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Just when you thought everything was said about the PDC, I thought I’d add a couple of notes from my perspective. I’d planned on doing this earlier, but am still recovering from all the parties and had to wait for the Mike Mathis to upload the best picture of the PDC, which is below. Fellow…

The latest version of Jeffrey Richter’s free Power Threading Library, which includes a DLL for use by Silverlight applications and components is now available for download. The Silverlight version includes Jeffrey’s popular AsyncEnumerator class that allows developers to use a synchronous programming model while performing asynchronous operations. This allows developers to create very fast and…

Thursday is National History Day at our local high school, and just in time for the competition, my son and I put the finishing touches on a German Enigma simulator to complement his display—written, of course, in Silverlight. Here’s what it looks like:   Enigma machines were used to encrypt Axis military communications in World War II.…

I just returned home from the PDC after a marvelous few days in sunny L.A. Sunday’s Silverlight precon was a blast, and if you attended, I hope you felt it was worth your time. I could have easily filled out two more days with Silverlight fun and games, but I tried to hit the high points…

Well, I’m back from my concert tour in England. I had just a spectacular time and made some good friends. The last show, in Birmingham, was recored by the BBC and is available for listening on the BBC’s website this week. If you like to hear a concert (where I helped set up the instruments…

I leave for the PDC tomorrow morning, but there’s time for one more cool Silverlight trick before I leave. One of the features added to Silverlight 2 late in the development cycle was the CompositionTarget.Rendering event. CompositionTarget.Rendering is essentially a per-frame rendering callback that lets you build high-performance animation loops driven by logic executed in…

One of the unique features that Silverlight brings to the browser platform is the ability for you to write multithreaded apps. You can use Thread.Start, ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem, and other mechanisms to execute code on another thread, and you can use the same thread-synchronization primitives that you’re already familiar with from the “big” .NET Framework to synchronize…

While I prefer the term “particular”, some (especially my wife and all my friends) would call me “anal-retentive.” For example, I am, ahem, particular where my windows show up on the screen. I have all the applications I run set to their specific locations and nothing makes me uninstall an application faster than one which…

Today I updated the Deep Zoom demo I originally published a few months ago for the RTW release of Silverlight 2. The new version shows how to do mouseovers on the individual subimages in a Deep Zoom scene—something that wasn’t at all obvious to me how to do until I read Jaime Rodriguez’s excellent blog post…

This is like my seventh PDC! My first PDC was 15 years ago in 1993 and I still have the Windows plastic slinky on my bookshelf. Anyway, I’ll be at the 2008 edition of the PDC so please stop by the Wintellect booth and say hello. As I’ll be at the PDC to see some…

One of the areas of Silverlight that not much has been written about yet is the factoring of applications. Applications don’t have to be packaged in one big XAP file; Silverlight presents numerous options for dividing code and resources among multiple assemblies, packaging resources inside or outside the XAP file in one file or multiple…