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Building a Silverlight 2.0 Media Player: Part II Adding the MediaElement and Wiring up the Navigation

So now we have the cool navigation with slick animation.  This tutorial assumes you have a media file on your local hard drive (avi or wmv) and that you have read Part I of this series.  Now let’s start by adding the MediaElement:

1. Open the project in Blend 2.5 June Preview
2. Click the Asset Library button on the tool bar (is the last one on the bottom) and in the Search field start to type Media and when you see Media Element click it like I am doing in Figure 1.

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Building a Silverlight 2.0 Media Player: Part I Creating the Navigation

One of the major advantages to using Silverlight 2.0 over Flash is its very powerful MediaElement.  It is very easy to use and very easy to create custom controls that play, pause and stop the video among other things. 

In this tutorial I am going to show you how to use the MediaElement by creating a Silverlight 2.0 Video Player complete with a cool animated navigation.  In Part I we are going to create the Navigation with some very cool, slick animation using the Visual State Manager (VSM) and Blend 2.5’s new State panel.  The VSM allows us to easily add State Groups to which we can add States that contain transition animations.

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Building A Silverlight 2.0 Custom Button Control

There are some really cool new features to Silverlight 2.0, one of which is the ability to style up a cool looking series of Rectangles with various gradients and then group them into a Layout Control, such as a Grid or Canvas and then in Blend 2.5 turn it into a Silverlight 2.0 Button Control complete with the behaviours that are native to a Silverlight 2.0 Button (Click, MouseEnter, MouseLeave, etc.).  I am going to show you how to do just that.  After that I am going to show you how Silverlight 2.0 makes reusing assets and Controls a breeze by placing some content, along with out new stylish custom Button Control into a Layout Control and then turn that into a Silverlight 2.0 UserControl.  Finally, I will show you just how easy it is to reuse our newly created UserControl.  Without any further ado, let’s get to it!

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Using Blend 2.5 Visual State Manager to Create a Silverlight 2.0 Image Viewer

Recently Microsoft released Blend 2.5 June Preview.  So, of course I started looking around to find what was new.  I was blown away by a new panel called the State panel.  This new panel allows you to create State Groups that you can then add states to (called a Visual State Manager (VSM)).  You can even specify the time (in seconds) it takes for a State to transition from one to the next.  So, I then started thinking about a practical application for this new feature.  Of course I could have made an application that had custom buttons (really just a series of grids and not actually a Button Control) and used the State panel to make MouseEnter and MouseLeave effects.  But, this seemed to me to not really show the power of this new feature.  So, then I came up with an idea to make an Image Viewer and use the VSM to handle the animation for me.  Here is how it works: when you roll over the thumbnail it grows to a larger size, when you roll off of it, it shrinks back down to the thumbnail size (see Figure 1-0).  Let’s get started now and build the StateImageViewer UserControl.

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Creating a currency converter with Web services and Flash CS3

Web services allow organisations to provide information to the public using the Internet. You can use a Web service to find out about the weather, stock quotes and the latest news headlines. Users make a request and the Web service provides information in XML format. We call this process consuming a Web service. Read More

Creating a currency converter with Web services

Web services allow organisations to provide information to the public using the Internet. You can use a Web service to find out about the weather, stock quotes and the latest news headlines. Users make a request and the Web service provides information in XML format. We call this process consuming a Web service. Read More

Everything you wanted to know about the Flex 2 DataGrid – part 2

Welcome to part 2 of the series of two articles on the Flex 2 DataGrid component. In part 1 of the article, I showed you how to load content from an external XML document and display it in the DataGrid. We set up the DataGrid structure by specifying the columns and displaying relevant data. In this article, we're going to add word wrapping, format the population number, display an image in one of the columns and add some click functionality.

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Everything you wanted to know about the Flex 2 DataGrid – part 1

The DataGrid is a pretty useful built-in Flex component. It allows you to display data in a table-like structure of rows and columns. One of the great things about Flex 2 is that the DataGrid comes with features like drag and drop, built in sorting and renderers so you can easily display images and other components in a DataGrid column. You can also add content to the DataGrid from an external source like an XML document or a text file.

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Flex and PHP: Building a Message Board – part 2

Welcome to part 2 of this series of two articles on building a simple message board application with Flex. The application uses PHP with a MySQL database. It is a very simple application because the aim is to show you how to use PHP and Flex together rather than how to create a fully functional commercial application.

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Flex and PHP: Building a Message Board – part 1

If you're a Flash developer, you've probably heard of or even worked with Flex. The Flex 2 framework provides a very flexible way to develop SWF applications. You can build simple applications like calculators that don’t use any data from outside sources. You can also build more complex applications that take their content from text or XML documents or even from a database.

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Printing with Flex 2

A common task for developers is providing a way for people to print out the contents of a Flex application. Often, you'll want to print out something that looks different from what's on the screen – maybe a simplified version of the data or the interface. The good news is that you can do this using Flex 2.

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Working with Drag and Drop in Flex Builder 2

One of the really cool things in Flex is the built-in support for drag and drop. Flex includes the Drag and Drop Manager which allows you to drag an object and add it to a component. The DataGrid, HorizontalList, List, Menu, PrintDataGrid, TileList and Tree components all include enhanced support for drag and drop so you don't have to write any code. If you want to drag and drop with other components, you'll need to write some ActionScript.
 

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