Xamlhouse > Microsoft Silverlight Exploration

Our team has decided that we would like to use a simple three pane accordion navigation system to display our project. With this in mind, we developers set out to create a simple accordion navigation system for this week. We found the following site of another developer, known as “Liquid Boy”, who not only develops slick looking Silverlight controls but also encourages others to rip apart his sample package and use it for themselves. Not knowing how to program an accordion in C#, this was a big help for us. Liquid Boys website can be found here:

http://advertboy.wordpress.com/2007/09/02/apples-accordion-control-done-in-silverlight/

The source code can be downloaded free of charge and used as the developer/designer wishes from here:

http://advertboy.wordpress.com/beautiful-website/

It is worth noting that it took quite a bit of tweaking by Jess and myself to get the Accordion navigation working. Included in the package are several other tools (a video player, product slider, and icon line-up to name a few). Customizing the accordion for our own project proved to be challenging. We encountered several errors along the way, which is probably why Liquid Boy encourages designers to get a developer friend to help extract the feature they want from his sample tools package.

Once we got the accordion working, we were able to add our own graphics to it. For next week, we plan on making it much wider (as per design comps of our final site) and the designers will provide the wider graphics for us to use. We recommend Liquid Boy’s toolkit for developers to get an idea of how a certain Silverlight/C# tool is functioning, and then add their own content to that functionality. Liquid Boy encourages this and gets alot of praise from the development and design company, as he seems to have experience in both realms of the field.