By Michael Washington on 3/27/2010 7:58 PM

I am really excited about the future of web development using Silverlight. Recent enhancements to Microsoft Expression Blend 4 have enabled the use of the MVVM pattern in a straightforward manner using behaviors.

I have posted a sample project that demonstrates an implementation of the MVVM (Model-View-View Model) pattern to create a simple Silverlight File Manager. This pattern allows a programmer to create an application that has absolutely no UI. The programmer only creates a ViewModel and a Model. A designer with no programming ability at all, is then able to start with a blank page and completely create...

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By Ian Lackey on 3/26/2010 1:33 PM

So this is not a full post (hence the Preview suffix to the title), but wanted to put something out there to let everyone know that I will be posting an update to the Silverlight SEO stuff sometime next week. Monday I am speaking at the St. Louis .Net user group meeting on this topic. After the talk I will be posting my notes and code used for the demo. The code provided will approach this topic from the standpoint of building a new site as opposed to the previous posts, which focused more on upgrading a current site. Currently you can view the demo online here: http://silverlightseo.openlightgroup.net . This site is all data driven content that is shared between Silverlight and ASP.Net. In the near future the site will be filled with all of the details of how it is built and how to incorporate the same strategies in your sites to improve search engine indexing for sites using Silverlight. Keep an eye out over the next few days as the content will start...

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By Michael Washington on 3/20/2010 5:10 PM

You may find this post helpful if:

You are using MVVM  You are using a TreeView control You want the SelectedItem of the TreeView control to be passed to another object There are a lot of improvements in Expression Blend 4 that makes wiring this up easy. I poked around for a bit until I found the easiest method to do this that I could find.

 

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By Ian Lackey on 3/8/2010 4:38 PM

This is a very short and sweet post about dynamically switching the ItemTemplate property of a Silverlight ListBox at runtime. First we will start with a little background of what led to this article.

I am currently working on an application that contains a list of pediatric patients and their parents. I was recently given a requirement to display a parent name to one group of medical professional and the patient name to another group. However, either group should be able to toggle this display to allow searching on either the parent or patient.

Knowing that in Silverlight, simple is usually the correct answer, I figured this should in fact be simple. Thankfully, I was correct and after only a few minutes I had the following solution working.

If Me.SearchByParent.IsChecked Then Me.PatientListBox.SetValue(ListBox.ItemTemplateProperty, _ Me.Resources("PatientParentListBoxTemplate")) Else Me.PatientListBox.SetValue(ListBox.ItemTemplateProperty,...

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By Michael Washington on 3/7/2010 11:50 AM

At the last Microsoft MVP summit, I was eating lunch with Jeff Paries who I had collaborated with on previous Silverlight projects, but had not met in person until that week. I commented that I had not used the Silverlight gauge he created about a year ago because it was too big...

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