As most of the people doing XAML development already know Silverlight 4 shipped at Mix 10 this year. This official release contained a lot of issues (memory leaks included) and it was a reasonable decision for Microsoft to postpone their GDR (general distribution release – the one that comes with Windows Update) version. A few weeks ago, Microsoft finally shipped the GDR. One of the things all developers hoped for was a resolution to the known memory leaks. The GDR did fix a lot of memory leaks, however, it did not address all of them and there are still some...

Hey everyone! Now that I'm all back and settled in the Boston metro area, it's time to make some resources available to people who attended and for anyone interested in a little bit of Silverlight goodness. First though I've got a tiny side-note as far as the presentations.  Originally in this post I mentioned that we offered three different Silverlight talks to the user groups, but as it turns out nobody picked this one: Building a Unified Experience – Developing with Silverlight 4 and Windows Phone 7 In this session, we will get look into development on both the full Silverlight platform and on Windows Phone...

A great new book called “Pro Telerik ASP.NET and Silverlight Controls” was recently released by Apress. As the name suggests it is aimed at .NET developers working with Telerik’s ASP.NET and Silverlight controls. The author, Jose Rolando Guay Paz, has been a professional developer for more than 15 years and is currently involved in the development of web application using ASP.NET and Silverlight. He has significant experience in the field and was among the first developers to build commercial apps in .NET in Central America. The book provides a complete guide on how to increase your productivity when developing software by...

Being Silverlight developer means that we are also kind of web developers. From this point of view, we also have to think about the web traffic that our applications generate. We need to reduce it as much as possible. So basically we need to reduce the size of the application's output - the .xap file. In this post I'll try to summarize the five ways to reduce the size of a xap that I've shared today with Sofia's Silverlight User Group. Understanding the Xap In order to reduce the size of a xap file, we should first be aware of its structure. Basically it can contain only 4 things: AppManifest.xaml -...

The next interesting part of building a Windows Phone 7 DatePicker control is the Date ListBox. That is a ListBox which should meet the following requirements: Can display in a human readable manner one of the three Date components: Day, Month and Year Should be “Infinite” – as discussed in my previous post. Should use data virtualization (to be most efficient). As you can see our “Infinite ListBox” project now comes in hand. The last two of the upper requirements are already implemented and all we need to do is to implement a special VirtualizedDataItem<DateTime> that provides the needed information to bind to. For a...