Archive for August, 2009
Jesse Liberty returns to the podcast to explain some of the new features found in Silverlight 3. This week, we talk about validation.
What’s New?
Validation was kind of a pain in Silverlight 2. Silverlight 3 has built in features (including template and VSM support) for capturing and displaying validation errors.
Example
A user types text into a TextBox that is only supposed to receive numbers. The data object throws an error and that’s reflected in the appearance of the control.
Surprising Fact
The error states can be completely customized. Would you like a dancing bear to announce the error? No problem.
Useful links:
Jesse’s What’s new in Silverlight 3: tinyurl.com/sgwhatnew
Jesse’s Mini-Tutorials: tinyurl.com/sgminis
Element to Element Binding Video: tinyurl.com/sgvalidation
Music for the show:
Special thanks to YACHT
Podcast: Download
August 26th, 2009
Jesse Liberty returns to the podcast to explain some of the new features found in Silverlight 3. This week, we talk about element-to-element binding.
What’s it For?
Element-to-Element binding is used to link the properties of two different controls in XAML.
Example
Imagine displaying the value of a slider control in a Textbox. This can now be done entirely in XAML.
Surprising Fact
Now that the binding agent can take control of these kinds of interactions, Converters can be used.
Useful links:
Jesse’s What’s new in Silverlight 3: tinyurl.com/sgwhatnew
Jesse’s Mini-Tutorials: tinyurl.com/sgminis
Element to Element Binding Video: tinyurl.com/sgelement
Music for the show:
Special thanks to YACHT
Podcast: Download
August 20th, 2009
Announcing: Silverlight 3 Firestarter Simulcast in Portland, September 17th.
Scott Guthrie keynote followed by presentations from Tim Heuer, Brad Abrams, Karl Shifflett and others.
Register here.
August 17th, 2009
Jesse Liberty returns to the podcast to explain some of the new features found in Silverlight 3. This week, we talk about Animation Easing. Easing has been around since Silverlight 2, but in Silverlight 3 it gets quite a makeover. Primarily, it becomes much… easier… to use.
What’s it For?
Easing functions allow us to specify how an animation changes over time.
Example
Easing can be used to put a bounce into an animation.
Surprising Fact
Easing has surprising bang for the buck. It makes applications feel much more natural.
Useful links:
Jesse’s What’s new in Silverlight 3: tinyurl.com/sgwhatnew
Jesse’s Mini-Tutorials: tinyurl.com/sgminis
Element to Element Binding Video: tinyurl.com/sgelement
Music for the show:
Special thanks to YACHT
Podcast: Download
August 13th, 2009
In this show, we look at Prism and the Managed Extensibility Framework or MEF. What are the differences? How do they overlap? We have the perfect guide: Glenn Block! He’s worked on MEF and Prism, and he helps us sort them out.
In this show:
- Prism and MEF are complementary. Since Prism can swap IoC containers, MEF can slide into that slot. At the moment, this is a bit of a trick, though. Glenn will be blogging on how to accomplish this.
- For the moment, unless you’re willing to dive into Prism/MEF code, Prism is probably the technology you’re going to use for Separation Of Concerns in larger applications.
- Prism and MEF may be teaming up in the future, and we’ll get the best of both worlds.
- If you’re thinking about 3rd party extensibility, MEF has some great support for that.
Glenn Block
Podcast: Download
August 6th, 2009
