Posts

• Jun 10, 2010

  Taking Microsoft Silverlight 4 Applications Beyond the Browser (TechEd WEB313)

  It’s been quite a week here in New Orleans for TechEd North America.  I’m especially glad to see Silverlight fans showing up in force, asking questions at our booth and attending breakout sessions.  On Wednesday, I had the distinct pleasure of giving a talk at this great conference, and it was a real treat getting to share some great content with you.  I’d like to thank all of you who attended for coming!  My talk – Taking Microsoft Silverlight 4 Applications Beyond the Browser – took a look at the features we’ve added for out-of-browser Silverlight applications with Silverlight 4.  I went over a fair amount of material, which I promised to make available on my blog, so I’ve provided the info below.

  Continue reading →
• May 10, 2010

  Common Navigation UI and Authorization-driven Sitemaps

  Navigation-driven Silverlight applications tend to share some common pieces of UI.  Traditionally, this has required sprinkling HyperlinkButtons throughout the application’s XAML.  For ASP.NET a number of controls intended to drive navigation exist.  These controls are driven by a sitemap, integrate well with authorization and roles (through sitemap trimming), and provide common user experiences around hierarchical application structures such as a TreeView-based list of hyperlinks and Breadcrumbs or navigation paths.  These controls provide the user with context as to where in the application/site they currently are as well as where within the application they can go.

  Continue reading →
• Apr 26, 2010

  Samples updated and code in comments

  Hi folks!  Just a super-quick note: in the last week, I’ve updated most of my old samples (it should be everything except for the one from my PDC talk – that one is a fair amount more work due to breaking changes in RIA Services since the Silverlight 4 Beta) that were build on the Silverlight 4 Beta and RC.

  Continue reading →
• Apr 26, 2010

  A "refreshing" Authentication/Authorization experience with Silverlight 4

  At the beginning of the year, as part of a series of posts about the INavigationContentLoader extensibility point in Silverlight 4, I described a way to use a content loader to do authorization before allowing a user to navigate to a page.  With the content loader, you can either throw an exception when an unauthorized user tries to reach a protected Page, redirect your users to another Page, or return a different page (e.g. a Login page) in its stead.  This makes for a fairly nice experience for your users, wherein they are taken directly to a login page (or at least a page with more information about why they cannot access the given page) when they lack the credentials to reach the page they are requesting.

  Continue reading →
• Apr 16, 2010

  Making printing easier in Silverlight 4

  Well, what an exciting week!  First Visual Studio 2010 is released, followed by Silverlight 4 yesterday!  Consequently, I was inspired to post about something new!  I’ve been spending some time looking at the new printing feature in Silverlight 4, and while on the surface it looks like a pretty simple and lower-level set of APIs, it’s possible to build rich frameworks on top of them for accomplishing common printing tasks.  In this post, I’ll take a look at an attempt I made (and added to SLaB) at building such a higher-level API over printing that makes printing collections of data easier.

  Continue reading →

subscribe via RSS