You think you are smart? You think you can explain the concepts of your technology really well? Do you like sharing your knowledge? Do you like travelling? Are you self-driven? Do you like being in touch with geeks who love technology and love to share their knowledge in order to learn more? Do you consider yourself a champ in SQL or IIS/ASP.NET? If your answer is "yes" to all of these, and you are interested in joining Microsoft Premier Field Engineering team… f... [More]

Today, while working with one of my colleagues, Chetan… I found a pretty neat trick to get some junk text in MS Word or Outlook. Just type something like =Lorem(5, 2) and hit enter. Basically, you are telling to create 5 paragraphs of 2 lines each and so on… I just tried with =Lorem(3, 10) and I got the following. Not bad! Having it in English would have been better I guess Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pul... [More]

In this post find out how easily you can use databinding to create a listbox which gives visual data representation. First up, create a class [Student.cs] like as follows… Notice the Students class below is an ObservableCollection.  using System; using System.Net; using System.Windows; using System.Windows.Controls; using System.Windows.Documents; using System.Windows.Ink; using System.Windows.Input; using System.Windows.Media; using System.Windows.Media.Animation; using System.W... [More]

This is another cool thing in VS2010 which goes unnoticed. In any Silverlight project, drag and drop a StackPanel. With the StackPanel selected, Double-Click Button control multiple times, to get 4 different button controls. Something like this… You can add a lot of controls in different layers (like a Tab control). Let's say you want to select all button controls and give them an equal size. How do you do it?Did you know that there is a an icon called Outline, that looks like this&he... [More]

In any Silverlight project you can hover your mouse over the edges of the Grid and click it. You can drag and drop multiple controls inside this Row or Column. Let's say, you get a grid split something like this… If you like you can resize the cell size. But, it can be a good idea to go "Auto". if you hover your mouse near the cell's left edge, you will get a choice like the following… (for fixed, proportion and Auto). If you click Auto, you will find t... [More]

In a Silverlight application, Create a resource in App.xaml. Something like this… <Application.Resources> <RadialGradientBrush x:Key="GreenRadialBrush" > <GradientStop Color="DarkGreen" Offset="0" /> <GradientStop Color="White" Offset="1" /> </RadialGradientBrush> <LinearGradientBrush x:Key="SampleLinearBrush" > <GradientStop Co... [More]

I never saw this before, and today I have hit this by accident. Windows + X key brings up the following screen on Windows 7. I found it pretty useful! For ex… you can change your presentation settings in just a couple of clicks! Cheers, Rahul Quote of the day: A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth. - George Bernard Shaw

In a Silverlight application, drag a border control, and inside the border drop a rectangle. Somewhat like the image below. The question here is… Horizontal Alignment setting has a default value Stretch. How come it is behaving as if it is Center? <Rectangle Height="71" Name="rectangle2" Stroke="Black" StrokeThickness="1" Width="101" /> In the code above, you can see I haven't specified Horizontal Alignment. Hence, it should be Stre... [More]

In a Silverlight application, create a button and drop a Frame control. If you set the Source property of this Frame control to another page (let's say "/anotherpage.xaml") in design time it will work just fine when you execute this application. But if you want to navigate to a different page using code you may write a code that looks like this… private void btnNavigate_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e){ frame1.Source = (new Uri("/anotherpage.xaml");} If yo... [More]

Even though I am new to Microsoft Silverlight development, I am mighty impressed with it. In this post, I will show you how easily you can create a Binary Clock that looks somewhat like this… If you don’t know how to read a binary clock, check this, or this out. Watch a live demo There are quite a few things that you can learn with this small project. More notably…     How to add controls dynamically     How to access those controls using code &... [More]