Days 8-10

Days 8 through 10 were labor day weekend and I was out of town for most of that time. I did get a chance to play with Expression Blend more and read the SDK and Expression Blend documentation about various XAML keywords, polygon and polyline in particular.

I was trying to figure out how to create some basic shapes in XAML. My first attempts were by creating a polygon with the correct points, but I found myself getting massively sidetracking trying to remember basic geometry from my freshman year of high school. After reading more documentation I found that I could draw some different shapes in Blend, then combine them into a single path, which might be the best way to accomplish what I was going for.

Day 11

Last night, I was trying to create a basic form in Silverlight. I started by looking at the documentation for the textblock object, and found all kinds of interesting ways that text can be transformed and output, including the run and linebreak objects. Unfortunately, I didn't find any information about how to allow the user to enter text into a silverlight app.

Eventually I found the Using Input Method Editors for Text Entry in Silverlight screencast which covers what I was looking for, in addition to other interesting features.

I've got to say I'm pretty disappointed to learn that in order to do text entry in a Silverlight app, I've got to actually overlay an HTML textarea over the Silverlight control, and use javascript to read/write text from that textarea.

I have a lot of ideas to experiment with such as whether I can create a textarea with a transparent background and no border, which would allow me to do a better job integrating it with the Silverlight control. Or perhaps I could have a text area that allows entry, but what's entered is immediately hidden and reproduced in the a textblock in XAML, fooling the user into thinking that they're entering text directly into Silverlight.

Labels: silverlight, sprint