Vertical Orientation of CoverFlow for Silverlight

    The feedback about our new version of CoverFlow for Silverlight has been great! Thank you guys for pointing out all these small issues and problems that had to be polished since we introduced a new beta CoverFlow for Silverlight 3 back in September. After the core functionality of the control is successfully integrated in our Silverlight 3 suite, we are now able to start developing new features that every grown-up CoverFlow control should possess :)

Vertical Orientation

    Both in our forum and support system we have received numerous requests for vertical orientation of the CoverFlow control. That is why, with our 2009 Q3 SP2 release that is around the corner, CoverFlow will possess Orientation property that gives you an option for vertically arranging all CoverFlow items. However, the reflection functionality is not available while using vertical orientation, and is internally switched off when using Vertical orientation. All other properties concerning the child items that are orientation dependent such as OffsetX, OffsetY, RotationY and CameraViewPoint are rendered as if the control is horizontally oriented. This will change in future and will require some minor changes to the naming convention, but for now in order to prevent any breaking changes or ambiguities these properties won’t be renamed.

Reflection Properties

    Another feature that we lacked in our CoverFlow API is capability to manipulate the reflection. Since Silverlight 3 introduced the power of shader effects, we have extensively leveraged on it to improve the presentation and performance of RadControls for Silverlight. With the upcoming release CoverFlow will also possess two new properties for tweaking up your reflection appearance. ReflectionHeight and ReflectionOpacity will be part of the CoverFlow API, and will internally tune a shader effect that is developed on High Level Shader Language (HLSL) that simulates the reflection. ReflectionHeight is a relative height of the reflection that accepts values in the range of 0 to 1. ReflectionOpacity defines the opacity of the reflection constrained by the ReflectionHeight and has a range of 0 to 1 as well.

    There are many more cool features in our roadmap for the upcoming 2010 that will bring to us Silverlight 4 and Visual Studio 2010! The Silverlight team is eager to further enrich your most complete toolset that boosts your presentation and performance.

This is my last blog for the year, so I would like to congratulate all of you who have been using our products and wish you a happy and successful new year!