There are a few issues that we have had recently with the DeepZoom, listbox, and MediaElement. With the DeepZoom, we had the problem of it chugging if there were a lot of images (say like…. 200). So we tried to cut it down in half (100 images).. still very slow, and now finally I think we have 20. It might just be because we have so many other things going on at the same time, and it just can’t handle it, but, just thought I would put that out there.The next thing on the list is well.. the listbox. What we wanted was different lines of text with different styles inside the listbox item. Now I knew how to do it in XAML, but not dynamically in C#. What I eventually came up with was this:

Now the MediaElement… our News Section (in which we want to have news items with video posts in them) is a User Control inside the project. When it was a project itself, I could get videos to work by just importing them and setting the source of the MediaElement. However this time, it wasn’t working, tried putting it in all different kinds of folders but it just wouldn’t work. What I ended up doing was setting the source to the full path. If you are running the video locally you can do something like “http://localhost/nameofvideo.wmv”, on the web you have to do something similar to this: “http://www.mydomain.com/mysubdirectory/mymovie.wmv” (you can use this url locally too). To do this dynamically, try something like this:

That’s it! Check back soon (in a few days) and we will have a post about the project!

-Andy, Anna, Jess

We have been working with the Calendar component and trying to incorporate it into our project. We have increased it to the right size, however we want to make it more interactive.

When a user clicks a day on the calendar, we want a text box to appear above that date with the events associated with that date. However, we are unsure how to access the component’s code and make this possible. We wish to pull the content for the date from an XML or XAML file.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

UPDATE:

We have fixed the problem. According to our developer Jess:

“10 min of google searching and messing with the intellisense with VS, it became easy: In Page.xaml:
In Page.xaml.cs:

What we really need now is to be able to manually change the style of a date. We basically want to cycle through an xml file (that has dates in it) and then cycle through the dates of the calendar component, and if the date matches up then we change the style of that date (which indicates that the date has an event). Any help on this issue would be greatly appreciated, as we are trying to get this figured out very soon in the next day or two.

-Andy and Jess

Just wanted to update people on what we have been up to. Here is a version of the famous Deep Zooming capability with Silverlight. However with this version there is even more! You can organize images by different albums, and even use thumbnails, so that when you click on the thumbnail it zooms into the image that you selected! Pretty cool, huh?! There are still a few bugs, and it’s still a work in progress, so it’s pretty much butt ugly but please let us know what you think!

-Jess

Microsoft announced this morning that the Silverlight 3 player (currently codenamed “Silverlight Gold”) will support playing and rendering .SWF files natively. Great news for Silverlight!

More to come!

Here are a few more accordion variations. The non-colorful ones are set up so that there is one user control, ie:

And the colorful versions of the accordion are set up so that each individual tab is a different user control. This is so that it is easier to edit the content in the accordion tabs and the color variations also. Example of how it is show in the Page.xaml file:

What I like most about Silverlight 2.0 is creating animations dynamically through code. Before with 1.1, you could do it, just not very easily. Now with this accordion, every animation is created dynamically with this one section of code:

So for instance if I wanted to make the second tab open I would do this (in the page.xaml.cs file):

This calls the function animate, which is in the accordion.xaml.cs file:

And in the beginning of the accordion.xaml.cs (when the page was loaded), we created the initial animation:

And that’s it! It was all pretty simple, you will see in the code that there is some logic to handle the tabs (i.e if you click on tab 2 and tab1 is already open, you have to close tab 1).

Source Code:

Accordion_Vertical_Color
Accordion_Vertical_NonColor
Accordion_Horizontal_Color
Accordion_Horizontal_NonColor

-Jess

I have just updated our two widgets to Silverlight 2.0. Overall the process wasn’t that hard, with the tweening buttons it was just a matter of cut and paste. However with the slider controls, I wanted to use the new sliders built in with the new Silverlight, so in order for them to look like they were before I had to skin them. It is definitely not as easy as it should be, and tool a good amount of work to get it working like I would like. With the help of liquid boy’s post and his awesome diagram I was able to finally skin the slider.
Anyways, the process wasn’t too bad I suppose, I ended up using fewer lines of code for both widgets (with the new version) which is always nice. And the sliders work very smoothly now.

Slider Controls 2:
View it | Source code

Tweening Buttons 2:
View it | Source Code

-Jess

We would like to thank Tim Wood and EffectiveUI for giving us gifts of software and books on Silverlight.





Thanks!


-Jim

More of the interface…


Since our goal is to keep usability at the forefront, we’d really like to stick to a clean design that is easy to follow. Things like the color-coded sections, straight-forward icons and open typefaces all play into that. These are prelims of the gallery and calendar sections that we’ll begin to incorporate into Blend once we get them finalized. Any thoughts or feedback?








-Matt

Yesterday I was working on an Image Gallery using Blend 2.5 March 2008 Preview. I had made a new Silverlight 2.0 project in VisualStudio2008, and opened the solution file in Blend 2.5 to make a widget. Everything was going great, I had sliders, it was using my computer to pull images off of…and then I got the “blue screen of death”.

I had tested the solution in a browser several times before, but for some reason when I went to test it this time (around 6 p.m.) I got the blue screen and error numbers. I found I could only log into Safe Mode (no Safe Mode with Networking or anything else as any other mode brings up the blue screen). I tried disabling my NIC due to the advice of my Computer Science major buddy, but the screen still prevailed.

We then attempted to seek out what was causing the error, and we still are not fully sure. What we do know by checking the Event Viewer in safe mode and looking at the System errors, was that Silverlight and SQL ran into some kind of error around 6 p.m. that caused the initial crash.

We wrote down the error codes and googled them to find out that it is some sort of driver issue. The error is labeled “DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL”.

I received some error codes that apparently don’t exist, however. The big error code is as follows:
0X000000D1 ( 0X006A0193, 0X00000002, 0X00000000, 0X006A0193). The 0X000000D1 error does exist, but the 0X006A0193 error apparently can’t be identified.

If anyone has any idea what is wrong or how to fix it, I will be looking for help until next week. After that, I will have to reformat/reinstall Windows XP and install all my development software again. This has been very frustrating and this error simply will not go away, I need to fix or reformat it seems. Any help is GREATLY appreciated!

Note: I never received any errors like this or any issues until installing the components for Silverlight 2.0, if that is of any help.

-Andy