Ouch! Right on the heals of April 15th (tax day in the U.S.) come big product releases from both Adobe and Microsoft. Long ago the term “Redmond Tax” was coined referring to the constant cost to stay current with Microsoft products but there’s an equal San Jose Adobe tax as well. If I were a [...]

I spent the summer and fall in the Silverlight world and it became apparent to me that the designer and developer worlds are converging. With the emergence of Expression Blend 3 designers visually create  XAML using Blend’s States and Properties panels. This XAML can be VERY long and verbose but the results when applied to [...]

A recent post explained how encapsulating functionality (e.g. Animations, etc) into a Behavior promoted reuse in that once this functionality is encapsulated into a Behavior, it can then easily be applied to multiple Controls in various projects by a designer using Blend (remember “write once run anywhere”!) Thinking deeper I thought: “That’s not really as [...]

I needed a UI Control that enables the user to refresh the current View. When the user clicks the control it rotates as feedback. The quickest way to do this would be to switch to the animation workspace in Blend and create a new Storyboard, set a KeyFrame and dial in a RotateTransform using the [...]

I’ve been messing around with a Silverlight 3 app that allows you to open and view XAML files located on your locale machine. Sure, you can do that already with your favorite editor including Visual Studio but I wanted to show more information easily so the viewer did not have to continually copy and paste [...]

A recent question on the Silverlight forums reminded me of an issue any MVVM fanboy will face sooner or later: “Is it possible to start an animation (StoryBoard in the XAML) from the ViewModel”? One of the major tenets of MVVM is “separation of concerns” in that the View is not supposed to know about [...]

My last post spoke of Peter Blois’ NineGrid.dll and how it can be used to do Nine Scale in Silverlight. Here’s a quick video showing how I used it in case anyone is having issues. – Cheers! link to screencast…

Stuck for time? Go here to see how Peter Blois uses Pixel Shaders to give Silverlight Nine Scale functionality In the Flex world, there are two ways to “skin” your controls: Programmatic and graphical. The nine yard explaination can be found here but essentially, you either roll up your sleeves and write Actionscript class files [...]

After getting my extension serial number (available here) for Adobe Flash Builder 4 Beta I had a run through the new wizard functionality available for connecting to Data Services. It’s available from the ‘Data” menu option and gives you the ability to connect to six different types of data sources: All you need to know [...]

In most of the languages you have been exposed to, a UI element  being displayed or not was probably related to some Boolean property. It was black or white, true or false (Duality anyone?). WPF adds a third possibility all of which are contained in the Visibility enumeration. The possible values (in WPF) are: Visible: [...]