Now that the dust has settled from Build, we’re all back to our day jobs and still working on the same Silverlight, WPF, and Windows Phone projects that we were working on before Build. As you might have read from Todd, Doug, Vassil, Steve, or Silverlight experts like Jeremy, Dan, and Laurent, the sky has in fact not fallen and the future for .Net development on the non-Metrofied Windows 8 desktop is alive and well.  On top of that, since most of us are working on projects in the here and now and want support for multiple versions of...

In the last episode we were examining a creative approach that the development team behind the CRM demo incorporated for connecting views to their Prism regions using a combination of custom attributes, attached behaviors, and the managed extensibility framework (MEF). One of the commenters was a little critical of the ‘magic’ behind MEF, and rightly so as many of us like being able to trace the exact line that code will go through as opposed to relying on the magic of composition to work everything out for us. Today we bring you one of those unexpected issues in which the...

In the early days of Silverlight binding support for advanced dynamic scenarios was very limited (remember my DataTable?). Since then, however, the platform has evolved greatly – so did our tools!   Dynamic code 2009 style:   Dynamic code 2011 style:   Now to bind RadGridView to some dynamic data you just need ObservableCollection<dynamic>:   RadGridView will auto-generate columns automatically using your DynamicObject GetDynamicMemberNames() implementation and will call your TryGetMember/TrySetMember (TryGetIndex/TrySetIndex in case of indexer binding) methods when needed.   To illustrate this I’ve made small example project (similar to this blog post) demonstrating...

Currently RadMap supports three built-in map providers: Bing Maps, Open Street Maps and Empty provider. The empty provider does not show any map tiles. It just provides spatial reference (projection) for other operations (i.e. KML or ESRI shape files). The Bing Maps and Open Street Map providers read their tile images from internet. Of course a browser can use these images from its cache, but the Bing Maps provider requires internet connection because it uses a WCF service to get URLs of the tile images. It is a common scenario that the map...

The last time we all got together was before a little conference known as Build. Everyone learned a ton of information about what is coming next in Windows 8 and the WinRT platform, but one thing stuck out for sure – Metro is in. Thankfully our designers have been all over this for quite a while and we have some very nice things in the works, most of which I can’t publicly talk about (yet!), but in the terms of this application we’re definitely on the right track. And don’t forget, an investment in a Silverlight application today means...