DarksideCookie

There is a simple little feature available in Silverlight that I think everyone should use, or at least more or less everyone. It is the possibility of adding a custom loading screen that will be shown while the plug-in downloads the Xap. It is simple to implement and gives your application that little extra to make it stand out. If you look at Flash for example, you will see that every Flash application has its own loading screen. During the time that the application downloads, you can display how much has been downloaded, but you can also give the user something to look at or even do. My favorite loaders the ones that gives you a simple game to play with while the application loads. This however, is only useful if the application is really big. And in that case, I would recommend splitting up the application in smaller pieces and load them on demand. Anyhow, how do we do it?

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I have several times gotten in a discussion regarding the visual aspects around changing the DataContext. That sounds like a really interesting discussion, doesn’t it…? Well, why is it a discussion at all, why is it something that I even bother writing about (just wait until you see the amount of code I have written as well)? Well…as you might have noticed in my previous posts, data bindings are very central in Silverlight development. At least if you do it like I do it. And that means that we work quite a lot with the DataContext of different controls. And out of the box, changing the DataContext will update all the binding, which is exactly what we want. But what happens when we DON’T want the change to be instantaneous? What if we want to add some form of transition? Well…as far as I know, you are %$@ out of luck. That is why I decided to try and build something that can do it for us…in a nice re-usable package…

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I just remembered that I just HAVE to recommend this great plug-in for Windows Live Writer. It is the plug-in I use to add code snippets to my blog posts. There are a few things design wise I would probably want to be able to change. For example being able to turn off the scrollbars and show all the code formatted straight up in a nice way. But except those minor things, it is a great plug-in. You can find more info about it here and download it here.

If you know any REALLY good plug-ins for code blogging, don’t hesitate adding a comment about it. I’d love to find more goodies…I just don’t have time to go looking for them…

I found this question on the Silverlight forum today (it might be “the other day” since I don’t know if I will even be able to publish this today) that I wanted to answer by creating a post. Why not just point towards someone else’s blog? Well…I tried that…but I couldn’t find one by doing a couple of simple Googlings (I love that new word…I will keep it and nurture it)…so I came to the conclusion that if it is that hard to find the information, it needs to made more available…on my blog…

So..what was the question? Well, the guy wanted to know how to use templates in a custom control. That sounds like a pretty simple request. There has to be lots of information available about this…well…not really apparently. In general I would recommend reflectoring it, but in this case I felt it was better to explain. So here we go…

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I want to start off this blog post with saying that I love Expression Blend! I have only used Blend 2 SP 1 before today, but I love the idea, the interface and the program in general. But in Blend 2, there were a few things I missed. The most obvious flaw in Blend 2 is the missing intellisense. It also expected me to do ALL my coding in VS, which to be perfectly honest is a good thing. Coding should not be done in Blend. Blend is the tool for the interaction designer, or possibly the “devigner” and not for the developer.

But this is where I start getting a little ambivalent. I want to be a good developer and say that that is the way that I generally do my Silverlight problems. The developer doing the coding in VS and the designer doing the layout on Design and then the interaction designer/”devigner” putting it all together in Blend. Unfortunately that doesn’t add up in my world…sorry Microsoft…I love the idea, but in my world it doesn’t work, even though I wished it did.

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