Posts by Jeff Prosise

I’ve spent copious amounts of time lately digging into Silverlight 4’s new Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) and seem to find new uses for it every day. I love the fact that you can download a remote XAP file and import all of its exported parts with basically two lines of code: DeploymentCatalog dc = new…

If you write applications for Silverlight for Windows Phone, one of the features you quickly become familiar with is the Software Input Panel, or SIP. The SIP is the virtual keyboard that appears when a text-input control such as a TextBox gets the input focus. You don’t have to do anything to make the SIP…

At MIX this year, Silverlight developers were handed a real treat: their first look at Silverlight for Windows Phone. Silverlight is the primary platform that developers will use to write applications for the new Windows phone, which will debut later this year. I can’t remember being this excited about a platform since…well, since Silverlight 1.0.…

One of the extensibility points added to the run-time in Silverlight 4 is the new INavigationContentLoader interface, which allows applications that use Silverlight’s navigation framework to take control of page loading. In Silverlight 3, navigation URIs had to target XAML files containing Silverlight pages. In Silverlight 4, a navigation URI can target anything—a class name,…

Silverlight 4 includes a slew of features designed to make out-of-browser applications richer. One of those features is notification windows, also known as “toast” windows. This feature is available to all OOBs, regardless of whether they are trusted. It is not available to applications that run inside the browser. A notification window is one that…

One of the less-talked-about features of Silverlight 4 is the new Managed Extensibility Framework, or MEF. MEF has been evolving on CodePlex for a while now. It’s slated to be integrated into .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4, and as such is something with which developers should be familiar. As its name implies, MEF is a framework…

Another of the new capabilities that Silverlight 4 brings to the platform is the ability to host HTML content inside a Silverlight control. This support isn’t limited to static HTML content; the content can be interactive and can include script. It can even be Flash content or content that includes other Silverlight controls. To host…

Quick: Can you spot the problem with these three lines of code? BitmapImage bi = new BitmapImage(); bi.SetSource(stream); TheImage.Source = bi; These statements create an image from a stream of PNG or JPG image bits and display the image by assigning it to a XAML Image object named TheImage. It’s boilerplate code used to display images read…

In my last blog post, I wrote about Silverlight 4 applications that run outside the browser with elevated permissions and their ability to leverage COM automation servers on the host PC. Another privilege that applications with elevated permissions—also known as “trusted apps”—enjoy is the ability to access parts of the local file system without prompting the…

One of Silverlight 4’s most compelling new features is support for out-of-browser applications with elevated permissions. An app running with elevated permissions can perform actions that a normal sandboxed application can not. For example, it can access the local file system, and on Windows boxes, it can interact with COM automation servers. This latter feature—also…

One of the exciting new features in the Silverlight 4 beta is a pair of properties added to the ButtonBase and Hyperlink classes named Command and CommandParameter. These properties represent the first real support in Silverlight for commanding, which is primarily beneficial to to Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) applications. MVVM has long been popular among WPF developers…