Adding some style to the loading screen…
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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And then Firefox does it differently…reloading the Silverlight control when the css changes…
I’ve, as you maybe know, been working on a Silverlight flickr viewer for my fiancées blog. And now that I have finally got it all done, blogged about it and so on, it was time to actually implement it on her blog. So I took the code from my blog posts and built my services and view models, but tore out the entire view layer and replaced it with a somewhat prettier thing. It has a thumbnail view that is visible in her blog posts. It looks as small Polaroid photos scattered on her page. And then when you click one of them, it changes to a full screen view and shows a larger Polaroid picture with the pictures description an handwriting.
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