Alex van Beek

In this article I’m going to show how you can use self tracking entities (which are new in the Entity Framework V4) in combination with Silverlight 4. I’m also going to show how to optimize self tracking entities by making an adjustment to the self tracking entities T4 template, which doesn’t only benefit Silverlight clients, but all .Net clients that make use of self tracking entities.

In Flex 4 there isn’t an alternative for the Flex 3 ViewStack navigation container, which we can use for browser history integration. Luckily, Flex 3 components should work in Flex 4, but there are two issues with the ViewStack container. One of those issues is that browser history integration isn’t working. In this article I’ll show you how to work around those issues.

I’ve found multiple posts on the web explaining how to sign a XAP file, using a post build event in which “signtool.exe” is called. With the new Silverlight 4 RC2 tools for Visual Studio 2010, there is another way to sign your XAP file…

If you develop applications in Silverlight a lot, it becomes more and more annoying that Flex doesn’t support multi threading. This is particularly annoying when you are processing a long running task and need to display some progress. The problem is that you can’t do this task on a background thread, this means that the ui thread is busy processing your task and it can’t update the ui until your task is done, at which the progress of course is 100%. In this article I’m going to show how you can somewhat work around Flex’ and more precisely Flash’ lack of multithreading while still being able to let the ui be responsive and show progress. 

In this post I’m again comparing two features of Silverlight and Flex, this time we’re going to take a look at how data validation is implemented on both platforms. This will be a very interesting comparison, since Flex and Silverlight take entirely different approaches. Which one is better? I can let you know in advance that one of the two is a bit broken. Read on to find out which one…… 

In this post I’m going to show how you can make use of MEF’s recomposition features to recomposition on the fly when the content of the configuration XML file in which the exports are defined, is changed.

In this post we're going to see how to keep your Merged Resource Dictionaries out of your Silverlight's .XAP file and loading them runtime. This way you can customize the look of your application without recompiling your Silverlight application. Refreshing the browser is enough to see the changes to your user interface.

This post shows you how you can create a complete working drag and drop solution in Silverlight 3. This solution works in every Panel and from anywhere in the application. This solution is inspired by Flex' DragManager class.