One of the challenges with referencing online content is that you never know just how long it will take to download... On a good day, images show up immediately and your application has exactly the experience you want. On a bad day, images take a looong time to load - or never load at all! - and your...

Tip Use a Transparent brush to make "empty" parts of a XAML element respond to mouse and touch input Explanation I got a question yesterday and thought the answer would make a good addition to my Development Tips series. As you probably know, WPF, Silverlight, and Windows Phone support a rich...

Recently, I wrote a post about the IListExtensions collection of extension methods I created to make it easy to maintain a sorted list based on any IList(T) implementation without needing to create a special subclass. In that post, I explained why I implemented IListExtensions the way I did and outlined...

If you want to display a dynamically changing collection of items in WPF, Silverlight, or Windows Phone, there are a lot of collection classes to pick from - but there's really just one good choice: ObservableCollection(T) . Although nearly all the IList(T) / ICollection(T) / IEnumerable(T) implementations...

One of the neat things about sharing code with the community is hearing how people have learned from it or are using it in their own work. Of course, the more people use something, the more likely they are to identify problems with it - which is great because it provides an opportunity to improve things...

The WebBrowser control is available in Silverlight 4, Windows Phone 7, and all versions of WPF. It's mostly the same everywhere, though there are some specific differences to keep in mind when using it on Silverlight-based platforms. WebBrowser offers two ways to provide its content: by passing a URI...

Just over a year ago, a couple of readers asked me about a WPF/Silverlight Panel that arranged things to make "best use" of available space without requiring the developer to set a bunch of stuff up in advance or know how many child elements there would be. Interestingly, this is not a scenario the default...

There was a minor refresh for the Microsoft Web Platform last week; you can find a list of fixes and instructions for upgrading in this forum post . The most interesting change for the WPF community is probably the fix for a WebMatrix problem brought to my attention by @radicalbyte and @jabroersen where...

Two posts ago, I explained the benefits of pseudo-localization and showed an easy way to implement it for WPF - then said I'd outline how to do the same for Silverlight and Windows Phone 7. In my previous post, I went off on the seeming diversion of implementing a PNG encoder for Silverlight . With this...

At the end of my previous post about easily pseudo-localizing WPF applications , I said this post would show how to apply those concepts to a Silverlight application. Unfortunately, I seem to have made an off-by-one error : while this post is related to that topic, it is not the post I advertised. But...

I've previously written about the benefits of localization and shown how to localize Windows Phone 7 applications . The techniques I describe in that post constitute a good workflow that's just as suitable for WPF and Silverlight desktop applications! But even with good processes in place, the way localization...

It was over a year ago that I wrote and shared the first version of my Insomnia utility . A few months later, I published a new version of Insomnia to satisfy the two most popular feature requests . Here's how I explained Insomnia's motivation at the time: The default power settings for Windows...

It feels like a long time since I last wrote about hash functions (though certain curmudgeonly coworkers would say not long enough!), and there were a few loose ends I've been meaning to deal with... Aside : If my hashing efforts are new to you, more information can be found in my introduction to...

It was about five months ago that I blogged about BlobStore, a simple Silverlight 4 REST-based cloud-oriented file management app for Azure and S3 . I pitched it like this: It's a small, lightweight Silverlight 4 application that acts as a basic front-end for the Windows Azure Simple Data Storage...

It's been a few months since I posted my previous collection of Silverlight/WPF Charting links . In the meantime, the April 2010 release of the Silverlight Toolkit was published with support for stacked series and significant performance improvements ! And Windows Phone 7 has been steadily building momentum...

The data binding infrastructure for Silverlight and WPF is extremely powerful and makes it easy to write powerful, dynamic applications without worrying about synchronizing the UI with every change to the underlying data. By leveraging this power, developers can think entirely in terms of the data model...

I've previously written that one of my ContextMenu test cases for the April '10 release of the Silverlight Toolkit was to implement a quick "split button" control for Silverlight using Button and ContextMenu . Though it wasn't my goal to build a general-purpose control for widespread use, there's been...

Tip Put XAML attributes and elements on multiple lines so the markup is easy to read and work with Explanation The last few tips have dealt with DependencyProperty issues. Now it's time for something completely different: XAML. While it's nice to pretend XAML editing can all be done in a design...

One of my ContextMenu test cases for the April '10 release of the Silverlight Toolkit ( click here for the full write-up ) was to implement a quick "split button" control for Silverlight using Button and ContextMenu . In that post, I cautioned that my goal at the time was to do some scenario testing...

A customer contacted me a few days ago asking how to display text labels on a NumericAxis . (Whereas CategoryAxis makes it easy to use text labels for the in dependent axis, this request was about text labels on the d ependent axis.) It's a bit of an unusual request (I spent a minute just now and don...

I've described the "app building" process before in this post about my HeadTraxExtreme sample for the Silverlight 3 Beta and a later in this update of HeadTraxExtreme for the Silverlight 3 RTW . The gist is that: ... everyone comes up with an idea for a medium-sized application they think could be...

Background These days it seems like everybody has a mobile device with them practically all the time. It's pretty amazing that we're able to be "always connected" - technology has made great progress! However, humankind hasn't changed nearly as quickly, and occasional forgetfulness is still a part...

My DataVisualizationDemos application is a collection of nearly all the Data Visualization samples I've posted to my blog. And just like the Data Visualization assembly ( get Silverlight/WPF Data Visualization Development Release 4 here! ), the demo application runs on Silverlight 3 , Silverlight 4 ...

The April '10 release of the Silverlight Toolkit brought stacked series support to the Data Visualization assembly on the Silverlight 4 platform! You can read an overview here and get a detailed description here . Almost simultaneously, the WPF team released WPF 4 as part of .NET 4 and Visual Studio...

A great way to test a new control is to make use of it in a real-world scenario. So one of the things I did just before we published the April '10 release of the Silverlight Toolkit ( click here for my full write-up ) was to take the ContextMenu code I'd written out for a little test drive. One of my...