scrolling instead. Even though this seems like a cool solution, I was too far down the other line to turn back. So my solution is using the traditional JavaScript way…

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Yes, I know. I guess I have to add this mandatory post. I have known about this date for quite some time now and also played around with SL3 for a while now. My first SL3 app was built about 5 months ago and I’m just putting the finishing touches on another one for Microsoft.

It is cool that is out there now and that we can finally start deploying apps on the new platform. Big congratulations to the Silverlight team! Great effort! Hope we get even more nice things in Silverlight 4. Keep up the work!

I will blog more about it as soon as I have time. However, I have more Silverlight 2 things to talk about as well. A few little tips and tricks that we picked up during the last project.

I’ve recently come up with a thing that is probably old news for most people. But to me it was new. I have styled a bunch of things lately, among them a bunch of buttons. Most of the buttons had MouserOver states, but no Pressed state. So I changed the template of the buttons and added my VisualStateManager (VSM from now on).

Being lazy as I am, I opened up generic.xaml and stole the original style for the button. And no, I did not use Blend! Why not? Probably because I’m a stubborn meticulous person who like coding things on my own…

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I’m currently working on this Silverlight project, that will be a growing video archive that you might see go online in the close future. Unfortunately I can’t say more at the moment. But that is not what this post is about. The post is about playing Smooth Streaming videos in Silverlight.

I’m not that familiar with media streaming and video formats and so on, but when we started talking about playing video, I insisted on it being streaming. Http progressive download is just not that attractive and great… It will use up unnecessary bandwidth as well as cause certain “issues” at the client. Such as limiting the users ability to “scrub” though the video…

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I’m currently working on a Silverlight 2 application that will go on-line in about a week. It is not a big application, at least not if you look at the functionality in it, but it still has it’s challenges. Especially graphical ones. But this was one that I didn’t actually expect would cause a problem…

Our designer has worked up some nice layout that we need to implement. One of the features in the layout is a list of items that the user can select from. Obviously a ListBox. But the thing that caused problems, was the fact that it was supposed to show a compact information layout for all items except the selected item. The selected item should have a more verbose layout and some extra functionality. Initially that seemed like a tiny problem. That would just be a ItemTemplate with a VisualStateManager. Apparently not…!

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