[updated 7/12/09 to Silverlight 3 RTW] One of the very cool features of Flex that I miss in Silverlight is Scale 9. Sure Silverlight is vector based and if you resize your browser or a container inside your application, vector artwork scales perfectly. But chances are your designer will give you a comp to reproduce [...]

So Microsoft has made Visual Studio 2010 available but I’m going to skip it for now as my “learning queue” is jammed packed already after coming off of a 2 year Flex/Actionscript jag back into the Microsoft world. I had previously gotten used to C# 2.0 features (mainly generics) and now I am processing all [...]

If you are new to WPF/Silverlight or have been living on Mars, Model-View-View Model is the undisputed winner in the WPF framework wars. If you are WPF only, you are off and running but if you are Silverlight, you need to do a little homework and decide if you want to cheat a bit from [...]

Master/Detail is a very common scenario. This post shows how to do it using .NET RIA Services, Silverlight 3 and .NET Entity Framework as the DAL. I read the financial papers online each morning and cut/paste news snippets into a text file (soon a database) for later review (to help me lose less money). I [...]

I thought I’d write a SIlverlight (or WPF) app to organize a text doc I have that is full of cut/paste blurbs from financial websites. I review this doc each weekend to arrive at potential trades for the coming week. I use a methodology that would suggest a basic database schema so I went ahead [...]

If you want a custom look for a ContentControl you can apply a Style which customizes various Dependency Properties of the Control to give it an altered appearance. The next step up the customizing food chain is to edit the out-of-the-box look of a Control using a custom ControlTemplate. After that you can extend UserControl [...]

Both Flex and WPF applications (as well as Silverlight) can have assets (such as graphics or sounds) embedded into them. Both systems have the same benefits (faster access to the resources) and disadvantages (larger file size). The process of compiling these assets into your application is called embedding. Flex offers the [Embed] metadata tag but [...]

C# in Depth Around circa 2001 I was getting into Java. Back then there were no bloggers to help point you towards examples and give you direction in what to study up on. I learned by pouring over books and following the usenet newsgroups. I would read a question that someone posted and try to [...]

Both WPF (Windows Presentation Framework) and Flex have the Canvas layout container. Each allows pinpoint positioning of children via “absolute positioning”. Where they differ is in how they accomplishing this positioning. Flex controls that inherit from UIComponent have the “x” property that specifies the component’s horizontal position, in pixels, within its parent container and the [...]

In Flex if you add a Box to the display list that has both its height and width properties set to 96, you will get just that: a rectangular Box 96 pixels square. In Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) you are not drawing in pixels but rather in what is dubbed “device independent units”. They are [...]