Resources

1. The Problem

In this article I’ll show you a simple solution for navigation between pages in different Xaps, by using Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF). Recently I hit the following issue, while playing with MEF. Suppose that you have a Silverlight Navigation Application. Your application is partitioned in different modules (plugins, extensions, add-ons or whatever). Let's imagine that 
your application has three plugins – Orders plugin, Products plugin and Suppliers plugin, as shown on the snapshot below.

In this third and last part of the duplex story in Silverlight, we’ll take a look at the third option offered by Silverlight to perform duplex communication.

Let’s quickly review the first two options. In Part 1, we looked at the Http Polling Duplex binding. Using a continuous polling mechanism on the network layer, this binding makes it possible to create an illusion of duplex communication. The big plus of this binding is the possibility we have to use it in internet scenarios, since all communication goes over plain HTTP.

In the first part of this series on duplex communication in Silverlight 4, we did a deep dive in one of the available options offered by the platform, namely the Http Polling Duplex binding. It’s advised that you read that article first, since this second part continues where we left of in the first part.

To summarize the first part quickly, we saw that Silverlight applications in some situations can really benefit from duplex communication. In scenarios where the client needs to be updated because of changes in the state of the server side (for example a change in a database, a file change…), the best solution is working duplex.

This article is Part 2 of the series Silverlight Applications with Telerik OpenAccess ORM

• WCF RIA Applications with Telerik OpenAccess ORM Part I: The Basics
• WCF RIA Applications with Telerik OpenAccess ORM Part II: Create, Update, Delete and Validation
• Introducing Telerik OpenAccess Data Service Wizard
• WCF Data Services with Telerik OpenAccess ORM
• WCF End Points Services with Telerik OpenAccess ORM
• Silverlight Applications for Windows Azure with Telerik OpenAccess ORM Part I: Connection to SQL Azure
• Silverlight Applications for Windows Azure with Telerik OpenAccess ORM Part II: Developing the Silverlight Client and Deploying the Application

1.

1. Introduction

I recently found myself in the following situation. My boss came to me and asked me: “Dude, we have a big Silverlight project, performing a great number of CRUD operations. We need to find a unified way of showing Modal Dialogs in a MVVM manner, without using any code in the View. The logic of showing dialogs must reside in the ViewModel, not in the code-behind. Also do you remember our previous WinForms projects? There are several pretty useful classes, such as BindingSource and DataRowView, implementing BeginEdit, EndEdit and CancelEdit functionality out of the box.

Introduction

In this article we’ll look at building a spider, which can load web pages and extract links. It will then allow the user to select which links it wants to retrieve, which adds more links to the list. It will look something like this:

Building it will involve using a two-way DOM Bridge to interact with JQuery and building some parsing mechanism to use on the HTML we retrieve.

Introduction

Let’s imagine a scenario in which you have a series of Excel files (.xlsx) on your computer but you don’t have any Microsoft Office installed. What can we do if we want to examine the content of these files?
In this article we will describe a small Silverlight application allowing you to open and view these files and also create line series graphs. I used this exercise as laboratory to familiarize myself with some of the new features of Silverlight 4 like, for instance, drag&drop of files from local folders to the application, drag&drop between controls in the application, right click event handling, theming and so on.

Introduction

Some years ago (pre-silverlight times) a client ask me for a weird requirement…he wanted to drag files from his local explorer and drop them on their ASP .net grid application without using any ActiveX help… I thought, umm… is that possible?

With the advent of Silverlight 2 we got the same request again, … we knew this time it was not a technology limitation, it was a sandbox security limitation, how does the Ms chaps can offer this feature without exposing a security hole? Well it seems that they have managed to “open the box” for this feature in Version 4 on a secure and very easy to use way.

Whenever a new version of Silverlight is released, I start examining its features from two perspectives: how would my current (and planned) LOB applications benefit from using these new features, and what cool new things can I build to entertain my children.

This article will guide you through the process of creating a doodling application (you know, for kids ;)), while covering some of the most visible (or not) new features, coming with Silverlight 4. But this is not just about new features, it’s about how they are prepared and served.

Among the new features introduced with Silverlight 3.0, Out-of-Browser is certainly one that has aroused more interest among developers as it opens very interesting usage scenarios that go beyond the traditional Web application, with version 4.0 this feature has been enhanced with additional options that makes it a viable alternative to classic desktop applications.

Introduction

Out-of-Browser mode allows a Silverlight 3.0 or above application to be detached from its natural host (the browser) and be run by the final user as any desktop application.