Blogs @ IRM

When you are developing both the service and the client it can many times be good to not use the “Add Service Reference” in Visual Studio. Instead the service and data contracts can be defined in a shared class library. There can be many reasons for this, on popping up immediately is that such a solution removes the need to always update the ...

In our RIA Services application, we’re using the AutoCompleteBox control, but what if you want to select something from the list, press Enter and bind to a Command in a viewmodel? Sort of like the Button Command property. I decided to extend the control and add a “Command” DependencyProperty for an ICommand which is executed when Enter is pressed ...

This is more a note for myself how to do this. The Silverlight 4 SDK contains a pretty good AutoCompleteBox that you can use. Download/install the SDK and and the control will be available in your Silverlight Controls Toolbox. If you try to use this with RIA Services, you may notice it is displaying the Id/Key in the dropdown, but you yourself ...

In our upcoming Silverlight 4 project there’s a need for a textbox with a mask for entering a Swedish national identification number (personnummer) with either 10 or 12 digits, in the form of yyyymmdd-nnnn. It’s quite simple, I just want to make sure only digits are entered and that the dash (-) is placed automatically and a few other small things ...

(using Visual Studio 2010 and .NET/Silverlight 4) Maybe there is a working solution for this already out there, but I created my own Silverlight Behavior for a basic TextBox Watermark which might be useful. I wanted to use it like this in my XAML (look at the behaviors tag): <TextBlock Margin="5">Watermarked ...

I need to write these things down somewhere... Brad's excellent tutorials and samples for learning Silverlight + RIA Services: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brada/archive/2009/10/27/index-for-business-apps-example-for-silverlight-3-rtm-and-net-ria-services-july-update.aspx Scott's super blog post about columns and the DataGrid: ...

Since we are developing a product, we need to support both Windows authentication (for most installations), and Forms Authentication for smaller installations or cases where the customer does not use Active Directory for whatever reason. A design goal we had for this was to only change the needed configuration in one place, and that ended up being ...

I blogged about localizing a Silverlight UI here, and in that post I described how to create a StringFormatValueConvert. What I have totally missed though is that one of the new features of data binding in Silverlight 4 is support for StringFormat (together with FallbackValue and TargetNullValue), but when changing my code to use that I was back ...

… is the title of a great post by Vibro that can be found here. This is an important subject and in all project where I have used claims and STS I also wanted the claims on the client. When cracking my own STS (before WIF) I always used the display token to get them from the identity provider (IP, aka the STS) so that seems to be in the line with ...

If you’re working with TFS and automatic builds of Silverlight apps, you may happen to stumble upon this error in the end of the build: Copying file C:\Builds\2\xxx\yyy\Binaries\zzz.xap failed. Access to the path 'C:\Builds\2\xxx\yyy\Sources\www\ClientBin\zzz.xap' is denied. The reason for this error I’m not 100% sure of, but it seems that the ...

This is the third post in a series of X. Read the first one here about out overall design and the second one here about localizing the UI. After doing some basic work on our repositories we wanted to create a Unit of Work implementation that would call SaveChanges on our EF ObjectContext and also commit the transaction if one is used. The problem ...

This is the second post in a series of X. Read the first one here about our overall design. Since we will develop a product that will be sold in more countries in a not to far future it is important to make sure that it can be localized. In Silverlight the key to localization is (as many other things in SL) data binding. This different for ...

I’m helping a software development company to “convert” a VB6 application to .NET. We have a very tight schedule and originally planned to do a convert with some help from the Conversion Wizard and some parts manually, but still close to their current version. The goal was to just get over to .NET and from there develop the product that they and ...

I've been watching Jason Dolinger excellent demonstration of how he takes a "traditional" GUI approach in WPF and then refactor it to a Model-View-ViewModel (M-V-VM) implementation. M-V-VM seems like the dominating design pattern for WPF/Silverlight application and it fits very good together with data-binding, commands and Unity (or ...

Silverlight Silverlight 2.0 has today been downloaded about 100 miljon times and the upgrade process has just started. It will be possible to run Ssilverlight out of the browser and not only in the browser as today. There will be a Silverlight toolkit containing: Charting TreeView DockPanel WrapPanel ViewBox Expander ...

Notes from the PDC pre-conference session, by Jeff Prosise. Silverlight contains an optimized subset of the full .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR). This means that if you have existing .NET libraries that only uses the subset the source code is compatible, but you cannot use the same compiled library because there are other references for ...