Silverlight 3 Article Navigator

Just put the first version of my SL navigator that uses a Coverflow to show that list of PDFs and notes that I have submitted to my blog. Also makes heavy use of the Vectorlight Richtext control (thanks). It requires SL 3 but should be out in few weeks. check it out

VectorLight Controls for Silverlight

vectorlight offers an amazing array of high quality controls. I have been using the their RichText and am very impressed especailly since the price is right, free for now. It makes me wonder why anyone would pay the extra for Telerik or ComponentOne. Many of their controls are in the Toolkit or are available free.

silverlight Coverflow

Just found a great Coverflow for Silverlight that can be used royality free,the demo is very cool, so click here

RIA Data services Chapter 3

Chapter 3 looks at populating a Datagrid and Dataform using an object hierarchy and investigates the impressive change management for the child objects in the form.
click here for PDF and here for the code

Ria data services Chapter 2 (Objects Only)

chapter 2 (Look Mom no database) will show that the .NET RIA Services focus on the end-to-end use of data, it may be retrieved through a Data Access Layer (DAL) of your choice include POCO as this PDF and code

RIA Data services

I have been playing around with RIA Data Services for a while and must say this is pretty cool stuff as it makes writting multi-tier apps so easy. I am writing a series of articles :
1. Introduction to RIA Data services that you download the PDF here
or code

Silverlight Host Page QueryString

One of the things you will want to do at some point is get access to the query string parameters passed to the page hosting your Silverlight application.

private void Application_Startup(object sender, StartupEventArgs e)
{
string test;
if (HtmlPage.Document.QueryString.Count > 0)
test = HtmlPage.Document.QueryString["fid"] ;
this.RootVisual = new Page();
}

WCF Tips

Default Serialization
.NET 3.5 SP1 has introduced a new kink: if you don't decorate your class at all (omit / not add the [DataContract] attribute) then the object becomes "fully" serializable by WCF. All public properties will be automatically included.
so the serialzation of
[DataContract]
class foo
{
[DataMember]
public string test;
}

is the same as as :

class foo
{
public string test;
}

2. Visibility
Similar to service contracts, the visibility of the data members or the data contract itself is of no consequence to WCF. You can include internal types with private data members in the data contract:

[DataContract]
struct Contact
{
[DataMember]
string m_FirstName;

[DataMember]
string m_LastName;
}

3 deserializing event
Since no constructor calls are ever made during deserialization, the deserializing event-handling method is logically your deserialization constructor. It is intended for performing some custom pre-deserialization steps typically in a constructor.

for more details see http://codeidol.com/csharp/wcf/Data-Contracts/Data-Contract-Attributes/