‘Innovate with Silverlight 2′ article code available

Back in October, I wrote an article for MSDN’s {youshapeit} campaign called “Innovate with Silverlight 2: Community-powered client side imaging“, outlining several open source approaches for displaying and editing GIF, PNG, BMP, and JPEG images in Silverlight 2 exclusively from the client-side.

I’ve received quite a few messages over the last while notifying me that the source code for the article is no longer available on the site. Luckily, I was given permission to share that code, so you may download it here. Please refer to the article for a description of licensing terms.

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How to make cross-site service calls in Silverlight using JSON

You’re quite familiar by now with the need for cross-domain policy files and service proxies if you’ve spent any time writing applications in Silverlight that behave like mashups. The root of the cross-domain issue is in how browsers restrict XML requests, and one emerging and popular way to circumvent this problem is to make JSON calls instead, which are cross-site friendly.

Silverlight has a nice set of browser interoperability classes waiting to be used for these kinds of purposes. As a quick and dirty example let’s create some extensions that allow us to make JSON calls to grab data from…

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Composing animations with Silverlight.FX

When I read Nikhil’s “Effects and Transitions for Silverlight” and its accompanying Silverlight.FX framework, I was impressed by how easy it was, and is, to create an animation and declare it on any Silverlight framework element.

<Grid>
    <Grid.RowDefinitions>...</Grid.RowDefinitions>
        <fxglitz:Effects.ClickEffect>
            <fxglitz:HighlightEffect TargetName="highlightImage" HighlightColor="Yellow" Duration="00:00:01" />
        </fxglitz:Effects.ClickEffect>
        <Border x:Name="highlightImage">
            <Image Source="/Silverlight.png" />
        </Border>
        <TextBlock Grid.Row="1">Highlight</TextBlock>
</Grid>

With a framework this powerful, I wanted to extend it even further by providing a fluent interface, similar to jQuery, to compose and chain animations together. This way, you can declare a common animation element and behavior once, and apply it to any framework element you require, swap…

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Jumping from ASP.NET to Silverlight 2 available now

If you’re not familiar with Wrox Blox, they are shorter than books, and aim to give developers focused, contextual information on new technologies to get and stay productive quickly. I’m happy to report that Jumping from ASP.NET to Silverlight 2 was published today.

In it, I try to provide a solid base from which to learn Silverlight 2 coming from an ASP.NET development background. If you’ve held off getting into Silverlight 2, but are anxious to learn and build on what you already know about web development, I sincerely hope this is helpful for you.

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LINQ + WCF + Silverlight (Part Seven)

Our final task is to facilitate the use of our services layer within the Silverlight client sitting in the browser. In Visual Studio we can add ‘Service References’ in Silverlight like we add any other application dependency. When we do, Visual Studio will auto-generate the ‘ServiceReferences.ClientConfig’ file which contains information specific to our services and bindings. Make sure you check this file prior to deploying to ensure that it was generated using a Silverlight-compatible binding (basicHttpBinding is the only choice today) and that you have appropriate size limits and security in place for your needs.

Use Visual Studio to add a…

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