Tips and Tricks

I think some of you may have developed an application that requires a lot of roundtrips on the server to retrieve data to be displayed to the user. Every time your application goes to the server it may have to wait for long running query to end its works, perhaps because the data are extracted from an huge database. Then it have to download the data and finally display them onto the screen.

If you have already deal with this kind of interaction you should know that the two connection limit of the web browser can become evident. For some of you that are not aware of this limitation you have to know that due to the RFC 2616 specification, the compliant browsers have not to hammer the network and are limited to make only two simultaneous connections to the server (per domain).

Introduction

In the first part of the series, I introduced the application, and created the “ugly duckling” version, where the end user could already browse the and watch the videos. In this part, I am going to add some bling to the app – namely the Intro animation, the ability to skip it, and to replay it. The Intro animation itself is not created with Silverlight, so I will just use it as a video. This part takes heavy use of Visual States, Behaviors and Easings.

Visual States

The application builds on Sample Data for displaying the videos’ metadata, and it uses Visual States to differentiate between the states of the application.

Introduction

As I promised earlier on Silverlight Show, this screencast series will show how to create the showcase application shown on www.response.hu (you may want to read the interview to get some background information on the project). The screencast series shows a real life example of how designers can add value to a project, and how a developer can support this effort by creating small, reusable behaviors that allow the designer to tweak things to shape the end result to be exactly as he wanted it.

During a recent work I found some trouble working with the TreeView control in a Model-View-ViewModel scenario. As usually happen, the standard controls are designed to work in an event-driven behavior and this non always marries with a correct MVVM implementation. After some work, I found a way to change the TreeView and transform it to be lazy loadable.

Download Source Code

The Model-View-ViewModel pattern has been introduced in Silverlight by few time and this platform lacks a complete support to the pattern by the standard controls.

1. Introduction

This is the second article of my series about Silverlight web services tricks. At first time I planned to write only about WCF and that is why I called my article series “Deep dive into WCF”, but with my last experience I decided to move away from mainstream and offer some new unusual stuff. That is why I have generalized name of this series to “Deep dive into Silverlight services”.

In this article I’m going to show how you can build a super fast REST web services using ASP.NET MVC and Google Protocol Buffers library.

Introduction

My XAP file is 5 Mb size, is that bad?

Unfortunately that’s a usual question for lot of new Silverlight developers, … you start coding you Silverlight app everything is easy to do, you can use lot of powerful third parties stuff, and finally you end up with an awesome application that runs quite well under Cassini / localhost, then you a realize that…

Well...

I was working with one of the web application localization. I was searching with couple of translator's available with the web. The most popular of them are

1. Google Translation Service

2. Bing Translator Service

I tried using the Google API for the web and it was pretty good. Then in recent times I came across Bing translator and tools link in them gave me the way to implement the Bing API. Bing is making a revolution in the search engines and so I liked to use that here.

Following URL's are referred for this.

Authentication and authorization plays a key role in the web world. Going distributed makes information sharing healthier. But only if it's allowed for the know contact it will be healthy. We can very well see this in the existing web world. We have the memberships and roles for ASP.Net web applications. In addition we also have forms authentication and NTLM authentication.

Going smart client is always best. But considering security it has to be more secure since smart clients attract all the people they can be easily prey to security vulnerabilities.

Merged Resource Dictionaries provide a way to define and split resources into separate files. By locating application resources in external file we can then reuse them between applications. This feature can be helpful in custom control development, but not only.

In Silverlight 2 resources cannot be factored into separate files and that leads to large App.xaml file holding application-wide shared resources. The same problem exists while developing custom controls. All default style keys must be specified in Themes/Generic.xaml which again leads to very large file.