I know my eyesight is not the best after looking at CRTs for 30 years but to me the lack of contrast between text and background in the Expression Blend UI is painful. My laptop is not the latest but Blend is the only application I use where I have to resort to a 26 [...]

Over the weekend I watched and took notes on a three hour session (Gilligan’s Island.. A Three Hours Tour…) given at Mix 09 by Robby Ingebretson (blog) entitled “Design for Developers”. I have always tried to improve my design skills and have had minimal success. But I have fun at it and enjoy the creative [...]

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 just had an epiphany with respect to the new Navigation Framework introduced in the Silverlight 3 Beta1 release. I had read the list of new features and perhaps I had “feature overload” as I did not realize the power that this addition gives us at first blush. In Flex developers have the ViewStack which [...]

In order to have behaviors show up in the Assets Tool so you can apply them to content on the artboard, you need to add a reference to a DLL containing the behaviors (after all they are created in code). Blend 3 Beta 1 ships with Microsoft.Expression.Interactivity.dll which is located in the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Expression\Blend [...]

If you have made the decision to dedicate a machine to all the new bits from Microsoft with respect to Silverlight 3 you may be feeling a bit overwhelmed by all there is to grasp. Fortunately, there is an ever increasing amount of blog posts, videos, tutorials and other helpful resources to assist you in [...]