Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Part 2 of 4 : Tips/Tricks for Silverlight Developers.

I wanted to create a series of blog post that gets right to the point and is aimed specifically at Silverlight Developers. The most important things I want this series to answer is :
What is it?
Why do I care?
How do I do it?
I hope that you enjoy this series. Let’s get started:

Tip/Trick #6)
What is it? Create a Notification Window in a Silverlight Out Of Browser Application.
Why do I care? Its a great way to alert users of something that needs their attention. It works similar to the notification you would get with a new email in Outlook.
How do I do it:
1) Make sure you are developing an OOB application. Right click on your Silverlight Project and make sure there is a check in “Enabled running application out of the browser” as shown below:

Tip/Trick #7)
What is it? You can increase isolated storage if you need more space.
Why do I care? Eventually you will get a requirement that will call for more space than what is originally allocated by default.
How do I do it: This trick has to come from a Button click Event. So drop a button on the Silverlight Page and paste the following code inside of it.

Tip/Trick #8)
What is it? Use the StringFormat in XAML to format your data (for example a Birthdate).
Why do I care? It allows you to use standard formatting expressions in XAML rather than put it in code behind.
How do I do it: To format a string into a Birthdate then do the following: add a TextBlock to your main page.

Read more: Michael Crump