Silverlight Geek - An interview with Jesse Liberty

Thanks.  I dig Jesse's videos.  I am finally doing a SL client because of his videos that help me get started.  Few questions currently have.

1) If I make a UserControl.  How can I make, for example, the Background color of the layoutroot (grid) be settable from the designer?  I want to hook-up the background property to the grid.

2) How, in c#, to set the Margins of a control?

3) I have a SL3 project am testing.  Can't seem to get other browsers (i.e. non-dev) to install the SL control.  Is this because you need to install the SL dev on the client first?  Or should it just download and run SL3beta normally.  Do I have to wait for RTW to have other clients be able to load SL3?

BTW - am really seem to like layout more in SL then in html and tables.  Layout in SL with margins and left, right, center, and auto sizes can get a bit confusing, but I will get it eventually.  Also things like master pages makes so much more sense to me as a managed coder.  It is opposite of html master pages.  In SL, you create 1 page with a contentplaceholder and poke your content into the placeholder (with no postback btw and very snappy).  In html, your content pages ref the master page.  I like the SL model better in the way I think. 

Thanks much.

Thanks Adam and Jesse - interesting insight into both Microsoft and the role Jesse has there.  I like Jesse's approach, blogs and video which really hit home for many developers getting to grips with the technology.

Cheers

Ian Blackburn

Silverlightforbusiness.net

Wouldn't it be cool to allow a SL object in posts on Channel9 and we can post xaml in the editor?  Or is that just me?  That way you can post samples and examples and actually see them work in the post.  Maybe we can do this already.

Random - curious how a video on SL opens MediaPlayer to play the video??

1) If I make a UserControl.  How can I make, for example, the Background color of the layoutroot (grid) be settable from the designer?  I want to hook-up the background property to the grid.

First you set a property on your usercontrol.  Any property on the user control well be settable in the designer if blend knows how to display its type (such as a string/enum/color etc.).  Then you databind the grid to the usercontrols property.  So you would write something like this in the xaml for the user control: <Grid Background="{TemplateBinding Background}"/>.  You will probably want to make the usercontrols background property be a dependancy property, so that other people can bind data to it (although making DP's are a little more challenging go look it up).

2) How, in c#, to set the Margins of a control?

If I remeber right you get a refrence to the control (such as by its ID), and then just type myGrid.Margin = new Thickness(60);  Thickness has several diffrent overloads if you want to set each side diffrently.

3) I have a SL3 project am testing.  Can't seem to get other browsers (i.e. non-dev) to install the SL control.  Is this because you need to install the SL dev on the client first?  Or should it just download and run SL3beta normally.  Do I have to wait for RTW to have other clients be able to load SL3?

SL3 as far as I am aware does not have a go-live license yet.  As such they have only released the developer's runtime.  The user must have the SL3 runtime already when it starts to have it work right.  The reason for this is they didnt want people getting "autoupgraded" to SL3 if SL3 had a bug.

Thanks cdwatkings.  That helped a lot.  I went to add Background getter/setter to class.  Then built.  Then compiler said you have to use "new" to override base class.  So I did and it worked right away.  So I did not have to do the binding thing.  Not sure if this is how you are supposed to do it in SL land, but it seems to work.  Your other comments got me sorted.  cheers.