Use the visual state aggregator to fire events in Silverlight without resorting to code behind or artifacts on your view models such as delegates to trigger animations. The events are broadcast to subscribing controls that transition visual states based on the event.

The visual state aggregator. What is it? How many times have you found yourself adding freak methods and commands to your Silverlight projects just to manage some animations? It's a common issue, and I've even built solutions like the IAnimationDelegate to help solve the problem. While it works, one thing always bothered me. I know it's a ...

This is a video tutorial to introduce beginners to how to use both MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) and MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) with Silverlight (should work for versions 3 and 4). Of course, some ''veterans'' may want to watch as well in case you've missed some of the fundamentals, or have a clever way to do something that you can share ...

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of presenting a talk entitled, ''Silverlight Line of Business Applications'' at the Atlanta Silverlight Meetup Group. This talk focused on several aspects of building line of business applications, ranging from the principles that belong in the foundation or architecture, to specific frameworks and ...

We often trip over ourselves trying to minimize code behind and abstract behaviors in the UI from the models, etc. This is important for clean separation, but sometimes behaviors may add too much abstraction. The real fact is many applications require some sort of transition or animation based on events, and while we can try to put as many of ...

In my last post, I showed you how to dynamically load modules on demand using the latest MEF release in Silverlight 3. This post, I will take you through managing regions with MEF. This will enable us to have a 100% MEF-based solution in Silverlight 3 if the only pieces of PRISM we were using were the dynamic module loading and region ...

Recently I've been having lots of conversations about the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF), the Composite Application Library (CAL or PRISM), and how they relate. One point of confusion that many people has comes when they try to force the two solutions to work together. In a recent conversation, I mentioned that PRISM has some great ...

The Silverlight team recently posted a blog entry entitled ''Vancouver Olympics - How'd we do That?'' in which they detailed the massive effort across multiple partners to pull together the on-line solution for streaming HD videos, both live and on demand. This was an exciting post for Wintellect and me because it detailed the effort we ...

NDepend is a product that analyzes large code bases and provides information about dependencies, complexity of code, best practices, and more. While designed to help manage large code bases, it also works well as a ''reality check'' as you are developing new projects. The latest release supports Silverlight and I'll be using it to clean up my RSS ...

One of the most common examples to help learn a language or framework is an RSS Reader. This is an ideal mini-project because it includes networking, parsing XML, and binding to data elements such as lists. I wanted to provide an example that shows some more interesting solutions that are possible using C# in Silverlight. This is the first part in ...