Blogs|Nov 30, 2009

MEF: Build a Plugin in Under 10 Minutes

In preparing for an upcoming talk I’ll be giving on the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF), I wanted to demonstrate how fast and easy it is to use in a sample, reference application. This application creates a dynamic plugin. I first link a plugin and show it active, then I create a second plugin and show…
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wintellect-blogs|Nov 26, 2009

Silverlight 4’s New Drag-and-Drop Support

Another new feature of Silverlight 4 that will enable developers to build richer UIs is drag-and-drop file support. In Silverlight 3, you had to pop up an OpenFileDialog to allow the user to select files from the local file system and make them available to a Silverlight application. In Silverlight 4, OpenFileDialog still works, but there…
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wintellect-blogs|Nov 25, 2009

Silverlight 4’s New Clipboard Support

Among the many new features coming in Silverlight 4 is clipboard support. A new class named System.Windows.Clipboard provides three static methods for accessing the system clipboard: GetText, which retrieves text from the clipboard SetText, which places text on the clipboard ContainsText, which indicates whether the clipboard currently contains text In the Silverlight 4 beta, only Unicode text…
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Blogs|Nov 25, 2009

Silverlight 4’s Improved Element Data Binding

Earlier this year, I wrote about Silverlight 3’s new element data binding feature, which enables XAML elements to be bound together declaratively. I also bemoaned the fact that the target of an element-to-element data binding had to be a Framework-element derivative. Good news! Silverlight 4 fixes this by extending element data binding to DependencyObject derivatives.…
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wintellect-blogs|Nov 25, 2009

Silverlight 4’s New Implicit Styles

Silverlight 4 introduces a boatload of big-ticket features such as printing support, webcam and microphone support, and support for elevated trust in out-of-browser applications. It’s also chock full of minor improvements that fly lower under the radar. One of my favorite features in this category is support for implicit styles. In Silverlight 3, there was…
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Blogs|Nov 24, 2009

RIA POCO DomainService with Existing Business Applications in Silverlight

Your boss suddenly decides that Silverlight is the “next big thing” and asks you to begin converting your line of business application to use the new features. Being a solid architect, of course, you have already built a nice application that is structured in layers. You have a data access layer that abstracts persistence behind…
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Blogs|Nov 23, 2009

PowerShell Script for Setting VS 2010 Symbol Paths

Edit (July 7, 2010): Get the latest version of this script here. A while ago, I wrote a PowerShell script that sets up the _NT_SYMBOL_PATH environment variable as well as Visual Studio 2008 so all the debuggers or tools that access symbols you use to shared the same symbol cache. Numerous people said they found…
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wintellect-blogs|Nov 23, 2009

Silverlight 3, RIA services, and Resource (RESX) Files

One of the advantages of using RIA services is that you can build your domain entity tier independently from the rest of the application tiers and then wire it in as needed, whether as LINQ or simple POCO classes. If you decide to annotate your entities with resources, it can get a little dicey. Most…
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wintellect-blogs|Nov 21, 2009

Getting Silverlight Applications Ready for the Real World

As I continue to work on a reference project (basically building my portfolio site out in Silverlight) I keep going back to what it takes to put a Silverlight application “out there.” When is it really “code complete?” There are tons of blog posts and articles about unit testing, frameworks, line of business, etc, but…
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wintellect-blogs|Nov 20, 2009

Rich Data Forms in Silverlight 4 Beta

Silverlight 4 provides some very powerful data form capabilities out of the box. You will no longer have to throw an exception just to send a validation error or even worry about hard-coding labels. With support for data annotations, IDataErrorInfo and more, you now have plenty “out of the box” to work with. Let’s explore…
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wintellect-blogs|Nov 19, 2009

Revisiting Lorem Ipsum in Silverlight 4 with RichTextArea and Printing

Earlier I explored some options to allow inline hyperlinks in Silverlight 3 using some extensions and the WrapPanel. In Silverlight 4, which was released as beta earlier this week, the problem is solved in the framework. Silverlight 4 gives us the RichTextArea control, which allows us to organize runs, spans, paragraphs, and even embed other…
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Blogs|Nov 18, 2009

Dynamic Module Loading with Silverlight Navigation using Prism

I started a project to update my personal website using Silverlight. The goal is to use Prism/Composite Application Guidance to build out a nice site that demonstrates some Silverlight capabilities and make the source code available as a reference. One of the first pieces I chose to tackle was ensuring I could facilitate deep linking…
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