One feature I employ often in Silverlight projects is the ability to share a model between the client and the server. When you expose a model using a WCF service, you can consume it on the Silverlight side and indicate you want to reuse types in a referenced assembly, rather than having the proxy types generated. At first glance this seems ideal ...

The biggest problem with data-binding is the requirement to implement the INotifyPropertyChange interface. There are dozens of solutions out there that try to simplify the process with techniques ranging from parsing lambda expressions and walking the stack frame to using IL weaving to modify classes at compile time. The most popular approach is ...

I'm please to share that I released the alpha version of the Sterling Object-Oriented Database for Silverlight 4.0 and Windows Phone 7.0 applications today. I dug into more details about the project in this introductory post. There have not been many significant changes to the source code since then, but I did create a set up project that ...

After posting about profiling Silverlight 4 out of the box, the author of a tool was kind enough to share with me his free .NET profiling tool. It's free, and it does a lot more than Silverlight. The manual is very straightforward but I wanted to make a quick an easy ''light tour'' to show you how I profiled the X-Fit app using the tool. In less ...

It turns out you can profile Silverlight 4 applications. Really! But the steps are scattered about the web in bits and pieces, so I wrote this to pull them all together. I'm going to use my reference X-Fit application for this, but you can obviously insert your own. Here we go! Set up PowerShell Yeah, we're going to make things a little easier ...

In my experience working with Silverlight applications, probably one of the most underused features I've witnessed is the ability to abstract application-level functionality using the IApplicationService and IApplicationLifetimeAware interfaces. This, in turn, results in the over-use (and abuse) of the Startup and Exit events in the Application ...

In this video, I wanted to share just how quick and easy it is to convert a Silverlight 3 project to Silverlight 4. The steps are basically as follows: Make sure you have the Silverlight 4 tools If you use Blend or any of the interactivity extensions (for triggers and behaviors) be sure to get the latest version of Blend If you use the ...

Silverlight 4 provides some very powerful data form capabilities out of the box. You will no longer have to throw an exception just to send a validation error or even worry about hard-coding labels. With support for data annotations, IDataErrorInfo and more, you now have plenty ''out of the box'' to work with. Let's explore the surface of some ...

Earlier I explored some options to allow inline hyperlinks in Silverlight 3 using some extensions and the WrapPanel. In Silverlight 4, which was released as beta earlier this week, the problem is solved in the framework. Silverlight 4 gives us the RichTextArea control, which allows us to organize runs, spans, paragraphs, and even embed other UI ...