Benoit Mandelbrot: Fractals and the art of roughness

At TED2010, mathematics legend Benoit Mandelbrot develops a theme he first discussed at TED in 1984 -- the extreme complexity of roughness, and the way that fractal math can find order within patterns that seem unknowably complicated.

Silverlight for Symbian

Silverlight includes a runtime that is optimized to display content on memory-constrained devices. Silverlight support for Nokia S60 5th Edition devices includes:

• The ability to view Silverlight applications in the mobile browser.
• Tools to build Silverlight applications that target devices

Tips and Tricks for INotifyPropertyChanged

As a WPF or Silverlight developer, you know that your models must implement INotifyPropertyChanged and it can be a pain. To do it safely, you really need to check to see if there are any registered handlers, then raise the event. To add insult to injury, the event arguments take a string, so if you mistype the property name you're out of luck. Some clever individuals have created nice code snippets to generate the needed plumbing, but it doesn't help with refactoring.

One common solution is to create a base class that provides the plumbing for a raise property notification.

Import Art from Photoshop and Make into Silverlight Controls

In this tutorial, we’ll take graphics created in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, import them into Expression Blend and then quickly turn the visual assets into interactive Silverlight controls.

Create a Custom Control - Inheriting from TextBox

When a control almost does what you want it to – if only it had another button or behaved slightly differently – you may be able to extend it by writing a custom control. Custom controls let you change an existing control or write a completely new control.

In order to take advantage of the design-time binding support in Blend (and now VS .NET 2010), especially when using MVVM, you had these options:

1. Set the DataContext in XAML to a StaticResource (like a ViewModel) created for design only, and change it to the real thing at runtime.

Good: use the existing class structure, XAML intellisense and autocompletion.

Bad: the design-time object will get created at runtime too, cannot access private set or readonly properties, must have a parameterless constructor.

2. Create sample data in Blend (XML).

Good: can be created by designers, can use private set or readonly properties, no runtime penalty.

Bad: must be kept in sync with the actual ViewModel, no compile-time checking, no intellisense support.

DesignData

The DesignData combines the advantages of the two options - you can create a XAML with your design values, based on the existing class model.

You can take advantage of intellisense and autocompletion and you're able to set readonly properties, instantiate classes with no parameterless contructors.

The objects will be created only at design time, so there is no runtime penalty. You also get compile-time checking - you get an error if you try to set an invalid value to a int property, for example.

This functionality has been available since Blend 3, but it was (and still is) kind of hidden - in Blend 3 / VS 2008 you had to manually edit the project file to get it to work.

Fortunately in VS 2010 you don't need to edit the project file, but there still is no Item Template for DesignData files.

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