wintellect-blogs|Jul 13, 2010

What YOU Are Interested In

I was very excited to see two of my blog posts featured in the 900th issue of Silverlight Cream which ranked the top articles of 2010 thus far. These were Top 10 Silverlight Myths and Facts to Bust Them (#4) and Simple Dialog Service in Silverlight (#17). I appreciate your interest and out of curiosity…
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wintellect-blogs|Jul 1, 2010

Customer IApplicationService for Silverlight Applications

In my experience working with Silverlight applications, probably one of the most underused features I’ve witnessed is the ability to abstract application-level functionality using the IApplicationService and IApplicationLifetimeAware interfaces. This, in turn, results in the over-use (and abuse) of the Startup and Exit events in the Application object. Before you get angry with me shaking…
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Blogs|Jun 29, 2010

Unit Testing Dynamic XAP Files

By now, you probably are aware that you can dynamically load XAP files using the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) within your Silverlight applications. Have you been scratching your head, however, and wondering how on earth you would actually test something like that? It is possible, and here’s a quick post to show one way you…
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wintellect-blogs|Jun 16, 2010

Silverlight UI Automation and Full VS 2010 Integration

OK, so it’s not exactly “out of the box” but the most recent PRISM 4.0 Drop (drop 2) seems to contain something Silverlight developers have been begging for … for quite some time. It’s buried within the “QuickStart” folder under the “BasicMVVM” project. This project provides guidance for the Model-View-ViewModel pattern and is worth a…
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Blogs|Jun 10, 2010

Tips and Tricks for INotifyPropertyChanged

As a WPF or Silverlight developer, you know that your models must implement INotifyPropertyChanged and it can be a pain. To do it safely, you really need to check to see if there are any registered handlers, then raise the event. To add insult to injury, the event arguments take a string, so if you…
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wintellect-blogs|Jun 8, 2010

Managed Extensibility Framework for Line of Business Applications in .NET 4.0

I recently gave a talk for the Atlanta Microsoft Professionals users group about using the Managed Extensibility Framework for Line of Business applications in .NET 4.0. We had a great turnout and I appreciate everyone who attended. The talk was based on my blog post “10 Reasons to use the Managed Extensibility Framework.” While the…
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wintellect-blogs|May 25, 2010

Silverlight Out of Browser Dynamic Modules in Offline Mode

Silverlight Out of Browser (OOB) applications are becoming more and more popular due to the convenience of being able to install and launch them locally. As Silverlight applications become larger and more composable, advanced techniques such as dynamically loading modules are also becoming more popular. The “out of the box” Managed Extensibility Framework provision for…
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wintellect-blogs|May 18, 2010

Making the ScrollViewer Talk in Silverlight 4

Recently I came across the requirement to react to the fact that a user had scrolled a view to the bottom. It sounded easy at first because I imagined hooking into a scroll viewer changed event, listening to the event args, and then reacting when it was done. The only problem was that I couldn’t…
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Blogs|May 14, 2010

WebClient and DeploymentCatalog gotchas in Silverlight OOB

This is a quick post to share a gotcha I found that may be impacting others. I am in the process of building a large composable application for a customer using Silverlight 4 and the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF). The application has a framework that supports multiple line of business applications that are dynamically loaded…
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Blogs|May 11, 2010

MVVM Coding by Convention (Convention over Configuration)

Convention-based programming is an interesting model. In essence, it attempts to reduce the potential for error by handling most scenarios based on conventions or standards, and allowing the developers to focus on the exceptions. Probably one of the most thorough public resources I’ve seen for the convention-based model is Rob Eisenberg’s Build your Own MVVM…
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Blogs|May 2, 2010

Silverlight Out of Browser (OOB) Versions, Images, and Isolated Storage

This is a quick and simple post to address three very common questions I receive about Silverlight Out-of-Browser (OOB) applications. In case you haven’t heard, applications made with Silverlight version 3 and later can be installed locally to your machine (whether it is a Windows machine or a Mac) and run “out of the browser”…
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