Learning more about WPF and Silverlight
Posted in Expression, PDC, Silverlight, WPF on Nov 13th, 2009
One of the neatest additions to Expression Blend 3 is the Effects pane. You’ll find it in the Asset panel.
This makes it dead simple to add an effect to an item on the Blend Artboard. Just drag the effect onto the desired item and you get an instant effect.
The effect is easy to [...]
Posted in PDC, Silverlight on Nov 10th, 2009
Here’s a list of the Silverlight specific talks next week at PDC 09.
Silverlight
Getting the Most out of Microsoft Silverlight 3
This is an all day workshop on Monday. It promises to be full of great content from developers working in the Silverlight trenches.
Come learn how the robust features of Silverlight 3 help developers to create [...]
Posted in Prism, Silverlight on Nov 2nd, 2009
The February 2009 release of the Composite WPF supported WPF and Silverlight 2. Since that time Microsoft released Silverlight 3 which contains plenty of great new features. Last week, Microsoft released a version (October 2009) of Composite WPF that supports Silverlight 3. There are only a few minor changes in this release; here is a [...]
Posted in Shazzam, Silverlight, WPF on Oct 5th, 2009
I’ve been posting about Shazzam for over a year on my WpfWonderland blog. Now that Shazzam version 1.1 is about to be released I figure that it is time to setup a dedicated blog. http://blog.shazzam-tool.com
News and discussion regarding the Shazzam Pixel Shader Utility.
Yes, that’s the goal. To have a place to describe upcoming changes, [...]
Posted in Silverlight, Tools, WPF on Sep 23rd, 2009
Shazzam development is moving again
Shazzam is changing. There hasn’t been much improvement to Shazzam this year and that’s a shame. Especially since there is an influx of Silverlight developers exploring the benefits that pixel shaders bring to their projects.
Many of you have discovered Shazzam via enthusiastic support from the WPF and Silverlight community. Thank you [...]
Posted in Silverlight, Tools on Aug 23rd, 2009
Shazzam, my pixel shader utility continues to show up in books, blogs and articles.
The latest sighting is in:
Silverlight 3 Programmer’s Reference
By J. Ambrose Little, Jason Beres, Grant Hinkson, Devin Rader, Joe Croney
Read an excerpt
Custom Effects
Silverlight opens up a world of creativity possibilities by supporting custom High Level Shading Language (HLSL)- based effects. HLSL [...]
Posted in Silverlight, WPF on Jul 24th, 2009
Dev102.com has a nice post explaining how to write a Brightness extension method.
Excerpt:
Suppose you have several objects in your WPF application filled with similar Brushes which differ in brightness only. Like in this image:
The nine rectangles use the same RadialGradienBrush but each rectangle is a little darker than previous. You can create these 9 different [...]
Posted in Silverlight, Tools, WPF on Jul 14th, 2009
Pixel Shader Effects are starting to go mainstream. Now that Silverlight 3, WPF and Expression Blend support Shader Effects I expect to see a blossoming of interesting effects libraries.
A case in point. Charles, over at digitalepiphania.com has an new pixel shader that is worth investigating. His shader effect converts any XAML visual into a [...]
Posted in Silverlight on Jul 10th, 2009
If you have a computer with the Silverlight 2 developer bits installed you might see the following message when installing Silverlight 3.
Unable to install Silverlight. Your Silverlight developer components are out of date.
Here’s a typical install sequence on a Windows Vista computer that results in this error message.
1.
Navigate to a Web site with Sliverlight 3 [...]
Posted in Blend, Silverlight on Jun 30th, 2009
A common UI metaphor in recent times is the circular wait cursor or progress indicator. This article shows some easy techniques within Expression Blend 2 that simplify creating this modern UI indicator. After showing how to easily layout multiple child elements in a 360-degree pattern, I will show animation techniques for spinning, sizing and fading [...]
