Silverlight Tips of the Day

Silverlight Tip of the Day #29: Creating a Transparent, Draggable Dialog with Rounded Corners

For this tutorial we will step you through the basics of what you need to do to create a dialog that you can: Drag/drop. Add transparency (opacity) to. Round the corners. To preview and run this application please visit this link: http://silverlight.services.live.com/invoke/66033/Border%20Demo/iframe.html Read More...

Silverlight Tip of the Day #28: How to Implement a Custom Mouse Cursor

In Tip of the Day #27 we talked about how to change the mouse cursor. But what if you want to have a cursor icon that is not supported by Silverlight? This tutorial will show you how to do it. For a complete demo of this tip visit: http://silverlight.services.live.com/invoke/66033/Custom%20Cursor%20Demo/iframe.html Read More...

Silverlight Tip of the Day #27: How to Change the Mouse Cursor

Let’s say you want to change the mouse cursor when hovering over a UI element. You can do this directly in the XAML by setting the Cursor property. For example, if you want to change the cursor to be the Hand     cursor when hovering over Read More...

Silverlight Tip of the Day #26: How to Change the Output XAP File Name.

Don’t like the default name given to your XAP file? Good news! You can change it but there are two steps you will need to take. Step #1. Right click on your Silverlight application node in the solutions explorer and choose “Properties”.    Choose Read More...

Silverlight Tip of the Day #25: How to Build the XAP File to the Debug/Release Folders

By default when you build your Silverlight application you will notice the XAP file is placed in your web sites ClientBin folder: This is regardless of whether you are building under Debug or Release configurations. In Visual Studio 2008 you can choose Read More...

Terrain Tutorial Part 1 – Creating a Scrolling Map

For this tutorial we will be generating a 2D scrolling map. The view is a straight down birds eye view. As shown in Figure 1 below, each terrain tile is represented by a combine upper-left and lower-right polygon. A map can be any width and height of Read More...

Silverlight Tip of the Day #24: How to Apply a XAML Template to a Class

Let’s say you have a class where you want to declare elements via a XAML template instead of dynamically creating them. For example, the XAML to declare an image and add it to a canvas would look like this: <Canvas x:Name= "MyCanvas" > Read More...

Silverlight Tip of the Day #23 – How to Capture the Mouse Wheel Event

Silverlight currently does not support mouse wheel events. However, you can attach an event to capture the mouse wheel movement through the HtmlPage object. This tutorial will show you how to do it for IE, Opera, Mozilla and Safari browsers. To start, Read More...

Silverlight Tip of the Day #22 – How to add Sound Effects, Music and Video to your Silverlight App.

No game is complete without a great sound track and sound effects! This tutorial will show you how to do both with a very small amount of code. Demo: (Silverlight 2 RTW required). Silverlight currently supports the following formats: Video WMV1-3 (Windows Read More...

Silverlight Tip of the Day #21 – How to work with Shapes, Brushes and Gradients

Shapes, gradients and brushes provide the user with a lot of power to make custom controls that look beautiful. For example, gradients can be made to look like shadows or lighting for stunning visual effects. For this demo, we are going to make the beginnings Read More...

Silverlight Tip of the Day #20 – How to Increase your Isolated Storage Quota.

Each application by default is given 1 MB of storage space through Isolated Storage where the server is able to store client specific data on the clients machine. So what if you need more than 1 MB? Fortunately, the IsolatedStorageFile object provides Read More...

Silverlight Tip of the Day #19: Using Isolated Storage

Silverlight uses Isolated Storage as a virtual file system to store data in a hidden folder on your machine. It breaks up the data into two separate sections: Section #1 contains administrative information such as disk quota and section #2 contains the Read More...

Silverlight Tip of the Day #18: How to Set Browser Cookies.

Cookies are strings of text that the server can store on the client side. These cookies can then be sent back by the client to the server each time the client accesses that server again. Cookies are commonly used for session tracking, authentication, Read More...

Silverlight Tip of the Day #17: How to Animate a Rotating Image

Each Silverlight element exposes a property called RenderTransform that is used to set the transform information that affects the rendering position of the element. I will be demo’ing a non-stop circular transform rotation of an image as seen here below: Read More...

Silverlight Tip of the Day #16 - StoryBoard versus DispatcherTimer for Animation and Game Loops.

In Tip of the Day #5 I discussed how to use the DispatcherTimer for your main game loop. However, a better approach may be to use the StoryBoard timer as discussed here or the CompositionTarget.Rendering event which was recently added to Silverlight 2. Read More...