wintellect-blogs|Mar 7, 2010

MVVM with MEF in Silverlight: Video Tutorial

This is a video tutorial to introduce beginners to how to use both MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) and MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) with Silverlight (should work for versions 3 and 4). Of course, some “veterans” may want to watch as well in case you’ve missed some of the fundamentals, or have a clever way to do something…
Read More→
wintellect-blogs|Mar 4, 2010

Silverlight Line of Business Applications

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of presenting a talk entitled, “Silverlight Line of Business Applications” at the Atlanta Silverlight Meetup Group. This talk focused on several aspects of building line of business applications, ranging from the principles that belong in the foundation or architecture, to specific frameworks and methodologies. You can view…
Read More→
wintellect-blogs|Mar 3, 2010

Animations and View Models: IAnimationDelegate

We often trip over ourselves trying to minimize code behind and abstract behaviors in the UI from the models, etc. This is important for clean separation, but sometimes behaviors may add too much abstraction. The real fact is many applications require some sort of transition or animation based on events, and while we can try…
Read More→
wintellect-blogs|Mar 1, 2010

MEF instead of PRISM for Silverlight 3 Part 2 of 2: Region Management

In my last post, I showed you how to dynamically load modules on demand using the latest MEF release in Silverlight 3. This post, I will take you through managing regions with MEF. This will enable us to have a 100% MEF-based solution in Silverlight 3 if the only pieces of PRISM we were using…
Read More→
wintellect-blogs|Feb 26, 2010

MEF instead of PRISM for Silverlight 3 Part 1 of 2: Dynamic Module Loading

Recently I’ve been having lots of conversations about the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF), the Composite Application Library (CAL or PRISM), and how they relate. One point of confusion that many people has comes when they try to force the two solutions to work together. In a recent conversation, I mentioned that PRISM has some great…
Read More→
wintellect-blogs|Feb 25, 2010

Vancouver Olympics – How’d We Do That?

The Silverlight team recently posted a blog entry entitled “Vancouver Olympics – How’d we do That?” in which they detailed the massive effort across multiple partners to pull together the on-line solution for streaming HD videos, both live and on demand. This was an exciting post for Wintellect and me because it detailed the effort…
Read More→
Blogs|Feb 23, 2010

Top 10 Silverlight Myths and the Facts to Bust Them

Silverlight is a client side plug-in based technology that has been in production since late 2007. I’ve been a web developer for well over a decade now, and recently have focused almost exclusively on Silverlight since version 3.0 was released. It astounds me how many people still resist Silverlight because they either don’t understand what…
Read More→
wintellect-blogs|Feb 18, 2010

A Fluent RSS Reader for Silverlight Part 2: NDepends on What you Need

NDepend is a product that analyzes large code bases and provides information about dependencies, complexity of code, best practices, and more. While designed to help manage large code bases, it also works well as a “reality check” as you are developing new projects. The latest release supports Silverlight and I’ll be using it to clean…
Read More→
wintellect-blogs|Feb 15, 2010

Windows Phone 7 Series (Formerly called Windows Mobile 7)

There has been a lot of buzz around Microsoft’s latest mobile phone operating system. I hope to be involved with this product as much as possible and will blog the detals that I can as they are made available. While the buzz has referred to this as “Windows Mobile 7” the platform has been officially…
Read More→
Blogs|Feb 7, 2010

A Fluent RSS Reader for Silverlight Part 1: Proof of Concept

One of the most common examples to help learn a language or framework is an RSS Reader. This is an ideal mini-project because it includes networking, parsing XML, and binding to data elements such as lists. I wanted to provide an example that shows some more interesting solutions that are possible using C# in Silverlight.…
Read More→
Blogs|Feb 2, 2010

Using Moq with Silverlight for Advanced Unit Tests

Moq is a library that assists with running unit tests by providing easily mocked objects that implement interfaces and abstract classes. You can learn more about Moq on their website. There is a distribution for Silverlight, and in this post I’ll focus on some ways to use Moq for some more involved testing scenarios. Download…
Read More→
Blogs|Jan 29, 2010

Programmatically Accessing the Live Smooth Streaming API

Live Smooth Streaming is a Microsoft technology that allows you to take a live, encoded, incoming video stream and rebroadcast it using Smooth Streaming technology. This technology multicasts the video stream in segments of varying bandwidths. This can then be played with a Silverlight-based client like the built-in MediaElement or more advanced player like the…
Read More→