Bytes and Bites of Internet
Archive for July, 2011
Blinking Light Animation in Silverlight using Expression Blend
Jul 31st
Before even anyone of you look at my animation, let me clarify again that I DON’T HAVE DESIGNER’S EYE 
… which basically means if you are looking for some really cool UI then you are at wrong place. With that info. noted I also would like to let you know that though I am not a good designer, I am still a developer and just like any developer, me too can design UI (no matter how terrible it is) …
In this post, I displaying a very simple Blinking Light Silverlight animation created using only Expression Blend 4. I have created all drawings and animation using Expression Blend in just 20 mins for this post, and I must say that I am really impressed with this tool. If I wanted to do the same thing with good ol’ Visual Studio 2010, then it would have taken me at least couple of hours or more. (Or may be less if you are very good at reading XAML). Honestly, I’ve not even used core feature of Blend (which is Storyboard), instead I wrote very simple code to do the job.
As first step, I created two circle like drawings and placed them inside of Grid
X Files are real !!!
Jul 16th
Well, not real as in some FBI agents trying to solve cases with unexplained phenomenal activity (or may be there are some ! who knows) …. well, for me X file case is like occurrence of some unexplained event and there is no clear explanation of what actually happened. That is exactly what happened yesterday !!!
I am not super enthusiast but I have a small fish bowl that has had only two fishes (originally there were 4 but now it just 2 left but that’s another story). As usual I take out fishes into another container while I clean up that bowl. Yesterday I did exactly same while cleaning up that bowl. As we all generally use tap water, we need to process it to make it OK for fishes so we need to add some chemical into it that removes chlorine and other chemicals that are harmful for fishes, this process requires some time (about 20-30 mins) so I left fishes into that container and added that chemical to bowl and left for dinner.
But when I came to put fishes back into the bowl, I found that one of the goldfish was missing !!!! I investigated “crime scene” but found no evidence that fish somehow jumped out of that container and fell off to ground, nor I found that someone intentionally thrown her out (yup, you have to consider everyone as a suspect at first) 
!!
Styles in Silverlight – Part 1
Jul 8th
Honestly, I don’t have so called “designer’s eye”. So I am really bad with designing. I think this is the curse that every developer bares … or may be it is a good thing, who knows. So the demo I am showing here is not so eye catching, but this solves the purpose so I am not going crazy with designing.
Just like HTML, Silverlight too has a concept of “Styling”, but it is bit different that what we do in HTML. Just like HTML here in Silverlight also we have different method of styling like inline styles or creating resource or use separate file that contains only styles. But this post is to show only basic concept of styling so I will just show inline code for styles, later on I will post more about other methods of styling.
In Silverlight each object can be styled individually as well as in group (just like HTML). And each style can be highly customized. For example, gradient in button. Or two different object can be used to create some new style, for example textbox with rounded corners.