silverlight
silverlight
Over the last several months, there’s been a lot of rumblings in the community about HTML5 and the future of browser plugin technologies like Silverlight and Flash. I follow Silverlight pretty closely, so I hear most of this talk in terms of the future of Silverlight. As the HTML5 spec has been maturing and browser vendor implementations arrive, you’ve heard a lot of people start to sing it’s praises. There is no doubt that HTML5 is going to be huge. What we’ve been able to accomplish with HTML + CSS + JavaScript in the last 10 years is jaw dropping...
By bones hurt from over a year of Silverlight debugging and runtime spelunking
John Papa and Glen Block have recently posted on a topic that touched home for me. They put together a solution to find view models for a given view in a view-first fashion to support Blendability and a clean MVVM presentation pattern. Funny, I put this very pattern together last week after being motivated by what I saw from Rob Eisenberg and Laurent Bugnion at MIX the week before. I too came to the conclusion that it makes a lot of sense to go with a View-first approach if you’re going to make Blend a first class citizen in your...
Here’s a handy Extension Method in C# that attaches a “ToXml()” method to any and all object instances. I added the capability to dictate whether or not to use the classic XmlSerializer or the DataContractSerializer that came to us with WCF. I made the XmlSerializer the default because typically, when I’m doing this programmatically in my code, it’s intended for human eyes and the XmlSerializer is far more readable, but the DataContractSerializer is what’s actually used at runtime by WCF. So, call the overload the matters to you. public static string...
I’m creating a simple ASP.NET MVC application and on first run I’m getting blasted with this: Google didn’t turn up the solution as fast as I would have liked, so I thought I’d post it here for the next fool to find :) Solution: When you add a Silverlight project to a solution, Visual Studio will ask you if you would like to create new web site to host it, or choose an existing one in your solution. I choose an existing one. By default, Visual Studio creates this in your HTML markup to...
The debugging experience in Silverlight project using Visual Studio is quite good. However, there are two things that is doesn’t help much with: when data bindings don’t work, and when your XAML doesn’t look like you think it should. Here’s a post about debugging data bindings. The visual part is a little more involved. Yes, yes Expression Blend has a nice visual designer, but it’s fairly common for Blend to show a piece of XAML in one way and for it to actually render in the browser differently (sometime significantly differently). Today I found First Floor Software’s Silverlight Spy. This...
I spent well over an hour on Friday with this one and gave up. I spent almost another hour today working on this. I almost gave up, but when I’m in learn-mode like I am with Silverlight, these types of issues can really teach you a lot if you see them through. I had a ComboBox with bindings on it’s ItemSource and SelectedItem like so: <ComboBox Name="ComboBoxControl" Style="{StaticResource ComboBoxStyle}"
SelectedItem="{Binding Path=SelectedOption, Mode=TwoWay}"
...
I’ve been neck deep in Silverlight development for the last couple of weeks. I’m finally starting to feel somewhat competent. Most of my struggles have been with XAML in general, so I think the steep learning curve applies to both Silverlight and WPF. One of the things I’ve been using struggling with the most is troubleshooting data bindings. The data binding system in Silverlight and WPF is pretty awesome, but it’s definitely not intuitive nor discoverable. When you force yourself to learn it, most of those issues melt away, but… buuuuut, debugging binding remains extremely difficult. Today I discovered...