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After having worked a bit with the Mode View ViewModel pattern in Silverlight, I've sort fallen into a trance chanting "MVVM, MVVM, MVVM". It gives the developer such a good platform to work with. The MVVM pattern is a modified version of the MVC and MVP patterns. By now, you are probablyabout to closer your browser due to the pattern rant I'm on. Well, don't. This isn't about MVVM really, only a little. The MVVM pattern was "created" by John Gossman at Microsoft, specifically to target WPF. This also means that it works great in Silverlight. But Silverlight is smaller, and missing some features... The CommandManager is one of them. This post shows a way to handle this shortcoming.

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In part one, a button like control was created. It worked like a button, or at least a little. It was a square with a descriptive text and a brand new Click event. Unfortunately that doesn't really make it feel like a button. There is more to a button, especially in Silverlight and WPF. First off, a button normally gives some visual feedback to the user, confirming that it is pressed or that the button is hovering over it. That visual feedback is something that you find in most button implementation, whether it is in Windows Forms, HTML or WPF. The thing that is special with buttons in WPF and Silverlight is that the content of the button - in this case the descriptive text - can be anything. And I mean ANYTHING. It could be a Grid with several controls inside. Not that I would recommend doing some of the things that you CAN do, but it is possible. So in this part of the tutorial, the button will get visual feedback and support for complex content.

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After having written mhy previous entry about how to style and template controls, I guess it is a good time to have a look at how to create controls that are template- and styleable. (Can you write "template- and styleable"? Looks weird...well...I am swedish so I'm allowed to write less than perfect english) Unfortunately, due to my lack of imagination, I don't have a really cool control to build and show you. So instead I'm going to create a very limited control that will work more or less as a simple button.

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Well, here it goes. I'm now going to publicly yell out the fact that I'm a lazy, ignorant person. A while back I wrote a little demo on how to store styles externally using my "ExternalStyleManager". I thought the idea was good and served a purpose besides being a good example for using attached properties... Well...

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Microsoft released some really cool charting controls a while back. ScottGu writes about it in one of his blog posts. It is a sweet little collectio  of charting controls both for windows and web development. In the web scenario, you add a specific webcontrol to your page, give it some data and it renders it nicely. At least that is the simple explanation. There is a LOT more things you can control and tweak to make it look like you want it. However, this time I'm actualy using the windows parts of the controls. Reason? Well, I need to create some charts in memory to be added to a PDF document. So I don't really want a webcontrol... So, here are some of my thoughts after working with it for a couple of hours.

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A couple of the guys at my company have started working on an internal Silverlight application. One of the guys is a former WPF developer, which gives him some serious advantages when starting with Silverlight. It actually gives him some serious advantages compared to my own sorry ass as well. However, it has some downsides as well. Downsides that sometimes end up with him sending me annoyed MSN messages.

He expects a bunch of WPF specific features to be available in Silverlight. I understand the "confusing". SIlverlight development is very close to WPF, except for the fact that Silverlight is in some aspects is tiny compared to WPF.

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I have spent a lot of time checking out Silverlight and its features. I have also spent a lot of time talking about it to a lot of people. And a reasonably large amount of the people I have talked to, have asked me about templating and styling and about how it works and the differences. I myself also had a little uphill battle to sort out the terms and get going... So I thought I would write an post about it... Sort of explaining it from my view.

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I spent a little time yesterday building a simple little PageProvider. For the record, it was an RSS PageProvider that would read an RSS fead and present the entries as pages... Not very complicated or special, but it needed to be done. It's going to be one of the exercises in the new advanced developer course for EPiServer. So, what was the problem...well...my provider worked, but only when I refreshed the page. The initial request would come up empty, but when I refreshed the page it would show up as it should...

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When creating a GUI-plugin you are basically either creating a usercontrol (ascx) or a webform (aspx). The problem with this is that when you deploy your plugin you have to deploy both an assembly and a second file. The location of the second file is of utmost importance since it is defined in the GuiPlugInAttribute's Url property. Is this a problem? Not in most cases, but once in a while it is. Can it be solved? Of course...

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I just came back to Stockholm after spending a few days at Oredev in Malmö. Oredev turned out to be a fantastic event. I arrived in Malmö late Tuesday afternoon and checked in to my hotelroom in the center of the city. Later that evening I got in my "costume" aka suit. I very rarely wear a suit and instead stick to baggy jeans and a hoodie... But since the speakers dinner that night was in the Town Hall, I went for a suit. It ended up being a bit overdressed, but hey...I like looking good once in a while...

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