I presented Week 4 material this week from my 6 part SRA-University course on SilverLight development. We began by reviewing the SilverLight SDK material on building interactive controls from scratch. We took a look at the three sample controls in Expression Blend 2. using split view. Using Blend makes it easier to see both the XAML and the control that is being designed.

We also went over a list of Performance Tips and Tricks for SilverLight. Here is a link to a document that is part of the MSDN library that shows us how to create SilverLight apps that run fast and smoothly. Examples of these performance tips are things like not animating the size of text, using visibility instead of opacity to show and hide objects, and setting the EnableFrameRateCounter boolean variable to true during development. One of the other tips and tricks dealt with the downloader control, which coincidentally was the focus of our discussion from our course text.

The downloader control is used to download files asynchronously using an HTTP Get. By using the downloader control, we can download content when we need it - not necessarily when the SilverLight control is instantiated. Here's another performance tip and best practice - when using the downloader control, after we are finished downloading content on demand, we should always detach our event handlers and set the downloader instance to null.

My week 4 slide deck can be found here.

Week 5 class will be held on June 12. Next week, I will be at the MS Tech-ED Developer conference, as well as presenting at the Microsoft Community Summit 2008. I will be speaking at the .Net University series on .Net 3.5 service development. Here's a link to our session. I hope to see you down there.

 

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