1. Introduction

Silverlight 3 is already a fact and along with it a new version of Expression Blend has been released. One of the changes in the Expression Blend that makes me a deep impression is that the new Blend has been made more approachable for designers. Beside the behaviors, Photoshop and Illustrator importers, the new Blend 3 makes a huge step in the direction of making better user experience. This step is the SketchFlow. The SketchFlow is a new set of tools for Expression Blend to create sketches and prototypes of interactive content and applications.

The official release of Silverlight 3 is already a fact and at Silverlight.net you can find the latest files for download. For more information on how to get started with the new Silverlight 3, pay a visit to our Get Started page.

With the official release there are a lot of changes that will affect in some way the Silverlight 2 and Silverlight 3 Beta applications. As the list of changes is pretty long, I will overview only the most interesting of them, but to be fully intact with the new release and to convert your application as fast and easy as possible, be sure to read this breaking changes document, provided by the Silverlight SDK team.

1. Introduction

The use of Deep Zoom Composer for creating deep zoom source files is often inconvenient.

For example, one guy has his online shop with thousands of high quality product images and after the release of Silverlight Deep Zoom technology he decided to use it. Surely he can’t decompose his images using Deep Zoom Composer, because due to the amount of existing site images it would take too much time.

And this is not the only case when you want to dynamically generate multi scale image tile source for high quality images without any other preparations.

1. Introduction

Currently Silverlight supports two ways of duplex communication: sockets and WCF polling duplex services. I was really impressed by the simplicity of using WCF polling duplex in Silverlight 3, but its responsiveness and scalability leaves much to be desired. On the opposite site we have sockets, which are rather tricky to use, but their responsiveness and scalability satisfy real world application requirements.

In this article I’m going to introduce my SocketsLight framework, which should simplify the working with sockets by providing high level API over .NET sockets library.

Introduction

Silverlight 2 has introduced many interesting features and controls but it misses something that Silverlight 3 makes possible –easily creating and manipulating rich data forms. These series of posts will help you when creating rich data forms in Silverlight 3 in your projects. Silverlight 3 introduces a new control, called DataForm. It enables various methods for display, edit, update and navigation through data.

The DataForm control is like the DataGrid control in Silverlight 2. But while the DataGrid control is used to manipulate a list of items, the DataForm control focuses on the item itself.

1. Introduction

This is the first article of my series about deep dive into  ADO.NET Data Services. In this article I'm going to show you how to implement your own ADO.NET Data Services proxy with T4 templates.

Source code and database backup

2. Content

2.1 Problem

ADO.NET Data  Services is a very powerful toy, but as many other cool Microsoft technologies it needs some workarounds to become usable in the real world applications.

Most of the problems are connected with the auto generated proxy which is created after the addition of a service reference.

1. Introduction

In this article I will present you a game which I created on Silverlight. It is a very small and simple but extremely popular game – the n-puzzle game. The n-puzzle is known in various versions, including the 8 puzzle, the 15 puzzle, and with various names. It is a sliding puzzle that consists of a frame of numbered square tiles in random order with one tile missing. If the size is 3x3, the puzzle is called the 8-puzzle or 9-puzzle, and if 4x4, the puzzle is called 15-puzzle or 16-puzzle. The object of the puzzle is to place the tiles in order (shown on the next figure) by making sliding moves that use the empty space.

If you are interested in more details about the history of the puzzle game, you can use the next link. But now let’s roll up our sleeves and dive into the world of Silverlight. The demo can also be found on a separate page.

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

1. Introduction

Animations allow you to create truly dynamic user interface. They are a core part of the Silverlight/WPF model. The most natural way to create them is to create them declaratively (in the XAML), configure them, and put them into action without writing a single line of C# code or using timers. At first glance, I thought that the property-focused nature of Silverlight animations seems terrible limiting. However, in the process of work I found out that it’s surprisingly capable.

Introduction

Silverlight helps for creating Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). It runs in the context of the browser. There is an isolated area, called sandbox, which holds the Silverlight application. But why is it necessary to restrict the Silverlight applications in such a way? The answer of this question is pretty simple - because of the security. Running such applications locally is dangerous. They may damage your computer or your data. So, there is a necessity to somehow restrict them. Thus, a Silverlight application runs in the sandbox.

Short Introduction to the RIAs World

Nowadays the web space is full of different sites. Old-fashioned HTML is slowly being replaced by the new Rich Internet Applications (RIA). But why are they so popular? The passion of the RIA technology is that it tends to reform the static HTML sites in order to make them look more like Desktop applications.

Why Silverlight?

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