It appears that if I miss a day, I can pretty much do an all-submittal post :)

From SilverlightCream.com:

Writing an AsyncLoader to enqueue long running operations

Andrea Boschin has a tutorial on SilverlightShow where he's building up an asynch service to deal with a long-running app on the server.

MVVM with MEF in Silverlight: Video Tutorial

Jeremy Likness has a video tutorial up for helping beginners wire up MVVM and MEF to Silverlight. Source code for the app in the video is downloadable.

MVVM with MEF in Silverlight Video Tutorial Part 2: Plugins and Metadata

In part 2, Jeremy Likness redesigns the app using metadata to turn the shapes into objects, and then show how easy it is to add a new plugin... and the source for the app is downloadable.

Binding a Converter Parameter

Andrew Veresov has a nice code-filled solution up for those times that you need to bind a ConverterParameter value.

EasyPainter: Lion Hair styling

Nokola has not been idle with Easy Painter... now he's added "Lion Hair" to the list of stylings you can apply... guess if you want to change someone's 'mane' ... sorry!

Twisting Navigation - Silverlight 3

SilverLaw has another control up - a "Twisting Navigation" control... very cool :) ... and since I'm behind the curve, he already has an update in the Expression Gallery as noted in his post, and a video tutorial on implementing it in an application... and if you understand German, turn up the sound :)

Uploading and downloading images using a WCF service with Silverlight

Gill Cleeren has a tutorial up at SilverlightShow on uploading and downloading images using WCF Services in Silverlight

New Windows Phone 7 Community Developer Hub

Jim Wightman and Jeremy Likness have a very cool Silverlight page up where you can paste the URL of your XAP in and have it display in a "Windows 7 Series Phone" ... and that's all I'm saying about that.

XAML Transformation 101

Viktor Larsson is discussing Transforms in XAML and has a nice tutorial up that is easily the beginning of a carousel... you may also want to check out his other posts... I'm adding him to my list.

Silverlight 4 Webcam Demo

In this post, Viktor Larsson has a tutorial up for using the WebCam. This is from a beginner perspective, so if you haven't jumped in, now's a good time.

How to extend Bing Maps Silverlight with an elevation profile graph - Part 1

Walter Ferrari has a post up at SilverlightShow discussing extensions to BingMaps such as creating routes using GeoCoding and Route Services plus drawing lines on the maps and getting coordinates of the points.

Stay in the 'Light!

Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    MIX10

This weekend i am headed to Vegas for a week of designer/developer love. I plan to spend a lot of time in the phone sessions as well as in the Commons visiting with people.

This year's MIX has be really excited about both Silverlight 4's continued maturation as well as the XNA/Silverlight 4 story on the phone. I really want to connect with designers who have spent a year with Sketchflow and see how the tool is working in their 'day jobs'.

Not coincidently I am also speaking at MIX this year. My talks are:

Debugging Microsoft Silverlight Applications

Time: Tuesday at 1:30 PM

Location: Lagoon B

Building Silverlight apps is one thing, but what happens when you get stuck? That's where debugging comes into the picture. In this mini-talk, Shawn shows you how to do simple debugging of Silverlight code, debug data binding/validation problems, and how to debug Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Services.

This is a twenty-five minute talk where I hope to help you figure out some of the debugging mysteries of Silverlight.

Securing Microsoft Silverlight Applications

Time: Tuesday at 3:00 PM

Location: Lagoon F

Come hear how to protect Silverlight applications from common threats including securing your application from intruders, eavesdroppers and users as well as protecting your code, your data and your servers from attacks. Also, hear about the key security vectors that must be considered when using Silverlight such as securing applications that often live outside firewalls.

The Rest of the Time

During the rest of the conference I will be around and at as many parties as possible...it is Vegas after all. If you want to find me, either follow my tweets, my FourSquare checkins or my Glympses (see my Twitter feed for Glympse notifications).

© 2010 Shawn Wildermuth. All Rights Reserved.
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Some great content has been published since I posted my previous collection of Silverlight/WPF Charting links. What's more, the November 2009 release of the Silverlight Toolkit and the February 2010 release of the WPF Toolkit have both been released, so please have a look at them if you haven't already!

Now, without further ado, here are all links that are fit to print (FYI: previously published links are gray):

Overviews (100 level)

• Silverlight Toolkit Released – More controls! - Tim Heuer's during the PDC keynote overview set the stage for good Charting content.
• Silverlight Toolkit (Silverlight 2 Control Pack) - Charting - Pete Brown followed up minutes later with another good overview. (Party trivia: The styles seen in his blog offer a rare glimpse of the pre-release Charting styles.)
• Silverlight - Introducing the Chart Control - Chad Campbell was also ready with a good "zero-day" overview and code samples.
• The Weekly Source Code 36 - PDC, BabySmash and Silverlight Charting - Scott Hanselman's post includes a BabySmash tie-in and a smidge of flattery. :)
• Graphing – Silverlight Toolkit - Jesse Liberty introduces Charting and covers some of the basics.
• Bubble chart - Jesse Liberty introduces the BubbleSeries class and describes some interesting use-cases.
• The Bubble Chart in the Silverlight Toolkit - Sparkling Client interviews Jesse Liberty in this podcast discussing the BubbleSeries.
• Day #15: Silverlight Charting - Jeff Blankenburg gives a nice overview of Charting and demonstrates how easy it is to switch series types along the way.
• Getting started with the charting controls - The Silverlight SDK team has a nice overview that walks readers through creating their first chart from start to finish.

Scenarios (200 level)

• Zooming into a chart - Ruurd Boeke did the "zooming" scenario sample for the live Charting samples page - here's how he did it.
• Silverlight - Getting Started with the Chart Control - Chad Campbell again - a thorough walkthrough of creating your first chart.
• Silverlight 2 Custom Stock Charts With Silverlight Toolkit - Peter Bromberg with his own walkthrough - creating a stock chart with plenty of code.
• Styling the Charts in the Silverlight Toolkit - Pete Brown again - this time with a good styling overview for designers.
• Designer’s Guide to Styling Silverlight Toolkit Charting Controls - Mehdi Slaoui Andaloussi goes over the top with a "soup to nuts" designer-oriented guide to styling everything. It probably helps that Mehdi works on my team and authored the shipping styles for Charting as well. :)
• Pie Chart Styling in the Silverlight Toolkit - Cross-Slice Gradients - Pete Brown takes a proof-of-concept for holistic pie chart styling and uses it to great effect.
• Bubbles – 1 Chart – three Axes - Jesse Liberty takes advantage of BubbleSeries to visualize historical data in an interesting way.
• Customizing the Labels on an Axis of the Silverlight Toolkit Chart - Kevin Dockx calls out the AxisLabelStyle property which allows designers to easily customize the labels of an axis.
• Dazzling Silverlight Toolkit Pie Charts with Overlays - Pete Brown continues working with pie charts and creates a further level of polish by adding some shiny overlays that make the visuals "pop".
• Silverlight Charting: Creating rich data point tooltips - Jeff Wilcox shows how he customized the ToolTips of a LineSeries to show a wealth of information relevant information in a very user-friendly manner.
• Pie Chart and Column Chart videos post - Jesse Liberty demonstrates the use of PieSeries and ColumnSeries in a set of "How Do I" videos.
• Styling Charts with the Silverlight Toolkit - Pete Brown's comprehensive Expression Newsletter article provides some of the best information available anywhere about Charting styling!
• Styling a Silverlight Chart - Rudi Grobler shows how to re-style a LineSeries to look just like the Google Analytics charts.
• LineChart with Markers - Lee demonstrates one way of adding markers (also known as annotations or cursors) to a Chart.
• Showing and Hiding Series in chart - Lee neatly solves the problem of hiding (and showing) individual Series by clicking on their entries in the Legend.
• Creating, Binding and Styling a Bubble Chart - Timmy Kokke shows off how some of the new Blend 3 features can be used to completely customize the appearance of a BubbleSeries without writing any code at all.
• Custom Bar Charts with the Silverlight Toolkit - Pete Brown discusses how he went about dramatically customizing the appearance of two Chart types to create a very modern, polished look for a demo app.
• Silverlight 3: Displaying and Charting with TwitterCounter - Peter Bromberg shows off an application to display Twitter statistics along with a chart of followers over time.
• Silverlight - Drill Down Charts Walkthrough - Chad Campbell gives a great overview of creating "drill-down" charts - in video form!
• Binding to a Silverlight Chart Series gives a null reference exception - Jim Lynn shows how to detect and correct a common mistake (I make myself from time to time).
• An Excel file Viewer in Silverlight 4 - Walter Ferrari shows how to write a simple viewer for Excel spreadsheets - with flexible graphing and zoom support!
• Squeezing out performance from Charting - Lee Campbell describes how using a custom CollectionViewSource can improve performance by making it easy to reduce the amount of data being visualized.
• Silverlight Toolkit Charting Controls - Hans Hugli outlines a few ways to make the process of customizing chart visuals in Blend a little easier.

Internals (300 level)

• Adding a Location Crosshair to Silverlight Charts - Colin Eberhardt shows how to add crosshairs on top of a Chart to display the coordinates of the mouse pointer.
• Adding a Location Crosshair to Silverlight charts (again!) - Colin Eberhardt updates his crosshairs post to accommodate changes in the March 09 release.
• How to create stock charts using the Silverlight Toolkit - Rudi Grobler shows how to create a custom Series type that's perfect for stock charts (open/high/low/close).
• Silverlight Charts: Binding multiple Series - Jeremiah Morrill shows off an attached behavior that enables binding a Chart to a "collection of collections" to create an arbitrary number of series automatically.
• Interacting with Charts - Lee implements a nice interactive range selection behavior to create a friendly "zoom" feature for controlling the Axis range.
• Interacting with charts-2 - Lee shows off a proof-of-concept implementation to add an overlay for the plot area with grippers that enable interactive zooming on an axis.
• How can I add labels to a WPF pie chart? - Bea Stollnitz begins her three-part series about adding annotations to a pie chart with an overview.
• How can I add labels to a WPF pie chart? - Implementation details - Bea Stollnitz's second post explains how she implemented her pie chart annotations on WPF.
• How can I port the WPF labeled pie chart to Silverlight? - Bea Stollnitz's final post of the trilogy details how she ported the WPF implementation to Silverlight.
• Freeing the axes of the Microsoft toolkit charting control - Robert provides an in-depth description of how he created a custom axis behavior and used it to produce a nice stacked chart display.
• WPF & Silverlight Charting: A Logarithmic Axis - Cory Plotts took it upon himself to write - and share - a LogarithmicAxis implementation that should make some of you very happy!
• Databinding Multi-Series Charts - Beat Kiener shows how he added support for the "collection of collections" scenario - very useful when the number of series isn't known in advance and you don't want to have to write code to hook things up.

Team Member posts (Partner level)

• Building an Observable Model in Silverlight - Jafar Husain gives some deep, technical detail about the observable model that Charting uses to enable its rich dynamic data support.
• Writing Your Own Silverlight Chart Series (Part 1): Making Designers Happy - Jafar Husain provides an overview of what it takes to create a new Series type and some scaffolding for an OHLC Series.
• Writing Your Own Silverlight Chart Series (Part 2): Implementing the Series - Jafar Husain explains all that it takes to completely implement a custom chart type using only the public interfaces!
• TreeMap control is coming to Silverlight Toolkit - Marek Latuskiewicz introduces the new TreeMap control, explains what Interpolators are, and shows how they work.
• Treemap released in Silverlight Toolkit - Gareth Bradshaw gives a great TreeMap overview that touches on all the common scenarios.
• TreeMap in Silverlight Toolkit: How to write your own interpolator - Marek Latuskiewicz explains more about what Interpolators are, how they're actually used by the TreeMap control, and how to write one yourself!

My posts (Ego level)

• Announcing a free, open source Charting solution for Silverlight [Silverlight Toolkit released today at PDC!]
• Click your way to great Silverlight charts [Live ChartBuilder sample and source code!]
• Improving ChartBuilder's cultural sensitivity [ChartBuilder app/source updated!]
• Silverlight Charting gets a host of improvements [Silverlight Toolkit December 08 release now available!]
• Great Silverlight charts are still just a click away [ChartBuilder sample and source code updated for Charting's December 08 release]
• Yummier pies! [A technique for more flexible gradient styling of Silverlight Toolkit pie charts]
• Columns of a different color [Customizing the appearance of Silverlight charts with re-templating and MVVM]
• Silverlight Charting is faster and better than ever [Silverlight Toolkit March 09 release now available!]
• Silverlight Charting remains just a click away - and runs on WPF, too!! [ChartBuilder sample and source code updated for Charting's March 09 release]
• Supporting the unsupported [Two fixes for the unofficial WPF Charting assembly!]
• If they can build it, they will come... [Enabling anyone to compile WPF Charting from the Silverlight Charting sources!]
• Another round of (un)support [Quick fix for the unofficial WPF Charting assembly!]
• Pineapple upside-down chart [How to: Invert the axis of a chart for "smaller is better" scenarios]
• Chart tweaking made easy [How to: Make four simple color/ToolTip changes with Silverlight/WPF Charting]
• Peanut butter jelly time [How to: Create a pleasing visual effect with Silverlight/WPF Charting]
• WPF Charting: It's official! [June 2009 release of the WPF Toolkit is now available!]
• Silverlight Charting gets an update - and a TreeMap! [Silverlight Toolkit July 2009 release now available!]
• Bringing the Silverlight Toolkit's TreeMap to WPF [Silverlight/WPF Data Visualization Development Release 0]
• Simple column labels you can create at home! [Re-Templating the Silverlight/WPF Data Visualization ColumnDataPoint to add annotations]
• A preview of upcoming Charting changes [Silverlight/WPF Data Visualization Development Release 1]
• Silverlight (and WPF) Data Visualization classes unsealed [Silverlight Toolkit October 2009 release now available!]
• Two birds, one stone [Silverlight/WPF Data Visualization Development Release 2 and DataVisualizationDemos update]
• Silverlight 4 Beta is out - and the Toolkit has it covered! [Silverlight Toolkit November 2009 release now available for Silverlight 3 and 4!]
• Two birds, squared! [Silverlight/WPF Data Visualization Development Release 3 and a DataVisualizationDemos update]
• "I feel the need... the need for SPEED!" [Seven simple, performance-boosting tweaks for common Silverlight/WPF Charting scenarios]
• No trees were harmed in the making of this blog post [How to: Successfully print a Chart with the Silverlight 4 Beta]
• This is what happens when two Toolkits fall in love... [The February 2010 release of the WPF Toolkit is now available!]
• Turn your head and check out this post [How to: Easily rotate the axis labels of a Silverlight/WPF Toolkit chart]

My many thanks go out to everyone who has spent time helping people learn how to use Silverlight/WPF Data Visualization!

PS - If I've missed any good resources, please leave a comment with a link - I'm always happy to find more great content! :)

PPS - The most recent version of this collection will always be pointed to by http://cesso.org/r/DVLinks. If you're going to create a favorite or link to this post, please use that URL so you'll always be up to date.

Very good high-level paper  on SDL consideration for both Client and Client Apps.

Start download

From SilverlightCream.com:

DotNetNuke Silverlight Traffic Module

If it's DNN and Silverlight, it has to be my buddy Michael Washington :) ... Michael has combined those stunning gauges you've seen with website traffic... just too cool!... grab the code and display yours too!

Cool demonstration of Silverlight VideoBrush

This is a no-code post by Tim Greenfield, but I like the UX on this Jigsaw Puzzle page... and you can make your own.

Introducing the Earthquake Locator – A Bing Maps Silverlight Application, part 1

Bobby Diaz has an informative post up on combining earthquake data with BingMaps in Silverlight 3... check it out, the grab the recently posted Live Demo and Source Code

Adding Volcanos and Options - Earthquake Locator, part 2

Bobby Diaz also added volcanic activity to his earthquake BinMaps app, and updated the downloadable code and live demo.

Building Hello MEF – Part IV – DeploymentCatalog

Glenn Block posted a pair of MEF posts yesterday... made me think I missed one :) .. the first one is about the DeploymentCatalog. Note he is going to be using the CodePlex bits in his posts.

Building HelloMEF – Part V – Refactoring to ViewModel

Glenn Block's part V is about MEF and MVVM -- no, really! ... he is refactoring MVVM into the app with a nod to Josh Smith and Laurent Bugnion... get your head around this...

The Case for ViewModel

Nikhil Kothari has a post up about the ViewModel, and how it facilitates designer/developer workflow, jumpstarts development, improves scaling, and makes asynch programming development simpler

MMORPG programming in Silverlight Tutorial (12)Map Instance (Part I)

Jianqiang Bao has part 12 of his MMORPG game up... this one is showing how to deal with obstuctions on maps.

MMORPG programming in Silverlight Tutorial (13)Perfect moving mechanism

Jianqiang Bao also has part 13 up, and this second one is about sprite movement around the obstructions.

1 Simple Step for Commanding in Silverlight

Christopher Bennage blogged about Commanding in Silverlight, he begins with a blog post about commands in Silverlight 4 then goes on to demonstrate the Caliburn way of doing commanding.

Stay in the 'Light!

Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    MIX10

[In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu]

We are continuing to make progress on shipping Visual Studio 2010.  I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who has downloaded and tried out the VS 2010 Release Candidate, and especially to those who have sent us feedback or reported issues with it. This data has been invaluable in helping us find and fix remaining bugs before we ship the final release.

Last month I blogged about a patch we released for the VS 2010 RC that fixed a bad intellisense crash issue.  This past week we released two additional patches that you can download and apply to the VS 2010 RC to immediately fix two other common issues we’ve seen people run into:

Patch that fixes crashes with Tooltip invocation and when hovering over identifiers

The Visual Studio team recently released a second patch that fixes some crashes we’ve seen when tooltips are displayed – most commonly when hovering over an identifier to view a QuickInfo tooltip.

You can learn more about this issue from this blog post, and download and apply the patch here.

Patch that fixes issues with the Web Forms designer not correctly adding controls to the auto-generated designer files

The Visual Web Developer team recently released a patch that fixes issues where web controls are not correctly added to the .designer.cs file associated with the .aspx file – which means they can’t be programmed against in the code-behind file. 

This issue is most commonly described as “controls are not being recognized in the code-behind” or “editing existing .aspx files regenerates the .aspx.designer.(vb or cs) file and controls are now missing” or “I can’t embed controls within the Ajax Control Toolkit TabContainer or the <asp:createuserwizard> control”.

You can learn more about the issue here, and download the patch that fixes it here.

Common Cause of Intellisense and IDE sluggishness on Windows XP, Vista, Win Server 2003/2008 systems

Over the last few months we’ve occasionally seen reports of people seeing tremendous slowness when typing and using intellisense within VS 2010 despite running on decent machines.  It took us awhile to track down the cause – but we have found that the common culprit seems to be that these machines don’t have the latest versions of the UIA (Windows Automation) component installed.

UIA 3 ships with Windows 7, and is a recommended Windows Update patch on XP and Vista (which is why we didn’t see the problem in our tests – since our machines are patched with all recommended updates).  Many systems (especially on XP) don’t automatically install recommended updates, though, and are running with older versions of UIA. This can cause significant performance slow-downs within the VS 2010 editor when large lists are displayed (for example: with intellisense).

If you are running on Windows XP, Vista, or Windows Server 2003 or 2008 and are seeing any performance issues with the editor or IDE, please install the free UIA 3 update that can be downloaded from this page.  If you scroll down the page you’ll find direct links to versions for each OS.

Note that we are making improvements to the final release of VS 2010 so that we don’t have big perf issues when UIA 3 isn’t installed – and we are also adding a message within the IDE that will warn you if you don’t have UIA 3 installed and accessibility is activated.

Improved Text Rendering with WPF 4 and VS 2010

We recently made some nice changes to WPF 4 which improve the text clarity and text crispness over what was in the VS 2010/.NET 4 Release Candidate.  In particular these changes improve scenarios where you have a dark background with light text.

You can learn more about these improvements in this WPF Team blog post.  These changes will be in the final release of VS 2010 and .NET 4.

Hope this helps,

Scott

[In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu]

This a quick post to announce a few upcoming events for those in the UK.

I’ll be presenting in Glasgow, Scotland on March 25th

I’m doing a free 5 hour presentation in Glasgow on March 25th. I’ll be covering VS 2010, ASP.NET 4, ASP.NET Web Forms 4, ASP.NET MVC 2, Silverlight and potentially show off a few new things that haven’t been announced yet.

You can learn more about the event and register for free here.  There are only a few spots left – so register quickly. 

When the event fills up there will be a wait-list – please add yourself to this as we’ll be encouraging people who won’t be able to attend to let us know ahead of time so that we can add more people to the event.

I’ll be presenting in Birmingham, England on March 26th

I’m doing a free 5 hour presentation in Birmingham (UK) on March 26th. I’ll be covering VS 2010, ASP.NET 4, ASP.NET Web Forms 4, ASP.NET MVC 2, Silverlight and also potentially show off a few new things that haven’t been announced yet.

You can learn more about the event and register for free here.

The event unfortunately filled up immediately (even before I had a chance to blog it) – but there is a waitlist.  If you’d like to attend please add yourself to it as hopefully a number of people will be able to attend off of it.

UK Party at MIX

If you are going to MIX and are from the UK send mail to phil@pixelprogramming.com (or tweet him @plip) for an invite to a party being organized for UK MIX attendees next Sunday (March 14th).  Knowing the people involved I’m sure the party will be fun. <g>

Cool MIX10 iPhone App

Speaking of MIX (and UK developers), Chris Hardy has posted a cool new MIX10 iPhone application on the Apple AppStore.  The free application helps track sessions, rooms, etc.  You can learn more about it from Chris’ blog post here.  The app works for everyone – not just those from the UK. :-)

Hope this helps,

Scott

Last fall I visited 0redev in Sweden and gave a "What's New in Silverlight 3" talk. THey've just released the video if you interested in wathcing it:

Shawn Wildermuth - What's New in Silverlight 3 from Øredev on Vimeo.

Now that Silverlight 3 is available, learning all the new features can be a chore. In this talk I will walk through all the new features and show you the most compelling pieces from both Silverlight 3 and Blend 3.

© 2010 Shawn Wildermuth. All Rights Reserved.
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