Go to Shine-Draw for a nice collection of links to interesting Silverlight resources, such as this Old Movie Pixel Shader:





Also, while you're there, check out some of the Flash vs. Silverlight comparisons. I suspect the audience of the site is a bit biased towards Silverlight, but the comparisons are nice and also give a good idea of all things possible with SL (and Flash, for that matter).

Yesterday I made my first Vista Sidebar Gadget (woot!). It's really a very simple thing to do. Basically the Gadgets are tiny websites, so you have to develop them using HTML, CSS and Javascript. There's an XML manifest containing some Gadget specific metadata, but that's it.

Since it's a webpage, in theory you could also host XAML content there, or even XBAPs and Silverlight applications. This more or less works, but there are some quirks.

If you want to follow this path, be sure to check out the following site, where you can download the nifty
WPF Styler which you can use to host WPF content in sidebar Gadgets. The page also has links pointing to extensive documentation!

Note: through a mistake, the last part of this post was truncated... Sorry about that!

Of course there's the standard WPF browser component, but that's a simple wrappen around the ActiveX one. It doesn't play really nice with the layour mechanism in WPF...





Chris Cavanagh mixed up some WPF, Chromium and other neat stuff together and whipped up
a genuine bona-fide WPF Webbrowser. The main benefit of this browser is that you can rotate the browser window, something that is lacking from all other commercially or open-sourcially available ones... Check it out! The ClickOnce is about 8 megs, so have a little patience.

Beatrice Stolnitz discusses the topics UI Virtualization and Data Virtualization in Silverlight 3 and WPF (and the differences in the two implementations) in two interesting articles.

UI Virtualization is the concept that only that part of the UI is rendered which is actually shown. The easiest example is a listbox containing a large amount of items, of which only a handful are shown one screen at the time. Without UI Virtualization, all items would have been rendered, something which might cause performance issues.

Data Virtualization performs this 'culling' even earlier in the databinding process and only binds a small amount of items to the control in the first place. Note that this behaviour does not come out of the box in both WPF and Silverligh 3. Luckily, Beatrice goes out of her way to show us a possible implementation.

I can across the Update Control Library when I read an article in this months Code Magazine by, "INotifyPropertyChanged Is Obsolete" by Michael L Perry.

The library lets you specify 'ordinary' properties which are then treated as Dependency Properties without the need to clutter your code with the INotifyPropertyChanged implementations and firing PropertyChangedEvents yourself. Looks pretty nice, only now you have the problem you need to explicitly mark all non-dependency properties as Independent()...