The Joy Of Programming

My previous post describes about making a Custom marquee control in WPF. Here is what I tried the same using Silverlight. Silverlight is getting really mature with its latest releases, it has come pretty close to WPF in most of the scenarios. There is a difference with the way you create the Generic.xaml for writing the default look. You have to manually add the Generic.xaml to the project and set the build action as Resource file. See this blog for a detailed explanation of this. And the XAML code is still the same as what we wrote in WPF. The following code has to be added to the constructor so that whenever the control gets instantiated the default style will be associated with that. public Marquee() { DefaultStyleKey = typeof ( Marquee ); } The rest of the code is pretty much the same as WPF. I have added a Duration dependency property so that end user will be able to change the speed of the animation at run time. And subscribed to the mouse enter and leave so that animation w...

WPF and Silverlight have the cool idea of 'Lookless controls' which means you can skin a control in whichever way you like. Or in other words the UI rendering logic of a WPF control lives totally in a seperate world than the control's functionality. This enables a WPF applications capaibility to dress up in totally different skins and layouts at the run time. So let me explain the creation of a simple custom control by taking the example of a Marquee control. Hope you are well aware of the HTML Marquee tag. I am explaining the CustomControl concept of WPF with Marquee control as an example. Step to Create a custom control with VS2008 The above step will give you the class file and Generic.xaml added to the project. Who is your control Parent? First I should choose the base class from which my control has to derive from. I am seeing the Marquee as a control which holds up a content element always and the content gets scrolled horizontally. So I can say that ' Marquee con...

Take a look at the Deepzoom page composed by Rob Burke using AndreaMosaic and Silverlight Deepzoom. This is such a great idea and to me this is going to be the major use of Silverlight Deepzoom technology. I am not sure that how many other software available out there which does photo mosaic. So I just tried to do one by myself. Bellow are the steps I followed 1) Installed AndreaMosaic and just follow the steps to create a photo mosaic file. You have to play little bit around the tool to undertsand what exactly is happening. 2)Open the DeepZoom composer (Can be downloaded here ) and arrange your photo mosaics in the order 3)Export the Deepzoom project to silverlight project 4)Publish that to Silverlight Streaming service Original Photo and the bellow deepzoom Silverlight(multiscale image) has around 1000 images in it. Check this out by drag and scroll your mouse. Or check out the Streaming version here

For the last two weeks I was a little busy with the WPF work for the Podder Skinning Contest by Josh Smith . Josh had a great WPF application architectured to support complete UI skinning. So all I had to do was to make some controls hooked up to his Model / Commands, and give it the look - that is the beauty of XAML/WPF. There are a series of posts he had made on theCode project explaining it really well The WPF Podcatcher Series - Part 1 (Introducing Podder) The WPF Podcatcher Series - Part 2 (Structural Skinning) The WPF Podcatcher Series – Part 3 (The Podcast Management Conundrum) The competition was annouced few months back but I was not sure about my time and availability and also I was not relieved from the hang over created by the previous contest - This needs more time out of my family:). Then I heard Josh has extended the deal line to Aug 4th. This time I decided to give it a try in two weeks . And here is the Source Code All my ideas were around the Aero glass feature of Vis...