Terms Defined Model: C# Classes that model the business domain View: XAML Markup that contains declarative rendering instructions and mappings to a model. Presenter: C# Classes that contain imperative presentation logic and event targets. View Model: C# classes that model the visual domain M-V-P (em-vee-pee) Strengths: Provides clear separation of presentation logic and event handling … Continue reading Silverlight Model-View-ViewModel-Presenter
Month: January 2009
Do you need a table?
I have received a few questions recently about whether or not a Surface Table is actually necessary to build something worthwhile on the Surface platform. My answer: absolutely it is! For all the benefits of the Surface Simulator, all tools have their limits. While the Simulator may provide a pretty realistic reproduction of how the … Continue reading Do you need a table?
Donut Shape in WPF
Its true that you can do a lot of very interesting things with path manipulation inside Expression Blend but there is no way to programmatically do such combine operations. The output of a Blend path combination is a new path whose points are fixed. This means that any scaling transformations are going to cause loss … Continue reading Donut Shape in WPF
Silverlight 2: ComboBox Selection / Source Conflict
To reproduce: 1. Bind the ItemsSource to a View Model property of type List<T>, we’ll call it “EntityList” 2. User selects an option from the ComboBox. 3. Set EntityList to a new List<T> Results: The next time UpdateLayout is called you will get a System.ArgumentException. System.ArgumentException: Value does not fall within the expected range. at … Continue reading Silverlight 2: ComboBox Selection / Source Conflict
Physics on Surface
While the ScatterView has some interesting effects that somewhat resemble the way things work in real life its missing a pretty big feature: you can’t bang stuff into each other! So I decided to solve that problem by wiring up a real physics engine to a Surface app. I used the WPF version of the … Continue reading Physics on Surface
Testing Surface Applications with the Surface Simulator
The Surface SDK comes with an awesome tool that is called the Surface Simulator. This tool allows you to test your applications that have been built with the Surface SDK. It even simulators multiple contact points when you plug multiple USB mice into your computer! Sweet! Right? Well, yes and no. After opening the Surface … Continue reading Testing Surface Applications with the Surface Simulator
Surface Hospitality Demo
The hospitality and gaming industries are a perfect avenue for applications of Surface technology. I led a team of 3 developers and 2 designers who had zero Surface experience before the project to build a application that I think is not just smoke and mirrors (as a lot of Surface demos tend to be) but … Continue reading Surface Hospitality Demo
Searching with Surface
Surface Computing offers some interesting challenges for software designers when trying to adapt even the most typical desktop or web usage scenarios onto the table. One such example is searching and filtering data. This may seem a silly topic of reflection as search on the desktop is so ubiquitous. However, the anatomy of a desktop … Continue reading Searching with Surface
Silverlight + Surface CONDG Presentation
A colleague of mine and I spoke at last night’s CONDG event. It was a great time getting out there and sharing what is possible with Silverlight and Surface. Here are some pictures from the event:
RE: Size Matters (when comparing Adobe Flex and Silverlight)
I just read a lovely article on RIA FLEX about how you could walk on water in Adobe Flex and how you would be stuck coding zillions of lines of code in Silverlight. The post had some quantitative data to support its claim, that data as follows: Some value object class: Adobe Flex: 19 lines … Continue reading RE: Size Matters (when comparing Adobe Flex and Silverlight)