wintellect-blogs|Oct 21, 2011

Using Jounce Navigation to Create OOB Child Windows in Silverlight 5

One of the reasons I prefer to manage navigation as an event, rather than a strongly typed interface or handler, is because it allows for so much flexibility and extensibility in the navigation pipeline. In my Jounce framework, for example, the basic navigation event simply wires up an instance of a view to a view…
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wintellect-blogs|Oct 11, 2011

Quick Tip: Design-Time Views for Regions

If you’ve worked with the Region Management pattern before, one source of frustration can be the lack of a design-time view. While you can compose individual views to be designer-friendly, the aggregate views that mark regions often end up devoid of anything useful. A simple little trick, however, can change that. You may be familiar…
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Blogs|Oct 7, 2011

Using Visual States to Set Focus on a Control

A common problem encountered in Silverlight applications is how to set the focus properly when transitioning between controls. For example, in the reference application I’m writing for the book Designing Silverlight Business Applications there is the option to either edit an existing record or create a new one. The result of clicking the appropriate button…
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wintellect-blogs|Sep 15, 2011

If Silverlight is Dead…

Once again speculation and worry has developers around the world biting their fingers and lamenting the end of a new era. It almost seems developers want to stick a fork in their Silverlight development because so many are latching onto the hype wagon, calling .NET “legacy” and refusing to see the bigger picture. Microsoft announces…
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wintellect-blogs|Sep 14, 2011

Windows 8: What you Need to Know

If you are trying to follow the hash tag for the //BUILD conference you are probably dizzy by now. I don’t blame you for trying to sort through all the messages about standing in line for the toilet or what someone is having for breakfast. I thought it might be a good time to step…
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wintellect-blogs|Sep 13, 2011

Windows 8 and Build Day 1 Keynote Thoughts

Yesterday I shared my predictions for Windows 8 at the Build conference. Today I can say that the keynote exceeded my expectations. There were a lot of amazing announcements that I’m excited to share with you. First, let’s recap my predictions: Microsoft will focus on Windows 8 as the platform for multiple devices and specifically…
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wintellect-blogs|Sep 12, 2011

My Windows 8 Build Predictions

Tomorrow is the start of the major event that has been hyped as heralding the most significant changes to Windows in the past 15 years (the last was when Windows 95 was announced). There has been a lot of speculation around what will happen tomorrow. Some people claim it will be the death of Silverlight…
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wintellect-blogs|Sep 9, 2011

Silverlight Enterprise Application Development

Silverlight is a popular platform for building enterprise applications because of its ease of delivery via the web and consistency across browsers and platforms. Most of the existing guidance is simple with introductory examples and basic content for building applications. Enterprise developers need a resource that provides a set of repeatable best practices and patterns…
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Blogs|Sep 6, 2011

Data Contracts and Behaviors over the Wire

One feature I employ often in Silverlight projects is the ability to share a model between the client and the server. When you expose a model using a WCF service, you can consume it on the Silverlight side and indicate you want to reuse types in a referenced assembly, rather than having the proxy types…
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Blogs|Sep 1, 2011

Silverlight 5 RC – Using the Task Parallel Library (TPL)

One enhancement that quietly slipped into the Silverlight 5 RC is the inclusion of Tasks. This is not the full-blown Task Parallel Library (TPL) to my knowledge (as it lacks the Parallel class and extensions) but it does provide Task, its related factories, and the functionality to chain and monitor tasks. The purpose of the…
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Blogs|Sep 1, 2011

Silverlight 5 RC Released – Using PInvoke

It’s exciting to see the progress of Silverlight 5 toward the final release that has been slated towards the end of the year. Today, the Silverlight Team announced the release of the Silverlight 5 Release Candidate. While it does not yet have a go-live license, it integrates many new features that were not available with…
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wintellect-blogs|Aug 30, 2011

Properties or Fields?

There was a great conversation on Twitter today about properties and fields. The discussion was about whether it makes sense to expose variables as fields and not bother with the overhead of properties. After all, it’s quick and easy and you can always change it later, right? One participant suggested there could be design “assumptions…
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