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Silverlight articles

On this page you will find an overview of all articles that I have written myself. The more recent articles deal with software development with .NET (C#, Visual Studio, VSTS, Azure, LINQ, Entity Framework, Web services, WPF, Silverlight, ...) in particular. The older articles were often written for the purposes of courses or demonstrations at my computerclub and these articles are mostly about Delphi, PHP, databases, Javascript, Windows, Office, Multimedia applications, Atari, ...

Use the left panel to filter the more than 115 articles by category. These articles can be used freely for personal use. Placing the full articles on other websites is not allowed without the permission of the author.

.NET - Customize WCF RIA Services code generation

SP1 of Visual Studio 2010 and the new WCF RIA Services Toolkit makes it possible for you to implement you own code generation classes that can manipulate the client code generation of WCF RIA Services. In this article I will describe how the code generation works and I will demonstrate some scenarios and ideas were customizing the generated code is a nice technique to extend your own framework.

.NET - Silverlight 4 design-time features for ViewModels

Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4 offer a lot of new features. I like all the new features but I was especially interested in improvements that could help my current developments which are based on a M-V-VM architecture with ViewModels and a lot of bindings with UI controls. In this article I will focus on the improved design-time features. Along the way I will show a lot of screenshots and try to cover some other new Silverlight 4 features.

.NET - Advanced databinding with ViewModels in Silverlight

Silverlight and RIA Services are great technologies and the Model-View-ViewModel (M-V-VM) pattern is a nice approach to keep UI and logic separated. But using the combination of view models with item controls, dataforms and commands can be a laborious task because the databinding features in Silverlight are quite limited. In this article I will demonstrate how binding with ViewModels can be improved by using the BindingHelper class and by creating your own command behaviors.

.NET - First look at WCF RIA Services

A few months ago Microsoft released the first preview of .NET RIA Services. This new framework promises to simplify building n-tier Line of Business (LoB) applications by providing patterns, components and tools to build services, query data, handle CRUD operations, resolve concurrency, manage data validation, ... In this first article I will focus on the current limitations and I will offer you some of my workarounds and tips.

.NET - Sharing source code between .NET and Silverlight

Entity Framework

A common problem when developing Silverlight applications is how to share classes and in particular (Entity Framework) entities which are compiled for the full .NET framework in a Silverlight application. Silverlight is a browser plugin and a subset of the full .NET framework. Therefore Visual Studio does not allow referencing .NET assemblies from your Silverlight application. In this article I will demonstrate a very simple technique to share source code and it will give several real world examples and some handy tips.

.NET - Generic custom WPF/Silverlight value converters

Data binding is one of the most powerful features of WPF/Silverlight. It allows developers to achieve more with less code. However, when building user interfaces with WPF/Silverlight, you often need to create your own value converters. A common mistake is to implement custom value converters for each and every binding that requires one. Of course value converters can be generalized an re-used. In this article I will show you the source code of my library of generic custom value converters and I will demonstrate in which scenarios you can use them.

.NET - WPF/Silverlight treeviews and LINQ to SQL

A few examples about .NET WPF applications using LINQ to SQL. This article will describe how to create nice looking treeviews which are populated with data using LINQ to SQL (or LINQ to Entities). Of course resources, templates, styles, datatriggers, value converters, ... will be utilized. Most examples will also work with Silverlight.