A common problem encountered in Silverlight applications is how to set the focus properly when transitioning between controls. For example, in the reference application I'm writing for the book Designing Silverlight Business Applications there is the option to either edit an existing record or create a new one. The result of clicking the ...

This evening I presented a talk that dove into the details of Silverlight's Visual State Manager. I enjoyed the talk and had a terrific crowd with some very good questions. The deck explains much of what I went into with the talk, including exactly how the VSM works from when and how it starts and stops storyboards to the timing and flow of a ...

One of the most common questions I get about Jounce is how to handle transitions, since the ContentControl immediately swaps out content. There are some third-party solutions, such as the TransitioningContentControl from the Silverlight toolkit, but Jounce can also handle this right out of the box. Take a look at an example: View example in a ...

I knocked out quite a few items for the next release of Jounce, the primary being explicit support for multiple views bound to the same view model. In the previous version, the visual state binding would only reflect the most recent view (and a bug prevented the actual binding of the view model, but that's been fixed). The changes are targeted ...

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.

Over the past few posts I've been exploring models for modularized Silverlight applications that follow the MVVM pattern (using Prism/CAL). In this post, I'd like to cover unit testing, and writing appropriate tests not just for the view model, but the view itself. Before we continue, I'm going to assume you've read: Dynamic Module Loading with ...

I started a project to update my personal website using Silverlight. The goal is to use Prism/Composite Application Guidance to build out a nice site that demonstrates some Silverlight capabilities and make the source code available as a reference. One of the first pieces I chose to tackle was ensuring I could facilitate deep linking using ...

This is a simple example that covers a few advanced topics: Silverlight navigation combined with Prism and on-demand loading, search engine optimization, and use of the visual state manager. It is a shell for a biography site I was building.