When using Silverlight or Flash to fetch data from other domains one often runs into cross-domain access restrictions. For security reasons in order to access data from different domains, the remote server explicitly has to allow this by defining a crossdomain.xml (or, for Silverlight, clientaccesspolicy.xml is good as well). If this file cannot be found [...]
The World Cup is on and there have been quite a few good Twitter mashups made for this event, probably the most popular being TweetBeat (and I’ve also developed one, Tweet For Your Team). In this post I’ll show how to build a simple service similar to TweetBeat using a publicly available real-time streaming service, [...]
Printing support has been introduced in Silverlight 4. This means that any part of the visual tree can be printed with some simple API calls (see the Printing Basics section on my Advanced Printing in Silverlight post). This post provides an example to print charts and looks at how elements can be auto scaled to [...]
Detecting the Silverlight version installed on a client machine isn’t entirely straightforward. To do so, one has to use Javascript. Unfortunately even though Microsoft ships a Silverlight.js in the Silverlight SDK, this script only has the ability to tell whether a specific version is supported on the client’s machine; it does not support returning the [...]
Silverlight gives the developer the possibility of completely customizing the developed application in all aspects. Defining fonts used for displaying text is no exception. However there are multiple ways on how to go ahead with specifying fonts to use, this article attempts to summarize the options. In Silverlight, using fonts can be done in three [...]
I’ve entered the MIX 10K competition where the goal is to write an application using no more than 10KBytes of source code in Silverlight. I’ve decided to implement a cocktail selector application – strictly listing alcohol free cocktails only – using the web services I’ve previously built for a popular cocktail site, iCocktail.co.uk. ICocktail.co.uk was [...]
As the holiday season is close I was looking for a way of sending a simple, yet nice animated Christmas card to friends. I wasn’t looking for one of the many popular sites offering e-card sending, instead I wanted something I could somewhat customize, put on my server and send the link to friends and [...]
Recently I wanted to implement a very simple file upload component in Silverlight that uploads a single file and if possible shows upload progress. Having done some search I’ve found numerous examples but all of them seemed too complex for the simple task of uploading a file so I implemented a really lightweight solution. The [...]
When working with images I sooner or later usually run into the problem of creating thumbnails. Resampling images is not really difficult in the major programming languages however I have not found built-in support for caclulating thumbnail dimensions neither in .NET nor in PHP. And it seems that this made me re-invent the wheel over [...]
