DevDave - Dave Relyea's Silverlight Blog

Customizing a ToolTip

(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.ToolTip

Control Lifecycle

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

Retemplating a Standard Control (Including VisualStateManager Stuff)

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

Silverlight Layout Fundamentals Part 2 - Layout Containers

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.

Silverlight Layout Fundamentals Part 1 - What is Layout?

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

Layout Transitions - An Animatable WrapPanel

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

Using VS Snippets to Add DependencyProperties and Attached DependencyProperties

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

Using an Attached DependencyProperty to Implement Pixel Snapping as an Attached Behavior

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 Snapper

Navigation with Animated Transition Effects

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

DiscreteSlider - Adding Functionality with a Simple Control Subclass

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

Using Popup to create a Dialog class

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

Layout Events - SizeChanged and LayoutUpdated

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 in

Pixel Snapping - the Snapper Element

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

Why I Don't Like Canvas

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