Silverlight Cream for March 14, 2011 -- #1060

Posted by Dave Campbell on Geeks with Blogs See other posts from Geeks with Blogs or by Dave Campbell
Published on Tue, 15 Mar 2011 03:42:51 GMT Indexed on 2011/03/15 8:10 UTC
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In this Issue: Lazar Nikolov, Rudi Grobler, WindowsPhoneGeek, Jesse Liberty, Pete Brown, Jessica Foster, Chris Rouw, Andy Beaulieu, and Colin Eberhardt.

Above the Fold:

Silverlight:	"A Silverlight Resizable TextBlock (and other resizable things)" Colin Eberhardt
WP7:	"Retrofitting the Trial API" Jessica Foster

Shoutouts:

Rudi Grobler has a post up that's not Silverlight, but it's cool stuff you may be interested in: WPF Themes now available on NuGet

From SilverlightCream.com:

Simulating rain in Silverlight: Lazar Nikolov has a cool tutorial up at SilverlightShow... Simulating rain. Nice demo near to top, and source code plus a very nice tutorial on the entire process.
Making the ApplicationBar bindable: Rudi Grobler has a couple new posts up... first this one on making the WP7 AppBar bindable... he's created 2 simple wrappers that make it possible to bind to a method... with source as usual!
All about Splash Screens in WP7 – Creating animated Splash Screen: WindowsPhoneGeek's latest is about splash screens in WP7, but he goes one better with animated splash screens. Lots of good information including closing points in more of a FAQ-style listing.
Testing Network Availability: Jesse Liberty's latest is on testing for network availability in your WP7 app. This should be required reading for anyone building a WP7 app, since you never know when the network is going to be there or not.
Lighting up on Windows 7 with Native Extensions for Microsoft Silverlight: Pete Brown's latest post is about the Native Extensions for Microsoft Silverlight or NESL library. Pete describes what NESL is, a link to the library, installing it, and tons more information. If you wanna know or try NESL... this looks like the place to start.
Retrofitting the Trial API: Jessica Foster paused on the way to shipping her WP7 app to add in the trial API code. Check out what she went through to complete that task, as she explains the steps and directions she took. Good description, links, and code.
WP7 Insights #2: Creating a Splash Screen in WP7: In the 2nd post in his series on WP7 development, Chris Rouw is discussing a WP7 splash screen. He gives some good external links for references then gets right into discussing his code.
Air Hockey for Windows Phone 7: Andy Beaulieu shares a tutorial he wrote for the Expression Toolbox site, using the Physics Helper Library and Farseer Physics Engine -- an Air Hockey game for WP7.
A Silverlight Resizable TextBlock (and other resizable things): I think Michael Washington had the best comment about Colin Eberhardt's latest outing: "Another WOW example" ... drop this in the pretty darn cool category: an attached behavior that uses a Thumb control within a popup to adorn any UI element to allow the user to resize it!