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Tuesday, September 15, 2009
One criticism we get as a company is that on the day Silverlight 1.0 was launched we didn’t do a massive refactoring of all Microsoft media-based or media-containing sites to use Silverlight. Since dry humor doesn’t often translate via blog I’m poking some fun at our critics with that statement. Any technology transition takes time, even one we believe strongly in like Silverlight. Given skill sets, market requirements and different time-frames it was never that surprising that the previous Zune.net still used Flash. It just made sense at the time.
Today is a different story though, today we can count one more site as having come into the Silverlight fold, Zune.net.
(This is just an excerpt, click the title for the full post)
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Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Showing off Blend 3's support for sample data, converting it into hierarchical data, editing the HierarchicalDataTemplate AND adding connecting lines to the Silverlight TreeView using the Silverlight Toolkit July 2009 release's TreeViewExtensions. A lot of goodness packed into one medium sized blog post, with pretty pictures.
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Sunday, March 22, 2009
It has been an action packed last week, a lot getting announced, released and talked about. What happened? MIX ‘09 MIX09 was awesome, first because it was the first one I’ve ever been able to attend and second because of all the great announcements and energy of the people. I met great people, had amazing conversations and the energy was so high that I didn’t even notice that I lived off of Red Bull and a couple of hours a sleep a night. No, the Adobe guy and I didn’t fight as people kept asking me :). We had a
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Tuesday, March 03, 2009
Today I’m giving a talk at Microsoft’s 2009 MVP Global Summit here on campus. The title of the talk is “Silverlight Toolkit: Past, Present & Future” and I’ll be talking a little bit about where the Silverlight Toolkit came from, what’s going on with it right now and what we’re planning in future versions. Pretty self-explanatory actually :) I’m done a few dry-runs and once it came out at 30 minutes, the next at an hour and 15 minutes so I’m hoping I’ll find a nice average and nail the 45 minute window I have. We’ve done a lot with
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Wednesday, December 10, 2008
One of the great controls released with the Silverlight Toolkit is the NumericUpDown. Sure it may seem like just a basic textbox that allows user input with the added glory of a spinner that makes it easy to nudge values up or down with a click, which in and of itself is a great benefit, but there is also some lesser known plumbing that allows users to easily extend this control to provide some great user experiences. One of my favorite user experiences is the way the UpDowns, or spinners as some call them, work in Microsoft Word when you’re
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Thursday, November 06, 2008
A common question in the forums has been how to get dynamic icons in the Silverlight Toolkit TreeView and luckily there are quite a few options. The Icon Before you can make the icon dynamic you need a place to put it. The basic idea is to create a HierarchicalDataTemplate and make room for an image: <stackpanel.resources> <controls:hierarchicaldatatemplate x:key="TaxonomyTemplate" itemssource="{Binding Subclasses}"> <stackpanel orientation="Horizontal"> <contentpresenter margin="0 0 4 0" content="???" /> <textblock text="{Binding Classification}" /> </stackpanel> </controls:hierarchicaldatatemplate> </stackpanel.resources> <controls:treeview x:name="MasterTree" itemtemplate="{StaticResource TaxonomyTemplate}" /> I've added a ContentPresenter and the Content is what we're interested in setting dynamically. Option #1 – The
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Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Ever since joining Microsoft back in August 2008 this blog has been pretty quiet and not just because I’ve been rolling around in the autumn leaves on campus but because of this gem, the Silverlight Toolkit. At its highest level the Silverlight Toolkit is a collection of great controls and utilities that are continually being improved and polished until they are of the highest and most useful caliber. You can find all the great details about this release over on my fearless leader’s blog and I highly recommend you check it out because beyond saying what the Silverlight Toolkit contains
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Thursday, August 07, 2008
It's all about the snappy opening line, watch any classic movie from the 40's and you'll realize the importance of the opening line. If you need some evidence check out 'His Girl Friday', at least the first 20 minutes, for some of what I consider some of the back & forth dialog around. Of course the classic for lines from the 40's is arguably 'Casablanca' and if you've never seen it you owe it to yourself to watch it with a bottle and some friends, you'll be amazed at how many lines come from just that one movie. The point,
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Wednesday, June 04, 2008
I've been putting myself through a crash course on Silverlight\WPF these last few days and here are a few random thoughts. All of this is after a 60 minute breakneck tour of WPF\Silverlight so I'm more than likely missing a whole bunch of things and probably doing things bass-ackwards but hey, that's why they call it learning. There are three stock layout managers (used for placing controls): Canvas, Stack & Grid. Where is the CSS-style panel? If designing web pages has taught us anything it's that the grid quickly gets cumbersome. Note to self if I get hired at Microsoft: