Designer Silverlight

I’ve been a busy blogger over at Veracity Blogs the last couple weeks. Here’s a list of my new posts:

• Florida Crime Rate Visualization – My attempts to use Silverlight for information visualizations are going pretty well. In this post, I visualize the Florida crime rate by county over almost 20 years. There are project files availalbe for anyone who wants to dig into how I did it a little more.
• Adobe Illustrator to XAML Conversion Options – This post walks through the pros and cons of two methods for taking an SVG file (or Adobe Illustrator) file and pulling it into Blend as a XAML file. It also has a XAML copy of a vector map of the US by county for download.
• Create A Snapping Slider In Blend Using Behaviors – This provides a downloadable behavior for getting a slider to snap to integers (or an integer multiple based on certain settings). I’ve provided project files as well as a tutorial for how to do it.
• How To Create a PART in Your Silverlight Custom Control – Because there are about a dozen tutorials on building a custom control, but I keep forgetting exactly how to do this part of it.
• How To Animate a Changing Property in a Custom Control in Silverlight – Have you ever wanted your property to animation automatically when it changes in your Silverlight Custom Control. I say, “Who hasn’t!?” at which point my wife forces me out into the fresh air and sunshine (or, as I call it, the Blinding Day Star). After I scurry back inside, I wrote this blog post.
• How To Build a Storyboard Animation for Silverlight in C# – Because sometimes you want to enjoy the benefits of the Silverlight animation engine but you really need to build the animation in the code instead of the XAML.

I finally cleaned out my Google Reader list and picked out the stuff I like.

• Carsonified » 5 Advanced Photoshop Techniques for Web Designers
• Carsonified » Advanced Photoshop Techniques for Web Designers – Part 2
• Source code for “WPF Control Development Unleashed” – From Pavan Podila, control development in WPF is pretty powerful… might be a good idea to check out his book.
• A SilverLight TreeMap control – I can’t believe I missed this for so long. I need to dig into this a little more, but if this really works the way it looks, everyone should be worshiping Pavan Podila over at Pixel in Gene. This is an info vis dream come true.
• Implicit Styles, Templates, Controls and FrameworkElements – From the Windows Presentation Foundation SDK team, Carole Snyder has a post on implicit styles… definately an under-appreciated topic in WPF
• Expression Studio Tutorials Starter Kit – Jaime Rodriguez continues to be awesome
• Mastering CSS, Part 2: Advanced Techniques and Tools – From Smashing Magazine and includes a section on iPhone CSS techniques
• How to Create Your First iPhone Application – Yet another “Make an iPhone app” guide
• How To Effectively Communicate With Developers – The graphic is hilarious.
• Typographic Design Patterns and Best Practices – Good for people who want to start digging into the typographic world
• 50 Useful New jQuery Techniques and Tutorials – 50 is kind of a lot, but this is from Smashing Magazine, whose motto is “The most compelling link dumps in the design community”

These are my links for May 6th:

• AutoScroller For Silverlight 2 ScrollViewer – Working on my own scrolling issues… there seem to be alot of them, but the more I dig into the control, the more I understand why.
• How to set the row height of a Grid in the code – Valuable if you're creating grids on the fly… which you shouldn't have to do, but sometimes the UserControls aren't working the way you want and the client deadline is approaching and you're beginning to panic and a some solution is better than no solution…
• Simple Perspective 3D in Silverlight 3 | Corey Schuman – Corey Shuman at 85turns.com has a really basic perspective 3D sample for Silverlight 3… nothing fancy, but it has code
• Silverlight Toolkit Control – TimePicker – Jesse Liberty – Jesse Liberty walks through the Silverlight TimePicker from the Toolkit… this is also a good tutorial on just getting the Toolkit working on one's machine
• Notes On Video: Implementing Model-View-ViewModel in Silverlight – Edward Tanguay's notes on Tim Heuer's talk on MVVM in Silverlight

These are my links for March 25th:

• Building Silverlight 2 and Silverlight 3 Beta applications on the same machine – Jeff Wilcox does what so many of us can only dream of doing… building with a client ready version of Silverlight and also the latest coolest shiznit.
• What’s New for Performance Profiling Tools for WPF – WindowsClient.net –
• kirupa.com – WPF Tutorial: Creating a Custom Window in WPF – Not my highest priority item, but cool nonetheless.
• Thriple – 3D Controls for WPF – Must play with new WPF UI stuff… No… must do real work… no, must play
• CodeProject: How to Implement MergedDictionaries for the ResourceDictionary in Silverlight 2 – This would be handy on my more enterprise oriented Silverlight projects

These are my links for March 6th:

• How to create your own commands and bind them in WPF – Edward Tanguay's piece on commands and WPF… I know that they are supposed to be awesome, but I haven't taken the time to sit down and figure them out yet.
• Simple example of Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection – Edward Tanguay continues his series on stuff that would be obvious if the Microsoft documentation were better.
• Coding4Fun : Wiimote Virtual Reality Desktop – So much Wii stuff… this one is a "Virtual Reality Desktop". It's more about 3D tracking with two Wiimotes
• How to: Publish a ClickOnce Application –
• 50 Twitter Tools and Tutorials For Designers and Developers – Yet another fantastic Smashing Magazine piece.

These are my links for February 27th:

• Quick Tip: Expression Blend – the Hand – Long story short: press the spacebar to use the hand tool without having to choose it from the toolbar
• Silverlight Drag and Drop Manager released @ CodePlex –
• “Implementing MVVM in Silverlight” – a UI perspective – Another in my ever-growing list of MVVM posts to look at
• Hands-On Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) for Silverlight and WPF – Another in the long list of MVVM stuff… someday I'll get around to it all
• Silverlight Patterns: Model-View-ViewModel In Silverlight 2 Apps – Shawn Wildermuth's article in MSDN magazine on Model-View-ViewModel In Silverlight 2 Apps

These are my links for February 20th:

• XAML Guidelines for Creating a Composite UI –
• Andrej Tozon’s blog | Design a Vista-like account display picture for Silverlight application – This is a great starting place for using Expression Design and moving everything into a Silverlight app
• 6 Things I Bet You Didn’t Know About Data Binding in WPF – Nates Stuff – Really valuable tips about WPF Binding and XAML
• Moonlight 1.0 goes live – Miguel de Icaza – Open Source Silverlight implementation for Linux. Works as a Firefox plugin.
• Descry – "As a part of Descry, we are releasing a set of open source, web-based visualizations and an article written by the Jon Udell that serves as a broad introduction to the topic." Silverlight visualizations.

These are my links for February 10th:

• Integrating Silverlight and ASP.NET MVC – Vital information if you're using Silverlight with MVC… Which I think about from time to time even though I have no time to actually do something
• Specialists Versus Generalists: A False Dichotomy? – Pabini Gabriel-Petit posits a counter argument to Jared Spool's discussion on specialists and generalists in UX. Or maybe I like it because Gabriel-Petit pretty much describes me to a tee. (thanks to jalderman)
• Example of using ObservableCollection for dependency injection – Edward Tanguay's has code for a test application that dynamically adds items to the UI when they are added to the observable collection. Nifty little summary app.
• Windows 7 Developer Guide – Release: Windows 7 Developer Guide – I should read this at some point if I want to stay ahead of the game… or at least know what it is I should know. (Thanks to joemcbride)
• WPF (Video) Hackery! Part I – Jer at http://jmorrill.hjtcentral.com has a hack for getting webcam to show up in WPF. Need to try! I got this fantastic webcam for Christmas and I've only goofed around with some AR stuff. (thanks to joemcbride)

I don’t know the answer to the question above… I’m still experimenting in that regard.

But if you have time, Joel Neubeck is asking that question and I would love to see what you think about it. I’ve heard fantastic things about Model-View-Controller (MVC), but I’ve also heard good things about Model-View-View-Model (MVVM).

Thanks to Tim Heuer for the pointer.

These are my links for February 10th:

• Shawn Wildermuth – Drag and Drop in Silverlight 2 – Seems like obvious drag-and-drop stuff. On the other hand, I've built an entire web presence on tutorials about things that should be obvious but aren't. (Thanks to WynApse)
• Silverlight and Encryption – Michael Wolf – Probably the best encryption tutorial for Silverlight I've ever seen. From Michael Wolf… who is part of the Cynergy team that is doing a workshop on good design/development teams at MIX09.
• A Simple Multi-Select ComboBox using Expression Blend – Jobi Joy walks us through creating a multi-select comboBox in Blend.
• Southridge Hands-on-Lab – "extensive hands-on-lab for WPF developers. The six-part lab includes Fundamentals, Custom Controls, Styling, Ribbon, DataGrid, Databinding" thanks to edward_tanguay for the link
• Twitter list: WPF and SL developers – Devin Brown over at Identity Mine posted this Google Docs list of Silverlight and WPF developers