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: [...]

As you may know, Silverlight is a junior varsity version of WPF where the attempt is made to balance plugin size (small) with available functionality (as much as possible) which is all very understandable. One of the areas that got (IMO) less than its due (considering the amount of code required versus the benefit derived) [...]

I’m spending time this weekend (Labor Day in the U.S.) getting all my machines cleaned up, patched up and backed up. First on the list was to upgrade my WordPress blog due to a new worm that will hose your (precious) blog if it gets to you. You can read about it here. I have [...]

Each file in a Silverlight project file has an associated BuildAction property that tells MSBuild what to do with it when your project is built. Here are the available choices as viewed in the Property Inspector of Visual Studio 2008. Certain file types are given default values for the BuildAction which make the most (only!) [...]