Products

1. Introduction

In the previous part of the article I described how to create a simple analog clock in Silverlight using pattern oriented approach. It was focused not so much on Silverlight but on the object oriented programming. In that part I will focus your attention on the process of improving the view (the clock face), making it much better and user-friendly. I will look at little more advance topics such as creating gradient brushes, creating custom figures, making transformations and of course adding movement and interactivity with animations.

So let’s roll up our sleeves and set to work.

Introduction

In Part 2 of this series I completed implementing the inventory list screen. The focus of this article is to describe the process of transferring data between the server (a WCF service) and the client (the Silverlight application), securely and sharing common business logic where possible.

Source Code* and Live Demo**

*To run the source code take a look at the "Using the sample application" section of the previous article first.

**To login in the sample application use the following Username: demo and Password: demo.

Introduction

In this article my aim is to give a quick overview of the controls included in the Silverlight Toolkit - launched a week ago and to give an example for every control included in the toolkit. I've made a little research for each control and I will share my impressions with the community.

Overview

The following Silverlight controls are included in the toolkit:

Components in the Stable Quality Band:

• TreeView
• DockPanel
• WrapPanel
• Label
• HeaderedContentControl
• HeaderedItemsControl

Components in the Preview Quality Band

• AutoCompleteBox
• NumericUpDown
• Viewbox
• Expander
• ImplicitStyleManager
• Charting

TreeView

Let's start with the TreeView.

Since the first beta release of Silverlight 2 there was a lot of talk about controls like a TreeView, auto complete TextBox, WrapPanel, DockPanel etc, and because of the high demand some custom controls were created. Last week the Silverlight Toolkit was released and introduced the so long awaited controls. In this article we'll take a closer look to one of them - the DockPanel.

Introduction

The DockPanel is a layout control, like the StackPanel and the Grid, but in some cases is far more powerful than them. The idea of the control is that you can "dock" its child controls in all of the four directions - top, bottom, left, right (compared to the StackPanel, which allows only two directions - top->bottom and left->right). That gives us pretty much freedom when designing our application's UI. Freedom in sense that the count of the nested controls will be less, which means less code and more simple structure of the XAML, or you don't have to bother to define the structure of a Grid first.

Here are some basic guidelines about the behavior of the control ( we'll take a closer look at some of them later on in the article):

• You can align the child controls to the top, bottom, left or right. The default alignment is to left.
• The child controls take the place that is left after placing the previous child controls.
• You can fill the rest of the place with the last child control. The DockPanel does this by default.

1. Introduction

I have been trying to get myself up to speed with the latest Microsoft technologies and more specially .NET 3.5,VS.NET 2008 and Silverlight/WPF. So rather than just ‘playing’ I have set myself a little application to write: a simple analog Silverlight clock. It is extremely simple application that I have been able to complete the first version of it just for few days (working only in my spare time, if I had any). The target of that article is to introduce some basic concepts of programming in Silverlight, such as: drawing simple elements, using styles, making simple transformation, as well as introducing some of the most important and powerful approaches in object oriented programming.

Source code

Introduction

In Part 1 of this series I covered developing the framework for a Line-Of-Business application in Silverlight, including the user interface framework, communication with a WCF service, a login screen, and a basic inventory list. In this article I will take you through the steps to extend the functionality of the inventory list to page, sort and group the results.

Source code* and Live Demo**

*To run the source code take a look at the "Using the sample application" section of the previous article first.

**To login in the sample application use the following Username: demo and Password: demo.

Limitations of the Standard DataGrid Control

It never ceases to amaze me how Microsoft repeatedly releases grid controls that don’t provide the ability to group similar rows together under a heading (such as the ASP.NET GridView control, the DataGrid and DataGridView Windows Forms controls, and until recently WPF didn’t even have a data grid in the SDK!).

Introduction

With the Silverlight 2 release candidate arrived three new controls: PasswordBox, ProgressBar and ComboBox.  In this article we are going to explore some of the features of the ComboBox. Also we change the look of the control using a few templates based on the default control templates. You can see all the source code here.

Download source.

ComboBox and ListBox

The ComboBox control is very similar to the ListBox control. It derives from ItemsControl and Selector, it has ItemContainer property but it also has a few additional things that are connected with the drop down items menu.

Telerik's RadPageNavigation control meets Mini SilverlightShow

In the Q3 Release of the RadControls for Silverlight, which is compatible with the RC0, you can find the RadPageNavigation control. It provides Silverlight applications with navigation, navigation history and possibility to use the browser's back and forward buttons. These three features are great and via them we are able to give the users greater experience when using Silverlight applications. For example we can create a standard web site scenario using several Xaml pages and the RadPageNavigation control and I've done it. This article describes the whole process I went through in order to implement the functionality of the control, but before write it, I needed a project. After quite a wondering I decided to implement part of the functionality of SilverlightShow into a Silverlight application and soon the name of the project was also revealed - Mini SilverlightShow. I choose that name because the Silverlight implementation of the site will have less functionality and will be smaller in size. Creative, isn't it?

Here you can find the Mini SilverlightShow live demo and source code. Now let's get the things explained!

With the release of the Release Candidate version of Silverlight 2 three long awaited controls were presented - the PasswordTextBox, the ComboBox and the ProgressBar. Since the need of such controls were pretty big, a lot of custom controls were created and the existing ones have been extended in order to fill that need. Probably you've already read a couple of tutorials about creating your own ProgressBar control. We have also developed our own simple progress bar for the Voting control and I was ready to show it off in a separate article, but that's not necessary now. Instead of this we are going to take a look at the ProgressBar control that came with the release candidate and show some of its basic features.

Download source code

Update:  The demo above is converted to Silverlight 2 RC0. The only thing you have to change in order to run the code under Silverlight RC0 is to place the generic.xaml in a folder called "Themes" in the project of the voting control. Everything else is compatible with the release candidate.

During the progress of the Silverlight: Write and Win! contest - one has finished and in the end of September another one ended, we thought that it would be nice to create a simple Voting control in Silverlight that will host the poll for the articles in the contest. The custom control we've created is based on the ItemsControl and its items are also custom controls. The biggest advantage of this control is that it's independent on the type of the objects that you pass as ItemsSource. You just set which properties of your business object to be used as Text and as Value for the poll options. That way you don't have to change them according to the control. The control also has a simple progress bar that visualizes the percentage of the votes. 

Source code

Note: The source code that is available for download is the one used for the article. To create this demo and the voting control for the site I made some modifications to it. The reason I post the basic source code is that you may want to make your own modifications to the control - like allowing multiple votes or only one time voting, modifying the user experience and the styling, adding total votes and poll title, customizing the workflow in the control etc. If you are interested in the things I have modified, I'll gladly share them with you, otherwise you can easily make your own modifications.