Resources

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.

Finally we came to the editing part that concerns the DataGrid control in Silverlight 2. After we took a quick look at the control, learned how to make some basic customizations to it and defined the three types of columns available, now we're going to see how can we edit the information. The DataGrid control has an integrated editing functionality. By double-clicking on a cell you automatically go into edit mode for that cell. If you want to cancel the edit just press Esc and if you want to submit the changes press Enter or change the selection. The purpose of this article is to show how to use this functionality and combine it with some properties and events.

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

Overview
Alright, so now that we know what a simple messenger looks like with WCF callbacks, what does it take to put one together in Silverlight? For starters, Silverlight does not have the same capabilities as the full WCF framework. WCF callbacks in Silverlight must be done through HTTP Polling and therefore we don’t really have a truly bi-directional environment. Instead, we must manually setup the message asynchronous message architecture with a few special classes in a new System.ServiceModel.PollingDuplex library.

Download the Solution

You may be familiar with the DZone network and our series of Refcardz. We are proud to announce that our newest refcard on Silverlight 2 has just been released and we would be honored if you can look through it and give us any review or feedback. Any supportive mention on your website/blog will be greatly appreciated :).

Please see information below:

Light up the web! Silverlight is Microsoft’s offering for designing, developing, and delivering rich interactive applications over the internet. These applications can run on all major platforms and in all major browsers.

Are you a fan of Twitter? Personally I'm, but I'm also a fan of Silverlight. Twitter has a couple of Flash and HTML badges (a.k.a widgets) you can get and put on your blog to let your visitors know what you are up to in the moment. However, Twitter does not have a Silverlight widget. What negligence! :) If you are like me and want not a Flash, but a Silverlight widget on your blog go ahead and read on how you can build one by yourself or just copy the text below to use it.

Most of the people reading this will already know this invormation, I hope. For ones recently being converted to Silverlight, I'm thinking I may push out a post like this irregularly.

There are lots of ways to stay connected with the world of Silverlight. The most obvious is Silverlight.net -- this is the source for the control, the SDK, etc. plus how-to videos and tons of resources. The forums there are unbelievabley busy with folks asking and answering questions. I'm not sure when some of those guys either work or sleep because they seem to ALWAYS be there :)

It seems like every day I find, or am shown, another blogger doing Silverlight...

The past 3 days, I've been working on my article on using Silverlight with all kinds of data and services. This is in fact like a transcript of the session I did at Mix Essentials in Belgium last week, but now in tutorial-format.

First, I take you through building services that are ready to be consumed by Silverlight clients using WCF. Then, we take a look at 3 types of services your Silverlight application can connect with: self-describing (using WSDL, meta-data driven), non-self-describing services (REST APIs like Flickr...) and finally RSS.

I hope this article really helps you in finding your way in Silverlight.

I posted the article on my "article-blog", www.CodeFlakes.net. The link is the following: http://www.codeflakes.net/blog/post/Silverlight2c-Data-and-Services-The-complete-story.aspx

Deep Zoom which is a technology that combines Silverlight with SeaDragon is a powerful and easy way to impliment zooming and panning large images. Below are a few examples.

• Exploration of Very Large or High Resolution Images with Great Performance: Take a huge high resolution image or collection of images (e.g. a map or collection of high-res pics) and allow users to zoom WAY in and pan around the image(s). If you haven't checked out the Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia site have a look.

On my never ending quest in Silverlight, I came across some very interesting links. Here are some that I really wanted to share with my readers....

• RSS databinding explained: Using the Syndication classes in Silverlight, it's easy to parse RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 feeds. In this article, the author explains how you can do some more advanced databinding scenario's with these classes.
• Code Camp Site Template: this actually contains a starter kit for an entire web app. Cool and extensible!
• KAXAML now supports Silverlight!