Thought I better quickly Blog this, as I struggled with showing & hiding a visual element on the Phone touch interface for quite a while… And couldn’t seem to find the answer anywhere on the Web. And then all of a sudden it came to me & I wished I could have kicked myself! :-) I am so dumb!!!

Basically if you have situation where you need to either show or hide a visual element, you need to know what State you are in. As you can’t attach 2 different Triggers (Behaviours) to the same element, & expect to activate/fire them in an alternating manner with the same action (i.e. a mouse click). Blend will only ever fire one & continue to fire the same one. (The closest in the Z order i presume…) And my first thought was, that i needed some code to determine what state I was in. But you don’t!

All you need to do is set up 2 dummy elements like Rectangles with a Fill set to 0% Alpha (Transparent, but HitTestVisible) & attach your 2 Behaviours to these dummy elements. You set the first behaviour to the front...

Well working on a few WCF RIA Services projects a need for the UI to update based on what roles the current user belongs to came up with each project. To make this easier for all of us working on these projects I created some behaviors that accepts a list of roles and updates the UI accordingly. I decided to include this in an open source library that is available at the associated OpenLight Group Common CodePlex project site. In this article we will discuss the base class used for all of the role based behaviors and look at the RoleBasedEnabledBehavior as an example of how to implement the base class.

The first class we will look at is the abstract BaseRoleBasedBehavior class. This class is takes a generic parameter that is constrained to DependencyObject to keep it consistent with Behavior base class.

public abstract class BaseRoleBasedBehavior : Behavior where T : DependencyObject 

 

BaseRoleBaseBehavior...

Live Example: http://silverlight.adefwebserver.com/ODataAuthenticationSample/

So you want to use OData but you need to secure the data? There are a ton of ways to do this, but this covers a simple way using ASP.NET Forms Authentication.

This is part II to the previous Blog (http://openlightgroup.net/Blog/tabid/58/EntryId/98/OData-Simplified.aspx) where we looked a simple OData example. This time we will make a simple Silverlight application that talks to an oData service.

Note, for this tutorial, you will also need to download and install RX Extensions from: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/ee794896.aspx, and the Silverlight Toolkit from: http://silverlight.codeplex.com.

As with the last tutorial, we will not use a database, just a simple collection that we are creating programmatically. This will allow you to see just the oData parts.

First, open up the project, in Visual Studio 2010 (or higher), from the zip file at the bottom of this link.



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Will OData eliminate the need for standard web services? Here is a simple example of how OData works. This example does not use a database connection so that you can easily see just the OData parts...

A growing collection of written Designer based tutorials for all UI designers in Expression Blend.

Starting with buttons! And expanding from there…

Follow this link for the series: http://openlightgroup.net/Articles/tabid/97/Default.aspx

Over the years I have created several DotNetNuke Silverlight File managers. Each one is actually different and handles a different scenario. What they all have in common, is that they use Silverlight to enable uploads of large files.

Here is the breakdown:

Silverlight FileUploader – This allows you to upload all the files into one directory. No matter how many instances of this module you place in your site, they will all show the files from the single location.

Personal File Upload – This module allows each user of your DotNetNuke website to have their own file structure. You can also indicate which role can use this module.

DotNetNuke Silverlight File Manager...

I just posted a DotNetNuke version of the Silverlight 4 Drag and Drop File manager covered in these CodeProject articles:

Silverlight View Model Style File Manager Silverlight View Model Style File Manager Drag and Drop Upload (part 2) This project uses the View Model Style pattern that allows for a complete separation between program and design. This allows a Designer...