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Monthly Archives: April 2010

  • Join me for some exciting sessions at Devlink 2010

    I'm excited to announce that I'll be presenting four sessions at Devlink 2010 in August 2010. The sessions are listed below. Hope to see you there! Best of Both Worlds: Sharing code and UI between Silverlight and WPF Pete Brown Applications Swang-AUD 8/6/2010 1:00:00 PM "Let's face it, the two technologies just aren't yet 100% compatible. If you're an ISV or just someone inte...

    Published Thursday, April 8, 2010 | Tagged: , , , | Leave comment

  • New Channel 9 Video: Dave Campbell on Silverlight Cream

    I've known Dave for a while. He's a great contributor to the community of Silverlight developers. His site and daily link post, Silverlight Cream, has become the go-to source to find good Silverlight content and good bloggers. While at MIX10, I caught up with Dave and asked him just want went in to putting out Silverlight Cream as often as he does. Watch the video to learn more.

    Published Thursday, April 8, 2010 | Tagged: , , | 1 comment

  • Layout Rounding

    WPF and Silverlight both operate on a subpixel grid. That is, you can align elements on partial pixel boundaries, like this: <Rectangle Margin="10.5 10.5 10 10" Stroke="Black" StrokeThickness="1" Height="100" Width="300" /> Unfortunately, for single-pixel-width elements, the result is usually not what you want. For example, the...

    Published Thursday, April 8, 2010 | Tagged: , , , | 7 comments

  • Customizing the Caret and Selection Styles in WPF 4

    WPF 4 allows you to customize the caret (the blinking line in a textbox that shows your current cursor position), as well as the selection brushes. This is great to allow you to be able to fully incorporate a custom color scheme. Carets The Custom Caret is especially helpful when you need to optimize the contrast with the background, or fit it in with your own color scheme. Nor...

    Published Thursday, April 8, 2010 | Tagged: , , | 5 comments

  • Encoding/Decoding URIs and HTML in the .NET 4 Client Profile

    In the .NET 3.5 timeframe and earlier, many client developers referenced System.Web.dll in order to be able to use System.Web.HttpUtility and its helpful encode/decode and parse methods. While those functions were really useful, the full framework is a pretty hefty tax to pay for just a couple methods. I ran across this tax today when I tried to use a popular twitter library (w...

    Published Wednesday, April 7, 2010 | Tagged: , , , | 12 comments

  • Creating Awesome Applications when you're Clueless

    On a fairly regular basis, I get email or blog comments where someone will ask me how to create something they have zero experience with. Invariably, it's a project that is enormously complex. Poking a little fun (good naturedly, I'll add) the requests are usually something like this: Hi. I want to build the next space shuttle. I know how to build landing gear and the fuel inj...

    Published Tuesday, April 6, 2010 | Tagged: , , , | 17 comments

  • New Channel 9 Video: Richard Costall on Silverlight Manic Miner for Windows Phone 7

    One of the more interesting uses for Silverlight is casual gaming. When you add Windows Phone 7 Series into the mix, it becomes even more exciting. At MIX10, I met up with Microsoft MVP and all around cool guy, Richard Costall. He showed me how, with no real changes, he was able to get his Silverlight game Manic Miner to run on the Windows Phone 7 Series. In fact, he did the port...

    Published Monday, April 5, 2010 | Tagged: , , , | Leave comment

  • Windows Client Developer Roundup for 4/5/2010

    This is Windows Client Developer roundup #19. The Windows Client Developer Roundup aggregates information of interest to Windows Client Developers, including WPF, Surface, Windows 7, XNA, Windows Forms, Silverlight and Windows Phone. If you have something interesting you've done or have run across, please send me the URL and brief description via the contact link on my blog.  ...

    Published Monday, April 5, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Leave comment

  • Tip: Zoom your browser when taking Silverlight Screenshots for Print

    I'm working rapidly towards finishing up Silverlight in Action, Revised Edition. As part of the work for this, I find myself taking screenshots pretty regularly. For a print publication, you want your screenshots to be the highest resolution possible. A screen is usually 96dpi, while a book is 300, 600 or more dpi. One way to handle the difference is to just design big: use big fonts,...

    Published Friday, April 2, 2010 | Tagged: , , | 1 comment