SlickThought

This multi-part screencast series will look at the fundamentals involved in building multiscreen applications using Microsoft Silverlight and Visual Studio 2010. Starting with an overview of the Microsoft ecosystem, Part 1 lays the foundation for future episodes, introducing key concepts that…

Have you ever wanted the flexibility of dependency injection without having to implement a full-blown IoC solution?  Maybe you just want an easy way to pass concrete services to your ViewModel?  This short video will show you you can use XAML to configure your ViewModels to provide a…

Lots of developers are building XAML-based applications today.  Be it WPF, Silverlight or Windows Phone 7, I have seen a lot of people struggle with certain tasks in Visual Studio that would be much easier if undertaken in Expression Blend.  Blend seems to be somewhat intimidating to…

Windows Phone 7 provides the LicenseInformation class that includes the IsTrial() method.  IsTrial() allows you to check, at runtime, if the running application has been installed from the Marketplace as a trial application, or if the user has purchased the application.  Developers are…

Continuing our previous explorations of the TransitioningContentControl (here and here – all WinPhone content here), we will now take a look at how we can extend the TCC to allow transitions to be defined on a per-page basis. Simply put, we would like to have a default transition for all…

In my original screencast (my blog or on here on Channel 9), I showed you how to use the Silverlight Toolkit’s TransitioningContentControl to add automatic transitions between pages of your Windows Phone 7 Silverlight application.  A few days after recording and posting that…

Update: To see how to extend this solution for custom per-page transitions, see my follow-on article.If you have played around with Silverlight on Windows Phone 7, one thing you may have tried to figure out is how to add nice transitions between different pages of your application. By default,…

In Part 7, I introduce the basics of building a WCF PeerChannel application.  Using a simple console application, the following steps are shown: Creating the necessary interfaces Setting up the WCF enviornment Checking online status Sending and receiving messages While basic, it demonstrates…

In Part 6 of the Peer to Peer Series, I set the stage for learning how to use WCF's PeerChannel.  After a simple overview of PeerChannel, I show a sample application that uses PeerChannel to play buzzword bingo.  The focus of this installment is to give an understanding of some of…

In Part 5 of the Peer to Peer Series, I show a sample application that uses PNRP to connect a client application to a server application using WCF and PNRP Peer Host Names. The details of the actual WCF Service implementation.  Instead, I will focus on those areas of leveraging PNRP to…