June 2008 Entries
The Problem While migrating a Silverlight 2 Beta 1 control to Beta 2, I encountered some odd behavior with the VisualStateManager and I thought I would document my experience in the event that you might run into the same issue. From what I can tell, this only occurs when you have multiple instances of a control that change state by animating color properties (ColorAnimation). There may be other ways to induce this behavior, but the following is the only way I have encountered personally. Simply put, calling VisualStateManager.GoToState to does not always go to the correct state...
It's been a little quiet here on my blog for the past few weeks, but tonight you will know why! I am excited to announce the Silverlight Control Builder Contest! Ripping the content straight off the front page (I can do that, I wrote it!):
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With the achievement of many product milestones at Microsoft, you can generally expect a post from Scott Guthrie. These well-written posts usually contain valuable information about the future product direction so it's always a good idea to read these posts (along with the comments) if you want to pick up on these tidbits. Below, I have extrapolated a few interesting items about the future of Silverlight from the Silverlight 2 - Beta 2 Post: "We ultimately expect to ship over a 100 controls for Silverlight" This is cool, because...
I have updated a few of my Silverlight demo applications to work with the Beta 2 release of Silverlight. The update was fairly painless, but then again, these are really simple applications :) Color Picker Control (Source Code) Simple Color Picker control built with Silverlight. Useful in applications that require advanced color selection options. Silverlight Binary Clock (Source Code) Just a simple Binary Clock with a live reflection. Since we don't have a visual brush in Silverlight, I...
As promised by BillG himself earlier this week, Silverlight 2 (Beta 2) has just been released. I've compiled a few resources to get you started. Enjoy!
Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 2 for Visual Studio 2008
Silverlight 2 Runtime Download
Silverlight 2 Beta 2 SDK
Silverlight 2 Beta 2 SDK Documentation (CHM)
Expression Blend June Preview - Containing the Visual State Manager
Web Developer Tools Team Blog Post (What's new in Beta 2)
Enjoy!
Over at the Silverlight SDK Blog, a new post containing the full list of changes has been made. Some of the things that I thought would certainly make this release (like a combo box) do not appear. Although, I did read somewhere that there would be approximately 3-dozen controls after this release, so maybe we will be surprised! Check out the full list here
Today at Tech-Ed, Bill Gates announced Silverlight 2 - Beta 2. The new beta is slated for release sometime this week. Here are a few authoritative news items that I found relating to the new beta: Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Releasing Soon! [Silverlight SDK Blog] Placeholder for new Silverlight Controls Documentation [MSDN Library] Beta 2 Event Bubbling [Jesse Liberty] Creating Control Skins with Visual State Manager - An Introduction [Christian Schormann] Interview with Jesse Liberty about Silverlight 2 - Beta 2...