I work a lot in Microsoft Expression Blend. If you do any Silverlight or WP7 development, you should too. A problem I’ve had lately is when creating a large number of User Controls. I don’t want them to contain the same content, but since they’re custom controls, there is no field for these settings in Blend.
I’ve today made good progress in the project I’m dedicated to. I amongst other things included a small video clip as a part of the application. As many of you know, video clips are fairly easy to handle in Silverlight. In XAML, it can be as easy as this:
<MediaElement Source="/Videos/MyVideo.wmv" AutoPlay="False"/>
When debugging though, the damned thing refused to work for me. I soon found out this was because of the method of debugging I was using. Here are the tree primary ways of debugging a WP7 application:
1. No phone, debug in emulator.
2. Phone tethered, debug in phone connected to visual studio.
3. Phone disconnected, code pre-deployed running on phone.
It turns out Media Elements will only display when in debug mode 3. Otherwise you’ll just see black or the first frame. This is also true for any camera functionality. If you have issues with your CameraCaptureTasks, try using debug mode 3.
Developer tip #23
Unfortunately, I won’t be providing the in depth look at my recent Silverlight project that I promised earlier. It still hasn’t been shown to our prospective customer and it wouldn’t be appropriate to show it publically before that.
Instead, I’ll be breaking down some of the lessons I learned from the project into little segments like this. At one point in the project I wanted to do a more advanced color animation than color to color.
Juicy code… and Superman in bondage.
I’ve been catching up on the sessions I missed during MIX10. There were quite a few to say the least. I think that Christian Schormann & Peter Blois’s session on Blend 4 was one of the sessions many visitors missed due to it colliding with Joe Belfiore’s introduction to WP7.
Schormann and Blois talked a lot about a new control called PathListBox, which is totally awesome. Jump with me –>
Sooner or later you’ll want to send people away from your Silverlight site. Maybe to a friends page or a company’s main site? These are two ways of handling navigation easily.
One of the many advantages with Silverlight and WPF is how easy it is to transform Images, objects or even entire groups of controls. Here is an example on two ways to bend objects with XAML in a quick fashion
During my visit to Finland last month, I got the opportunity to demonstrate some of the new features in Silverlight 4 in demo-form. Today, I’ll review the webcam demo.
I was asked a question regarding images in Silverlight from someone who wishes to learn more. To appease and educate; I’ll be sharing some basic info on how to work with Image objects in Silverlight.
