Tech
An issue that can crop up with Flex applications is the lack of any log information to match up against users' bug reports.
Tech
The Silverlight ScrollViewer exposes readonly properties which indicate the current vertical and horizontal scroll offset, and methods for setting the current offset.
Tech
This post provides a simple IValueConverter implementation that makes use of the framework type converters in order to convert between a large range of source / target types. This converter can be used both within bindings and in code-behind to give more concise property setters.
Tech
This blog post looks at the problem of showing modal dialog windows in applications that target both the Silverlight and WPF platforms. A solution is provided which allows modal dialogs to be written that work well for both technologies.
Tech
If your Silverlight application performs intensive updates to the UI during mouse events, the UI can freeze because it is invalidated before it has a chance to render.
UX Design
Contextual cues are frequently used in user interface design to communicate functionality and behaviour to the user, removing the need for the user to guess.
Tech
In this post I describe an update to the Silverlight MultiBinding solution I presented last year. This update includes support for Silverlight 4, attached properties and multiple bindings on a single object.
Tech
This post discusses the this keyword, what it represents, how it can catch you out and how to avoid those problems. It also introduces the functions call and apply from the Function prototype.
UX Design
This blog post looks at a recently published set of charts in a UK newspaper and how they fail to help in the comprehension of the data which they visualise. I will also look at much more effective ways of displaying this same data.
Tech
In this post I demonstrate a method for binding a Silverlight 3 DataGrid to dynamic data, i.e. data which does not have properties that are known at design time.
Tech
This blog post demonstrates a Linq API which can be used to query the WPF / Silverlight Visual Tree.
Tech
This blog post describes a simple technique for ensuring that consumers of events unsubscribe their event handlers without the need for weak events.
Tech
Sparklines are described by their inventor, Edward Tufte, as "data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics".
Delivery
Last week I gave a presentation on Agile Development for an event hosted by Codeworks and Sunderland Software City.
Tech
This blog post is about my entry to the Mix10k code competition, and old-skool demo, plus a few tips about how to keep you code size to below 10k.
Tech
This blog post demonstrates how Silvelight 3's WriteableBitmap can be used to create a UserControl that renders the content of any other Framework Element as a reflection with an animated ripple effect.
Tech
Today, Philipp Sumi and I and are proud to announce the release of SLF - the Simple Logging Facade.
Tech
Microsoft have recently submitted US patent application 20090282325, entitled Sparklines in the Grid.
Tech
This post looks at the speed of development of the two leading RIA frameworks, Silverlight and Flex, giving unequivocal proof that Silverlight is better than Flex ... !