By Michael Washington on
12/27/2009 7:51 AM
Live Example: http://www.adefwebserver.com/silverlight/SilverlightOrb/SilverlightOrbv1/
This is actually a failed experiment. The theory was that XAMl contains all the visual elements you need to “cross” two Silverlight objects to create child objects that resemble the parents.
However, a failed experiment is no reason to let code go to waste!
Along the way I learned some things:
- How to display XAML elements in a drop down
- How to zoom in on elements using a Viewbox and a ScrollViewer
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By Richard Waddell on
12/26/2009 10:37 PM
Live example: http://www.adefwebserver.com/Richard/TheSeekerBehaviorv1Site/
Ok, Silverlight is starting to freak me out a little bit. I thought it would take a couple of days to figure out how to translate my Seeker behaviors into Silverlight behaviors. After going down several paths that had too many details about things I wasn’t interested in right now, I found Falling Snow in Silverlight on Kirupa.com and the scales were lifted from my eyes in about 15 minutes. I was afraid behavior would be restricted to some short-term action-reaction thingie but not at all. After reading Kirupa’s description of a behavior’s parasitic behavior and seeing the FallingSnowBehavior literally take over a Canvas control I became hopeful I could write a Hunt behavior that could take over my Seeker control, or at least its reaction to a SightingEvent.
I modified Seeker Version 1 to try this out. First I modified the Seeker so the reaction to a SightingEvent is a call to the React method on an iSighting interface...
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By Richard Waddell on
12/25/2009 12:02 PM
See it live: http://www.adefwebserver.com/Richard/TheSeekerSitev3/
After ooNaLife, I intended to just post my latest version of The Seeker so I could move on to focusing on Silverlight issues. But I had to indulge myself by using interfaces to supply the Seekers with “brains”. But that’s cool, I think it got me more in a good place to look at the MVVM model (judging from the little I know now).
Let me explain the on screen changes to what I now call ooNa and then I’ll get on to the code. Seekers are now red ellipses. When a Seeker ‘catches’ a Prey, the Prey disappears from the screen...
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By Richard Waddell on
12/22/2009 8:11 PM
See the live example here: http://www.adefwebserver.com/Richard/ooNaLifeSite/
After Seeker 2, I wanted to add a control panel, but I wasn’t clear how to tack one on. So far I’ve just slapped everything up onto the main UI, LayoutRoot, so I decided to write a new app and divide everything up from the start...
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By Michael Washington on
12/20/2009 6:37 PM
Victor Gaudioso just shot me an email asking me how to debug a Silverlight 4 out-of-browser application where you can just hit F5. I know he is working on his latest Silverlight 4 book so he probably needs to get this in the book tonight.
To illustrate this, I am using the source code for Silverlight Bridge.
1) Right-click on the FileManager project and select Properties. On the Silverlight tab, select Enable running application out of the browser.
 ...
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By Richard Waddell on
12/18/2009 9:41 PM
Version 2.0 keeps some continuous action going by introducing Prey for the seekers to follow around. The Prey has a true graphic representation, a green circle created by choosing an Ellipse from the Asset panel, then drawing it with the shift key held down so it will be constrained to circular dimensions. The Seeker now watches its target after initially becoming aware of it through an event – which is generated when a new prey is created through a left mouse click...
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By Richard Waddell on
12/17/2009 7:20 PM
When I’m trying to learn any new language, framework, or the like, I often find myself frustrated because blogs and tutorials obscure the simple concepts I’m trying to understand with too much detail. My goal is to start very simply so that the programming concepts are laid-out in small, easy-to-understand chunks of code. Then with each version to expand the use of those concepts and add in some very simple examples of a few new ones.
I never get to do it on the job, but my favorite kind of programming is to create intelligent objects that interact onscreen. My first Silverlight project in that line is The Seeker. The seeker reacts to an onscreen event by moving towards it. In this case the event is the drop part of a drag and drop operation.
The important concepts are:
- Publishing and consuming events
- Programmatically adding and positioning controls on screen
- Drag and drop
- Animation / Storyboard
- Internal Logic
- Calculating distance onscreen
The images below show the starting positions, the seekers...
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By Ian Lackey on
12/17/2009 1:38 AM
Like many other developers I have been excited to see that WCF RIA Services has gone beta and now comes with a Go-Live license. After this release my team at Wash U began developing a few applications using the new RIA Services bits. We have been very impressed with the productivity increase as well as several other features that RIA provides over the previous straight up WCF services have offered in the past.
All was going well, until it came time to publish the first application to the staging (user testing) server. Upon deployment the application started displaying the “Initializing Application” progress control for close to a minute.
...
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By Michael Washington on
12/15/2009 9:45 PM
Here's an interesting video that gives you an idea of what working with data on the web can be like using Silverlight.
The thing that is interesting is that there are no "pages" to the application. Things just "pop out" and the objects on the screen simply adjust to allow you to quickly achieve a desired task.
The "relational data domain" is carried over from the current web application design, but the UI is totally changed. We now have to think "What if I were designing the next version of Microsoft Excel, how would the UI look?".
XAML...
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By Ian Lackey on
12/10/2009 1:29 AM
In college my instructor taught us that it is not always knowing the answer but knowing where to find it. In the mindset, this post is simply a list of other blogs, twitter accounts \ lists and books that I have found helpful in the recent past. Hopefully these will point you to information that you need to build great software, enjoy your work (or at least experience less stress), and keep up on the latest news regarding development.
Admittedly I have been almost 100% focused on Silverlight development, so most of these resources will reflect this. However, there are a few in the list are are more general. Also, for some of the more experienced developers, I realized that a few of these links are may have you wondering why they are including. Like the MSDN site, doesn’t everyone know about that? Well, maybe, but necessarily. So I included them for the new developers or people looking to get started.
(…these resources are in no particular order…)
Favorite Blogs (other than the OpenLight Members...
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