Daily Links 26/09/2008

Silverlight 2 Release Candidate Now Available

Microsoft Silverlight unit test framework now on MSDN Code Gallery

First Reporting tool for Silverlight

Drag and Drop controls at runtime using Silverlight 2

Closable TabItem
enable closing of tabitems ala browser tabs

DataBinding in silverlight
includes validation & Value conversion

IsolatedStorage as a Silverlight object cache

StyleCop Plugin for Resharper

Mapping strings to Enums and Enums to Strings

XAML Power Toys 2.0.8 Released New Features

Patterns in Practice
Informative article on the Open Closed Principle. Found it useful in my current client implementation of MVC / MVP and how that relates to the Application Controller Pattern.

SharpZipLib Versus 7-Zip for Large File Sets

Customizing ListView in WPF

WPF Transitions library
Add animated transitions to your WPF controls with ease

Daily Links 15/09/2008

Sliverlight Multithreading with Controls (Slider example)

SilverGPS - Building a GPS application using Windows Mobile and Silverlight technologies

Creating a reusable MessageBox control in silverlight

Well Performing Silverlight Application with XAML On Demand

Silverlight 2 Beta 2: Doing Data Part III
Combining the DataContractSerializer & the SharpZipLib to serialize compressed items to isolated storage in silverlight

Babel Obfuscator
"an obfuscator for .NET Framework"

Jimmy Bogard on Passion

DeepCopy with Silverlight

In a few scenarios, the need arises for making an exact copy of a given object. I've been doing this for a few years now in Windows Forms development using code that looks something like:

Using the code above, one could copy any object just by typing:

SomeObjectType instance = anotherInstance.DeepCopy();

Unfortunately for Silverlight users, the BinaryFormatter is not available, so when I wanted to store the original state of an object (make a deep copy of it) retrieved from a service call in order to track changes on the client, I could not do it the old way :| .

DataContractSerializer to the rescue:
Thanks to recent SP1 changes which do not require objects to be marked with the DataContract tag, you can use the DataContractSerializer (which is available is Silverlight) to serialize just about any object of a given type. Here's the code for Silverlight Deep Copy:

Remember to add a reference to System.Runtime.Serialization to the project in order to get to the DataContractSerializer class.

EDIT: Recently came across this post, which may contain additional useful information.

Daily Links 04/09/2008

Silverlight 2 Samples: Dragging, docking, expanding panels (Part 3)

IPhone UI with Silverlight 2 beta 2

XAML Power Toys
Generate your XAML UI - Silverlight support to be released with the RTW

Patterns for Flexible WCF Services
"presents patterns that allow you to define descriptive, maintainable, yet extensible contracts specifically with Microsoft’s WCF technology."

Batching SqlCommand Queries

Silverlight Spy updated

Including code style analysis in your MSBuild process using MS StyleCop

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