Controls

Introduction

Yes, I was searching for months if there is any possibility to simple justify block text! And I didn’t find anything – except lots of posts like: “Why didn’t they implement it?”!

So I waited for Silverlight 3 Beta 1 to appear, and I began to hope and pray, but: Once again – there was nothing like block text. I was very disappointed. How should I display long text on the screen without clear formatting borders on both sides - and I don’t want to mix Silverlight and HTML again, either. I need this for building a web application composed of 100% Silverlight, and I don’t feel like doing the text-rendering and position-calculation by myself.

Introduction

With the beta release of Silverlight 3 a lot of new goodies were introduced and one of them is the navigation framework. It allows us to easily implement navigation between UserControls in a Silverlight application, interacts with the Browser History journal and provides us with Uri mapping. To learn more about these features read on the article.

For this article the demo will be the Mini SilverlightShow application, which I used not a long time ago as a demo to my article about the Telerik's RadPageNavigation control.

Introduction

The SaveFileDialog is a new dialog control in Silverlight 3 which allows the user to save a file on the client machine.

Overview

To demonstrate the common use of the SaveFileDialog I’ll give an example:

When you click on the button a dialog window appears which allows you to save a file.

Note: This article is submitted by Umesh Patel for Silverlight: Write and Win contest.Thanks a lot, Umesh! Hello All, Please drop a comment if you like it.

1. Introduction

Microsoft Silverlight uses the WebClient class to send HTTP requests to remote scripts, which allows the application to perform specific web server functions, such as retrieving files. Remote scripts, created with Active Server Pages (ASP) and Personal Hypertext Processor (PHP), add an additional layer of functionality with direct access to the remote server, such as the file system. In this article, I will demonstrate an application that utilizes the WebClient class to retrieve and display files from a remote server.

Introduction

In this article I will present the Silverlight application I was busy with recently - the Silverlight Metronome. It's a classical metronome (a measurement tool for tempo, mostly used by musicians) that is based on a pendulum with a moveable mass, which modifies its period. The project was very challenging as it needed some simple physics and a beautiful design to be implemented. In my opinion I have accomplished it or at least I have done it according to the physics; the design has always been a very subjective topic. Anyway, you can see the live demo here and download the source code here, but I'm sure that you would like from us to make a fast dissection of the application and see how it works.

Note: This article is submitted by Damon Payne for Silverlight: Write and Win contest.Thanks a lot, Damon! Hello All, Please drop a comment if you like it.

If you have used Amazon.com or Flickr you may be familiar with Image Hotspots or Hot Regions. This is a region on an image where clicking or hovering the mouse reveals some additional information in a callout or popup. By providing extra information your photographs become more interactive and appealing. In this article we'll build a Hotspot Designer that allows the user to draw Hot Regions on an image, a preview and display control, and a way to save their work.

Here's a finished example, using a photo of the "gear closet" from my home theater.

Introduction

Silverlight 2 has a couple of useful controls, which you can use when building your own applications. This collection of controls is extended by Silverlight Toolkit. It contains really great controls like Expander, AutoCompleteBox, TreeView, etc. You can download the Silverlight Toolkit from its site or you can see the online demo.

Imagine that you want to create a questionnaire. A questionnaire consists of questions and a list of possible answers for each question. In most occasions you are supposed to select just an answer.

Note: This article is submitted by Thomas Kirchmair for Silverlight: Write and Win contest.Thanks a lot, Thomas! Hello All, Please drop a comment if you like it.

1. Introduction

My recent aim in coding with Microsoft's Silverlight is to support ASP.NET developers by solving common ASP.NET- and HTML-problems scenarios easily with Silverlight applications and tools. The project of this article here shows my idea of solving the annoying ASP.NET-DropDownList bandwidth- and ViewState-problem with a huge amount of option items inside the control.

Using the normal ASP.NET-DropDownList with enabled ViewState is quite simple and easy, but the time you fill your ASP.NET-DropDownList with a great amount of option items.

This article is sponsored by Telerik

Vladimir Enchev, a senior software engineer from Telerik team, created an example demonstrating how you can handle millions of records in milliseconds with Telerik's RadGridView for Silverlight.