The Slider control as shipped with the Windows Phone Developer Tools has some problems, both due to how it was templated, and also because it was originally designed for the desktop, where mice are very good at hitting small targets. The visible Thumb...

If you are doing Windows Phone 7 development, chances are that you are either using or have considered using the Panorama. To make a truly glorious Panorama application, to immerse the user in the experience, or for branding purposes, many applications...

The Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit also includes the WrapPanel from the Silverlight Tookit. It is ideal for displaying content in wide PanoramaItems. The sample application that ships with the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit source includes...

If your Windows Phone 7 application includes a Panorama with a background, you may have seen seams—one pixel wide lines darker than the background image’s color—where the background loops around and the right edge meets the left edge...

(Special thanks to Andre Michaud and Mike Russell who showed me how to do this.) ToolTips are quite useful for for displaying helpful information when the user hovers over a control. The way that ToolTips are usually used is by setting the ToolTipService...

What happens when you create a Control? When do overrides get called and events get raised? When do styles get applied? In response to this thread on silverlight.net, I've whipped this simple table up. There are some subtle differences between instantiating...

This example demonstrates how to give a Button new visuals and visual state by re-templating. It also includes what to do with all of the existing VisualStateManager stuff, but first it discusses various ways of modifying existing controls. There are...

In Layout Fundamentals Part 1 , I started slowly, and demonstrated the need for a layout system. I touched on what it can do for you, and layout containers and properties. This post covers the layout containers and some layout concepts in a bit more detail...

This is the first part of a series of articles on Silverlight 2's layout system. I'm going to start off slowly, and demonstrate the need for a layout system, then explain some more about what "layout" actually is and what the Silverlight 2 layout...

I've been playing around with RenderTransforms and decorators and such to make layout transitions, but for this WrapPanel, my goal was to introduce no additional UI elements, animations or transforms. I also wanted to use some easing equations to do some...

It can be a little tedious to type in everything that you need to define a DependencyProperty but you can use VS 2008's snippets to make is easy. The snippets are designed to work with WPF, but they can be made to work with Silverlight with one small...

In a previous post , I introduced the Snapper element, which is a UserControl subclass that snaps its Content to an integer pixel. Now I'll show how to implement snapping as an attached behavior using a custom attached DependencyProperty. To use the...

One of the common things that developers want to do is to navigate between pages of their application. Once they have that, then they want to make the transitions look pretty. The attached project (see below) show how to do use a TransitionControl to...

How do you prevent the Slider from returning "ugly" values, and get it to "snap" to only the values that you want, such as integers, or multiples of a certain step value such as 0.125? One way to do this is to override OnValueChanged, but it helps to...

Presenting a dialog to the user is a common task for many applications. Silverlight 2 does not have a Dialog class, but it is possible to use the Popup class to create a very credible dialog. My Dialog class can't leave the Silverlight plugin--for that...

Executive Summary : Most of the time, SizeChanged is the right event to use, and LayoutUpdated is the wrong event. The Silverlight 2 layout system offers two events: SizeChanged and LayoutUpdated. They look the same...here is how they are hooked up...

What is pixel snapping? Snapping in general usually refers to allowing a property to take discrete as opposed to continuous values. In Silverlight, values such as Width, Height, Canvas.Left and Canvas.Top are of type double and not restricted to integer...

In Silverlight 1.0, the only container element was Canvas. In Silverlight 2, there are a number of other layout containers, such as Grid, Border and StackPanel, and you can also make your own. Silverlight 2 applications can be completely layout-based...