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 [...]

The HTTPService makes an HTTP request to a URL, and either a fault or result event is dispatched depending on the outcome. What you cannot know ahead of time is how large is the HTTP response and while it is being retrieved, how far along are we? If you make a HTTPService request for the [...]

I was searching around for help on how I can display simple Silverlight apps in my blog posts. I use Kimili’s flash embedd for SWFs and wanted something similar for Silverlight. Tim Sneath posted that “Catherine Heller has written up a great post” on the subject. Tim offered up this one-liner to use: <iframe src=”http://silverlight.services.live.com/invoke/32/SlLogo/iframe.html” [...]

Recently I posted on how Flex uses pixels to “measure’ when placing controls inside a Container and that Windows Presentation Framework uses “device independent units” which render controls differently according to the DPI (dots per inch) setting on the local machine. It is important to note that Silverlight uses pixels just like Flex. Obviously this [...]

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 [...]

In the cold world of the Internet, cross-site scripters don’t discern between rival RIA platforms. If you are a Flash or Flex developer, you are familiar with the crossdomain.xml policy file that needs to be placed in the root of any domain that wants to allow requests from other domains. The idea being that the [...]

A year ago I was doing mostly WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) programming. The application I was working on was for my own learning and use. It went out to Yahoo finance every night and dragged down stock quotes and placed them into text files. The other part of the app did statistical analysis on the [...]

This is a new domain ( http://blog.flexforcefive.com ) for my (same old) blog! I’m sorry to make you go through the “pain and suffering” of updating your news readers but hey, “Change happens”! I look forward to many new posts and together we can learn and have some fun. Cheers