The WebClient and HttpWebRequest classes can both be used for retrieving data from a Web service. WebClient is most useful for one-time retrieval of data from a Web service, or downloading remote resources (for more information on this see, "Downloading...

I've recently taken over the documentation for some of the Silverlight controls, and one of the controls I now own is Popup. One of the first things I do when preparing to document a control is play around with it in code. Using the Popup control is pretty...

Sometimes you might want to create an animation in procedural code (e.g. C#, VB .NET, etc) rather than in XAML like in my previous Animation post . I've seen a lot of traffic on the Silverlight.net forums asking about this subject so in this post I'll...

Here's a link to a silverlight video player with all the basic features like progress/seek slider, full screen toggle, play/pause/resume, etc. The player is meant to be relatively simple while still sporting the basic features you'd expect in a video...

I've seen several questions related to timers on forums and in internal mail so I thought I'd toss up a simple example. To create a timer, you have to use the DispatcherTimer in the System.Windows.Threading namespace. Here's an example of a simple...

Creating animations is one of the main reasons for even being interested in Silverlight and so I'm going to put together a series of posts that go over Silverlight animations - from dead simple to sophisticated and cool. Along the way, I'll be constantly...

Using playlists in Silverlight is extremely easy. Silverlight supports the use of playlists through ASX files. An ASX file is simply an XML file that specifies the media files in the playlist. Playlists provide, among other things, a central entry point for a group of media. ...

I’ve gotten some feedback from customers that they have pressure from their management to create Silverlight apps that look very visually appealing, but these customers, who are primarily developers, lack the tools, design skills or time to put together...

One of the tasks I am trying to accomplish as I write the documentation to accompany the FuelTracker project , is to incorporate the design guidelines and certification requirements where they are pertinent. As a side effect of this effort, I’ve generated...

This posting illustrates the use of opacity in a Microsoft Virtual Earth/Silverlight mashup that allows you to display selected landmarks in New York City....

There seems to be a fair amount of misunderstanding about windowless mode, and the current documentation doesn't provide enough detail to help out. The upcoming doc refresh will fix this, but I thought it might be helpful to provide some information here...

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 includes a number of incremental improvements based on customer feedback. Changes include improvements to controls, templating, Deep Zoom, performance, further compatibility with WPF, and much more. For a full list of changes, see...

Silverlight 5 Beta introduces a new ICustomTypeProvider interface that enables data binding to objects the structure of which cannot be known until runtime. This is a common problem when you work with data in any format from databases to metadata or XML...

Animation is very useful in creating graphically rich Silverlight applications. This posting illustrates the use of several types of animation in Silverlight, including key frames and splines, in order to simulate a bouncing ball....

Recently I thought I would check out the charting controls in the Silverlight Toolkit. I’d been meaning to for awhile, but I was distracted by other tasks such as writing the documentation for the Silverlight 4 beta release. Well, those docs have gone...

I've been watching the Silverlight forums since the release of Silverlight 2, and I've noticed folks are having problems getting their Silverlight 2-based apps to work with Web services. There have been a number of API changes between Silverlight 1.2...

I've been creating some Silverlight applications for Windows Phone lately and I've run into a few speed bumps I thought I'd pass along. This one is in regards to closing the SIP. The virtual keyboard on the phone or the SIP (Soft Input Panel) is the...

So I think I’ve mentioned before I have been working on a Windows Phone 7 application. It’s been a real learning experience as oftentimes as a writer, I get to know my feature areas very well, but don’t create full-blown applications using several features...

I've spent time the last couple weeks trying to figure out how to create my own panel. At first I was completely confused and it seemed like I would change something small and the entire layout of my panel would radically shift. But after stumbling around...

In previous versions of Silverlight, the browser handled all the HTTP communication for the Silverlight plug-in. The browser HTTP stack works well but has some limitations including the HTTP methods you can use and the response codes that are accepted...

What if you want to use a single animation object (let's say DoubleAnimation) to target multiple objects? This is especially useful when you have a large number of objects that have similar animations applied to them. For example, you are displaying rows...

I recently inherited the DataGrid control and, after reading over customer feedback and forum posts, one of the tasks I gave myself was to create a code example for the DataGrid.ColumnHeaderStyle property. After poking around I thought it would be interesting...

The FrameworkElement.Loaded event in Silverlight has a timing difference versus the FrameworkElement.Loaded event in WPF. Specifically, in WPF, the Loaded event will occur after the template is applied. In Silverlight, the Loaded event is not guaranteed...

Silverlight Pad is a Silverlight 1.0 Beta application that gives you a simple way to experiment with creating XAML content--the XAML you enter can be instantly rendered as Silverlight content. You can run the application online, or download it....

The Downloader object is a special-purpose Silverlight object that provides the ability to download application data, including fonts. You can download either a single font, or a collection of fonts in a Zip file....