In many situations, it is important that your Silverlight appilcations load as quickly as possible. For example, when building a Silverlight Advertisement, the user should not experience a significant load time. The advertisement should load just as fast as the other page assets. But how do you achieve this when your application includes heavy-weight resources, such as video or images? Of course you could pull these individual assets from a server during runtime, but if your assets are packaged inside the XAP package, you need a better solution. The most common solution I have seen is to build a...
In my spare time, I have been re-writing the Star Selector control that is part of Silverlight Contrib. I re-wrote this control because there were several things I wanted to accomplish. This re-write includes quite a few new features. I will highlight them in the next few sections:
Half-Star Selection
The control supports enabling half-star selection. To enable or disable this feature, simply set the AllowHalfStarSelection property accordingly. The default value is false.
DisplayValue and Value Property Data Types
The DisplayValue and Value properties have been changed from an Integer to a double data type. This allows you to select half-stars and the...