Surface Website ... Meet Silverlight

Ok, so first of all, my apologies for not updating this blog in such a long time. Things have been a bit hectic around here lately. I have also spent some time away from the office. Anyway ... I'm back.
Just a quick post this time. In a previous post I ragged on Microsoft for not eating its own dog food. They preached about Microsoft Silverlight, but then would not even use the technology in its own websites, like http://www.microsoft.com/surface/.
Well, that's changed now. Microsoft has finally decided to use it's own technology over Adobe Flash. Way to go Microsoft. It took you a while, but you finally did it. You'll find it to be a great technology. I'm sure you'll run into bugs along the way like the rest of us, but you should be in a much better position to get bug fixes in whenever you encounter them!

DeepZoomComposer.Dll

Wow! It's been a very long time since I've updated this blog. My bad. I've been extremely busy since the last post. I just thought I add a quick entry here about something I just learned today. If you are wanting to create a DeepZoom image programatically, it is not very difficult. With the new release of DeepZoomComposer for Silverlight 3, all you have to do is add a reference to the DeepZoomTools.Dll found in the DeepZoom composer program files after installing DeepZoomComposer.

Once you've got that it's only a matter of two lines of code. Here is a sample I created. You simply call the Create() method on an Image creator object and pass in the path to the image you want to create a DeepZoom image out of and then the path for the output directory. It's that simple!

ImageCreator creator = new ImageCreator();

Creator.Create();

Enjoy!

How to Create a Sivlerlight Fly Out Panel

-Note: This example is built on Silverlight 2.0

Description:

Using fly out panels is a good way to add a touch of animation to applications while also increasing the amount of available browser real estate. In this post, I will show you how to create a basic fly out panel using Expression Blend and minimal C# code. The progression depicted in the images above begins with the panel will out of view except for its right border. When the border is clicked, the panel will fly into view. Clicking the panel again causes the panel to return to its hidden position.

Level of Difficulty: Easy

Preparation/Directions:

1. Create a New Silverlight application in Blend and name it FlyOutPanelBlend.

2. Set the Height and Width of the UserControl to Auto

a. Open Page.xaml by double clicking on it on the Project tab.

b. Select the [UserControl] node on the Objects and Timeline panel.

c. In the Properties tab, go to the Layout section and Change the Width and Height properties from their defaults, 640 and 480, to Auto.

This can be done by either typing the “Auto” in the appropriate textboxes, or by clicking the Set to Auto button to the right of each textbox.

3. After setting the Width and Height to Auto, the UserControl will be too small for laying out the user interface using the designer in Blend. To fix this, change the design time Height and Width properties of the UserControl.

a. Select the [UserControl] node on the Objects and Timeline panel.

b. Three extra handles are displayed around the UserControl, one on the bottom, one on the right, and one on the bottom right hand corner. These are used to click and drag in order to modify the design time Width and Height of the UserControl. Click and drag the triangle handle on the bottom right hand corner down and to the right. Notice that as you drag small labels display the values for the design time Height and Width.

c. To modify these values with greater accuracy, click on the Split view to show the designer and the XAML code simultaneously.

d. When dragging the handles for the design time Width and Height, Blend adds several extra attributes to the UserControl element telling it to display the user control in design time at the appropriate Width and Height. Change the d:DesignWidth value to 1024 and the d:DesignHeight property to 768. Note: The XAML show below has been formatted for easier reading.

e. Set the background color of the main grid by selecting the grid LayoutRoot on the Objects and Timeline panel. In the Properties tab, select the Background property and set it to a solid color brush by selecting the second sub-tab (Solid color brush), and choosing black from the color picker.

f. Right click on the Grid icon on the toolbox to show other panel control options. Select Border from the list to hide options. The Grid icon has now been replaced with the Border icon. Double click on the Border icon to place a Border object inside the LayoutRoot grid.

g. Set the background color of the border and name it bdrMenu by selecting the border on the Objects and Timeline panel. In the Properties tab, set the Name property to bdrMenu and select the Background property and set it to a solid color brush by selecting the second sub-tab (Solid color brush), and choosing white from the color picker.

h. Now stretch the border vertically to fill the entire height of the window. Do this by going to the Layout panel in the Properties tab and setting the Height property to Auto and the VerticalAlignment property to Stretch.

i. Change the width of the border to 200 and give it rounded corners on the tob and bottom right corners by setting the CornerRadius to “0,10,0,10” (top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right).

j. Place a title on top of the menu by double clicking on the TextBlock icon in the toolbox. This will place a textblock inside bdrMenu. If a TextBlock does not appear inside the Border, undo the last action (Ctrl+Z) and make sure the bdrMenu was selected in the Objects and Timeline panel before double clicking the TextBlock icon.

k. In the Properties panel, give the TextBlock the following properties: Text=”Menu”, FontSize=”22”, HorizontalAlignment=”Center”, and VerticalAlignment=”Top”.

l. Move the menu almost entirely off the screen, leaving the right border visible. To do this, select bdrMenu on the Objects and Timeline panel. Then, Properties tab, go to the Transform panel and set the value next to the X to -180. This will give the border a TranslateTransform with a value of -180 for the X property.

m. Create a new Storyboard for animating the panel into view. In the Objects and Timeline panel, click the New Storyboard button and name it ShowPanel.

n. You will see a timeline appear. Drag the yellow line to .5 seconds and select bdMenu on the Objects and Timeline panel.

o. Set the TranslateTransform’s X value to 0 in the Translate panel of the Properties tab. This will cause the panel to be visible after half a second whenever the storyboard is played. When making this change, you should see the property recorded in the timeline with a little sphere on the .5 marker. If you wish to make the animation take longer or shorter than .5 seconds, simply drag it left or right accordingly.

p. Expand the dropdown menu by the New Storyboard button by clicking the
triangle and select Duplicate.

q. This will create a copy of the previously created storyboard. Expand this same menu again and choose Reverse. Expand the menu once again and choose Rename. Rename the storyboard to HidePanel.
Generated Xaml

4. Open Page.xaml.cs in Visual Studio and add an AddEventHandlers method in the constructor. In the implementation of AddEventHandlers, assign a new event handler to the MouseLeftButtonDown event of bdrMenu.

5. Add a private member variable of type bool named _hidden. This will be used to keep track of the state of the panel. If the panel is hidden, this value will be set to true, otherwise it will be set to false.

6. In the event handler, create a conditional statement. If _hidden is true, begin the ShowPanel storyboard and set the _hidden flag to false. Conversely, if _hidden is false, begin the HidePanel storyboard and set the _hidden flag to true.

7. Finally, clean up the unnecessary using statements from the top of the file only keeping using System.Windows.Controls; and using System.Windows.Input;.

Connecting Wii Balance Board to PC

.Ok. It's been a long time since I've had the chance to blog. I have been playing around with the Nintendo Wii, and I am extremely excited about all the possibilities this little device opens up. Today I just got my balance board hooked up to my pc. I am going to investigate what kinds of interactions and cool applications I can come up with. I just thought I would take a second to jot down the little problem I had connecting to it in case anyone else is having similar issues.

 

To connect the balance board I pressed the sync button found by the batteries. While pressing that button, I went to my control panel->Bluetooth Devices and clicked on the Add button.

check the checkbox on the wizard and click next. Then I saw a list of all the available devices. I clicked on the balance board "RVL-WBC-01". From there I clicked next and selected not to use a passkey. After that the device showed up on my list of devices, but it did not say it was connected. I searched for a while trying to figure out what was going on. Finally, I decided to select the board from the device list and click on properties. This showed a list of services available for the device. I selected the 'Drivers for keyboard, mice, etc(HID)' checkbox, clicked the Apply button and I was good to go. The balance board was connected and ready to use.

I hope this helps you out if you are running into the same issues I was.

How to Create Dependency Properties in Silverlight

You can pretty much cut and paste this snippet in your code and change a few names and values in order to properly register a dependency property for your Silverlight class.

First of all, you need to create public property whose getter and setter call GetValue and SetValue respectively. You then define a public static read only Dependency property. This must have the name given to the public property defined earlier with "Property" appended to it. In this step you want to register this dependency property and specify the name, type, type of object to which it is being registered, and specify the method to call when the property is changed. If you do not need to call a method to do some processing every time the property value changes, the last parameter in the Register method can be set to null. That's about it.

So, in this snippet I am registering a dependency property named HorizontalOffset of type double. I am registering this property on a class I called Stack3DPanel. This class happens to be a custom panel, so whenever I change this property, I want all the elements in my panel to be redrawn, so I'm calling the InvalidateArange method. The body of this method can be whatever you need it to be. Again, if you do not need to do anything when the property is changed, you can set that fourth parameter in the Register call to null.

Here is the code.

 

        public double HorizontalOffset
        {
            get { return (double)GetValue(HorizontalOffsetProperty); }
            set { SetValue(HorizontalOffsetProperty, value); }
        }

        public static readonly DependencyProperty HorizontalOffsetProperty =
            DependencyProperty.Register("HorizontalOffset",
                                        typeof(double),
                                        typeof(Stack3DPanel),
                                        new PropertyMetadata(new PropertyChangedCallback(Stack3DPanel.OnHorizontalOffsetPropertyChanged)));

        private static void OnHorizontalOffsetPropertyChanged(DependencyObject d, DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs e)
        {
            Stack3DPanel pnl = d as Stack3DPanel;
            if (pnl != null)
            {
                pnl.InvalidateArrange();
            }
        }

Help! My breakpoints are not being hit!

Man! I have wasted a lot of time the past two days with this one, so I thought I would blog about it immediately in case anyone else is seeing this. As I was working on a Silverlight app, I ran into a bug. I decided to add a breakpoint and run the debugger in order to see what was going on. I added the breakpoint and ran the debugger (F5). I noticed the red circle that indicates the breakpoint changed from a red circle to a little warning sign with an error message. "The breakpoint will not currently be hit. No symbols have been loaded for this document."

This started me off on an incredibly painful, and long search for answers. I tried deleting every possible temporary file I could think of. I tried cleaning the solution and rebuilding it. I restarted Visual Studio. I ran IISReset. I rebooted my machine. I tried a handful of other things and... nothing! I was still not able to debug! Finally, one of my co-workers saw a post on that said to check the properties of the web project you are trying to debug (right click on it in the solution explorer). Next click on the Web tab and make sure that Silverlight is selected as one of the Debugger options.

Some way or another, the Silverlight option became unchecked. Once I checked it, I was able to run and debug with no problems. I hope this saves some of you a lot of headaches and hours of wasted time.

Good find on this one Scott!

Getting Professional Quality Animations with the KeySpline Editor in Expression Blend

When I first started working with WPF and Silverlight, I was amazed at how simple it was to create animations, especially when using Expression Blend. I was always frustrated with one thing though... they just didn't look very professional. I could edit the speed of my animations, but the interpolation of the values in the animation was always linear. That is, if I had an animation that changed a button from size 1px to size 10 px, which lasted 10 seconds, it would cause the button to change at a rate of 1 px per second. This linear interpolation frustrated me. I wanted some of my animations to ease in, or ease out. For instance, when I Show a pop-out panel, I typically like to make the animation occur really fast at first, and then slow down towards the end. Like in the button example, I would like the button to grow to 8 px in the first 3 seconds, and grow from 8 px to 10 pix in the last 7 seconds. This tends to make the animations look more professional.

So... how do you do it?

First, create your animation in Blend. Once you have your animation (storyboard) created, you should see something like this in your Objects and Timeline panel. In this example, I have applied an animation to a grid named grdSelectDate which takes 1 second to complete. This is indicated by the little egg-shaped dot placed in the timeline next to the grdSelectDate grid.

If you click on this dot, it will change colors from white to gray. This now gives you the ability to use the KeySpline editor.

You can see the editor under the Properties tab. You can think of this editor like this. The X axis represents the value of the affected property. In my example, it would represent the size of my button (this is a made up example... the size would actually be two different properties.... height and width or a single scaleTransform property... you get the idea though!). When X = 0, the value is at it's original state, so the size of my button has not changed, when X = 1 (top of the scale), the value has now reached it's final value (10 px in my fictional example). The Y axis is a function of time. Y=0 is the start of your storyboard and Y=1 represents the end of the storyboard (10 seconds in my button example).

To edit these values, you can simply click and drag on the yellow dots or enter values in the textboxes below(not as easy...) to change the speed of easing in/out of your animations. In this example, the animation starts really quickly (indicated by the steep incline of the line) and then slows down towards the end (indicated by the very small change in the x value while the y value keeps changing).

Keep playing around with this graph to ease in and out and you will see your WPF and Silverlight applications kicking it up a notch in no time!