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 –>
For my presentation one week ago, I showed two demos. I thought I’d share one of those with you now. It’s calles “What we talked about at the christmas party” and highlights in a simple way, three new features of Silverlight 4; Dropping, right clicking and printing.
Let’s begin!
As I mentioned in my Previous Post, I’ve realized that I can go no longer without learning at least a little Expression Blend. Whenever I mention the technology to a Silverlight developer they all smile that “Ooh-I-love-that-program-to-pieces” smile.
I’ve been tasked with a high profile graphical task at work by one of my bosses. I feel that neither nifty buttons or handwritten animations will do the trick this time. Any suggestions on good resources for learning Expression Blend would be appreciated.
A side note: This is Blend for .Net 4, but any help is appreciated
Today I’m making a demo application. It’s a simple PDF reader in Silverlight and it uses two new features. The Silverlight Out Of Browser (SLOOB) with elevated permissions, and the WebBrowser Control. Those of you who’ve written some WPF might already be familiar with the WebBrowser control and what it can do. In Silverlight, it’s basically an html-renderer for when you’re out of browser.
Not having the right mouse button available has been a hassle for both Silverlight and Adobe Flash since their inception. Flash has had the ability to customize their right-click context menu to some degree but never true right click event handling. With Silverlight 4, Silverlight will have true customizable event handling for the right mouse button. I know this might be a small step for event handling, but it’s a giant leap for rich Internet applications.
To do this in Silverlight 4, this is the code you’ll need to use:
As I mentioned before, I’ve been working on an image extractor for a specific image board as a way to hone my .net skills. It’s almost done in the sense that “it works on my computer”.
This is the look of it at the moment. The gradient background is kind of an inside joke and those of you who get it, good for you.
The idea is for users to be able to look at multiple pages of image content without having to click through pages or read lots of useless banter. Take for instance this wallpaper-board. The user can request any number of available pages to be presented and then click on an image to see it in full resolution. Very effective.
My problem at this point is that since I developed the app using Visual Studio 2010, all references are to .net framework 4.0 and unusable to most people. A friend of mine who tested the application also complained about it stopping when trying to save the pictures. I guess the apps main thread stalls while downloading. That’s something else I’ll have to look at.
Fragile Development 