A session that caught my eye from PDC was a session titled Behavior driven development vs Test driven development.  I don’t think this session had direct ties to Silverlight, however it made me think about Silverlight Behavior development.  Could this be a topic?

Lately I have been a big advocate about using behaviors for UI interactions when developing a Silverlight app.  Behaviors enable me to quickly develop a rich UI without much code and focus on functionality.

This is a quick thought, and more to come about it, but wanted to throw it out there.  In the meantime check out

http://www.85turns.com/2009/10/14/top-5-silverlight-behaviors/

Problem: You need text to dynamically add elipses, "…",  to the end of a sentence.  The difficulty is how do you detect the actual length of the string.  All characters are not created the same.  Ten i’s != ten m’s.

Solution: Robby Ingebretsen at NerdPlusArt.com (and of Kaxaml fame) has a dynamic control that does just this.  http://blog.nerdplusart.com/archives/texttrimming-textblock-for-silverlight.

The solution is very Elegant.  Robby wraps a TextBlock in a Content control then manipulates the Text inside based on the size.  Best of all…he as post code and an example.  Thanks Robby.

Over the past six months I’ve had the amazing opportunity to work with a highly talented team (Mason Brown, Casey Britt, SmartyP, and many more) at IQ Interactive.  We’ve been working on an amazing, ground breaking, Silverlight application.  There wasn’t a stone unturned while developing.  Items such as Pixel Shaders, custom Panels, animations for purpose (as they should be), LINQ, dynamic loading of xap, Prism, and much more illustrate the breadth of the technology. I want to share the experience/application with you so badly but it will have to wait until the end of this month.

The biggest win over the past months is not the use of technology, but the team.  When I joined there was a large Silverlight project without any Silverlight knowledge.  Everyone rallied, designers were brought up to speed on Blend and Flash devs were put to work.  IQ now has a competent and competitive team of Silverlight developers/designers, and I am so happy to have been, and continue to be part of that. 

Over the next few month, and into the beginning of next year, I will be taking on a consultant role with IQ to ensure the project sails smoothly into launch and advice  with the direction of IQ’s Silverlight practice.  Doing this enables me to work on a number of key Silverlight projects in the media space in Turin, Italy.  Hopefully the jet lag wears off soon, because I’m ready to dig in, build awesome Silverlight projects, and most importantly build another team of kick ass Silverlight developers.

From Turin – ciao ciao

Did you know there is a built-in Trigger in Silverlight 3?  It’s the the Loaded event of objects.  There’s been a fair bit of attention given to Behaviors, and rightfully so, but sometimes you simply want a trigger.

It would be great to have more Triggers in SL, but for now, let’s take a look at the Loaded trigger.  It’s particularly interesting because you can handle the visuals of an element becoming visible.  Adding a build on (like fade in) transition to your elements in your application is something small, but adds polish, and should be encouraged.

The below Xaml shows the fading in of the LayoutRoot using the Loaded Trigger.

<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Opacity="1">
  <Grid.Triggers>
    <EventTrigger RoutedEvent="Grid.Loaded">
      <BeginStoryboard>
        <Storyboard x:Name="LayoutRootLoaded">
          <DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames BeginTime="00:00:00"
              Storyboard.TargetName="LayoutRoot"
              Storyboard.TargetProperty="(UIElement.Opacity)">
            <EasingDoubleKeyFrame KeyTime="00:00:00" Value="0" />
            <EasingDoubleKeyFrame KeyTime="00:00:05" Value="1">
              <EasingDoubleKeyFrame.EasingFunction>
                <ExponentialEase EasingMode="EaseOut" />
              </EasingDoubleKeyFrame.EasingFunction>
            </EasingDoubleKeyFrame>
          </DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames>
        </Storyboard>
      </BeginStoryboard>
    </EventTrigger>
  </Grid.Triggers>

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find a way to edit a Storyboard defined in a Trigger.  For right now you’ll have to create the Storyboard in the Resources and copy into the Trigger.

In a previous post I showed a screenshot of all the controls available to you in SketchFlow.  The below application takes it one step further by displaying the live controls.  For the record, the SketchFlow styles are re-distributable.