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There are several “missing” features in Silverlight that people keep bringing up, or keep trying to find solutions for. One of them is the template selector, or DataTemplateSelector class to be more specific.

The DataTemplateSelector has a single responsibility, which is the way it should be. It is responsible for returning a DataTemplate based an object. Generally, it is used in lists, where the data template can be selected based on the bound item, and thus give different templates to different kind of objects in the list.

In Silverlight, this is not possible out of the box, and instead requires us to create multiple UI controls, and hide and show them using data binding. This approach works, but it easily becomes heavy and complicated, which is why I want a template selector that works…

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Sorry, for the cryptic title for this post, but it is sort of true, at least when it comes to client access policies. And I didn’t know it until a couple of days ago…

As a part of a project I am working on, we are deploying an STS (Secure Token Service) to handle authentication the users of an OOB Silverlight application. The STS is completely decoupled from the application, as it should be, and is hosted on its own, and the client requests a token from the service through a simple HTTP GET with basic authentication.

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There are many ways to expose functionality and data from a server to a client. And there is probably almost as many going the other way… In Microsoft scenarios, using WCF is the obvious choice for most of us, and when people talk WCF, they generally talk SOAP based webservices.

SOAP can however be a less than ideal choice in a some cases. It is way more complicated than some of the other options, and on top of that it has a tendency to bloat the messages being sent, which can be an issue when working with mobile clients for example.

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SignalR is a somewhat newish open source project that makes it possible to simulate push notifications on the web. It does so using long-polling (websockets available as an extra download), so it isn’t true push as such, but it gives the appearance of push. And on top of that, it is so ridiculously simple to set up…

Unfortunately, the NuGet package for SignalR doesn’t include the Silverlight client, which the GitHub project does. This is most likely going to be fixed in the near future, but currently you will have to do it the manual way instead of using NuGet.

The server part of SignalR works fine through NuGet, however, it doesn’t play nice with the Silverlight version as a property has been renamed and causes issues. So we have to do the whole thing manually to make sure both the client and server has the modified property… Once again, it is probably going to be fixed some time really soon.

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A question I keep running into when I speak about XAML-based application developer is how the developer/designer workflow should work. I don’t know if the question is common in general, or if it is because people feel that I’m not only passionate about coding, but also about design.

I have spent quite a lot of time thinking about how this workflow should work when working with XAML. In other technologies, I believe that the flow is much harder to get going, and I believe it requires more steps. In the “XAML world”, it should be a lot easier. The separation between functionality and design is pretty clear. And this separation should enable quite a well working flow.

Before I get into how I see it, I want to add a disclaimer… I have not been able to try this out in the real world as much as I would have liked. Mainly because I, in most cases, play all the roles. Or at least manage everything from XAML to code, with visuals coming from a designer.

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In Silverlight 5, we can use a new feature called “implicit data templates”. An “implicit data template” is a data template that will be used based on the type of the bound object instead of a “manual definition”. That is, we can define data templates and tell them what type they render, and then let the system figure out what template to use as it binds objects.

This sounds really brilliant… Let’s try it out!

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Ok, after yesterdays less technical post, I guess it is time to get back to writing a real techy post. This time, it is even techy, or geeky, enough to be about Silverlight 5, which currently is still in beta.

This obviously means that we can’t use it, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t have a look at some of the new features and start thinking about how we can upgrade our existing applications as soon as the new version is released…

Custom type providers might sound really obscure, and to be honest, not very interesting. But that’s where you are wrong…

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As a very small group of people might have noticed, my blog has been more or less dead for the last couple of weeks…or months to be honest… The reason for this is that I have had a bit to do as I have packed up my life in New Zealand and moved back to Sweden. This is a little bit more time consuming that you’d expect, so I have had to move my focus away from certain things. And unfortunately, my blog was one of the things I had to axe.

The move back to Sweden did however make me think about localization, as building apps in Sweden often means adding at least 2 languages, Swedish and English. The topic has been in the back of my mind for a long time, but I never really settled on a good way to handle the whole thing. However, at this point in time, I felt that I really had to come up with some options. And with the introduction of a specific feature in Silverlight 5 called markup extensions, I felt that it might be time to have a look at it.

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I really tried not to write this post. A lot of other Silverlight devs have already written it so I shouldn't, but I have had enough… I have finally got asked about the death of Silverlight so many times that is has pushed me over the edge…

Silverlight isn’t dead… It isn’t dying… It isn’t about to be killed…

How do I know this? Well, except for some of the information I am hearing from Microsoft about it, it doesn’t make sense… It makes no sense at all!

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Ok, so in my last post, I gave a brief introduction to WCF for the complete n00b. As a follow up to this, I would like to have a look at some different ways to consume these services.

The “normal” way to do it is obviously by adding a service reference to the project in VS, but there are alternatives that can make sense.

The samples I am going to use are specifically for Silverlight as they focus on simple bindings and features that Silverlight supports, but it can still be used for any .NET client.

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