ILM Community Blog

The third Tuesday in June, 2008 was the second Silverlight User Group at Microsoft offices in Edina.  Wow.  Lots of Men there!   ( OK, I counted three women, 123 men inside the presentation area.  But that’s a topic for another blog post.)

Doug Nelson presented to us and very skillfully demonstrated how Silverlight controls can interact with the browser.  Doug’s source code for the presentation will be here, I promise.  I have to corral him first, so give me a few.

Here are some notes I took while there, I apologize if my observations are not quite on topic - I’m a presenter in training , I get to give the next talk and I have a lot to learn.

Doug used a special coloring scheme for his Visual Studio environment which was nicely visible from the back of the room where I sat.  I noted the colors ( I don’t know why)

SCREEN COLORS:  Black background, white regular writing, neon green comments.  blue keywords, pink class names.

The presentation title was “Kiss Your Javascript Goodbye”. This is catchy, but to me it was more of a great tutorial on how the browser and Silverlight applications interact with each other. It was very ugly, but that’s ok because all the functionality we needed to know about was discussed.

Here’s just a simple list of how the topics flowed:

1. How Silverlight applications are structured, what they look like in Visual Studio.
2. What is App.xaml and what purpose does it serve.
3. The use of Window.Eval in the application error for error reporting (security - this is just a demo.)
4. Page.xaml. How is it constructed. How you hook into browser events.
5. Presentation Slide.
   1. a. Page, Window, Document
   2. HtmlPage
      1. Browser Information
      2. Document
      3. Window
6. Html Document
7. DEEP LINKING!
8. NavigateToBookmark!
9. HtmlWindow
   1. Alert, Confirm
   2. Submit
10. Demo again. The bookmark is updating the url in the browser address bar. This is what I need to support deep linking.
11. HttpUtility
    1. a. HtmlPage.Window.NavigateToBookmrk
12. HtmlElementEventArgs
    1. Stop Propagation - Prevent bubbling
    2. Key State, Key Code
    3. Mouse Button
    4. Screen Offset Window Coordinate Info
13. Flying Div: the use of SetStyleAttributes to change pieces of the CSS in the html.
    1. Sets a DispatcherTimer - EventHandler. TimeSpan(0,0,0,0,10)
    2. Using{} cleans out the resources when no longer used
       1. Delete Service Proxy.Dll - Reinstall to replace it.
       • Notes: WCF Service gave some issues.
       • Silverlight Enabled WCF Service - Default Binding set for What Silverlight Supports.
         If you installed the Beta2 bits early on, you should check your SDK size. If your SilverLight Tools Install size is 1.14 or under, you should uninstall it and bring it down again from the download site. You want to see something the size of 1.17. This is what you want, not 1.13 or 1.14.
14. When building WCF services, inside Visual Studio you’ll be able to use Tabs to build your stubs to save typing.
15. Talk about how MVC fits in
16. X-Domain, show clientaccessplicy.xml
17. The root is clientbin folder when loading from WebClient.
18. Isolated Storage Demo
19. Types for creating and using Virtual File System
20. Exists on Client between Browser Sessions
21. Clearing Cookies and Deleting Temporary Files doesn’t delete these files.
22. Mechanism for examining contents Of isolated Storage. Yes. It allows us to iterate the file system. Allows disconnected storage
23. Finding the Isolated Data store on the disk. Local Storage. Appsettings / microsoft, isolated storage.
24. Promotes code reuse for data validation