.NET Rocker

[Update 07/25]

There are two important things to point out on this post (thanks to the guidance from the MVVM Light toolkit author Laurent).  First, if you are solely using the messsaging component and not using the DispatcherHelper, then there is no need to Initialize it.  The second is that your message class does not need to inherit from the MessageBase class.  You can, in fact, send any class thru the messaging system.

These two changes simplify this post quite a bit.  Which, in my opinion, only validates the power and flexibility of the toolkit messaging.

[/Update 07/25]

Being an avid Silverlight developer, I love the MVVM pattern and the benefits of using it.  That being the case, I have used several different frameworks to help with the MVVM plumbing.  However, I keep coming back to my favorite, GalaSoft’s MVVM Light Toolkit.  This toolkit does a great job of handling a lot of the MVVM plumbing code for you, making it much easier to get your applications up and running using the MVVM pattern.

Continue reading

Since Silverlight 2, the binding in Silverlight has been truly amazing to build applications with.  It’s ease and power has allowed developers to build advanced relationships with very little code.

Silverlight 4 has extended the binding capabilities by adding indexed property binding.  In previous versions, you could bind to an object’s properties like such:

<TextBox Text={Binding LastName}/>

With the addition of indexed property binding, you can bind to indexed objects as follows:

<TextBox Text={Binding [LastName]}/>

The added features open up some new potentials in binding to dynamic values.

Continue reading

So I originally started this blog to discuss Silverlight and .NET goodness.  Of course, as soon as I got the blog up and running, I got pulled in several different directions.  Now that I’ve gotten things a bit more straightened out, it’s time to restart the blog posts.

With that being said, I wanted to give you a preview of what we have coming over the next few months.

First, I will be posting a series of quick tips on Silverlight and WP7.  They will be called something extremely clever, like QuickBytes or some other eye roller.  The intent is to pull little snippets from my day to day development roles that others might find useful.

Next, I have a series in the works on building a Silverlight app using MEF, OData, MVVM, and the new media framework.  Yep, let’s see how many topics we can cover in one series.  It’s an exciting little project and I will be posting more on this soon.

Outside of the blogging world, I have many exciting things on the horizon.  There are a few speaking engagements, a new training program, and a couple of other new things heading this way.  I will make sure I keep these happenings updated here.

I’ve gotten a lot of great feedback on what content there is on the blog and I look forward to hearing from you as we flush out the refocused direction of this blog.