Unit Testing Silverlight Animation

One thing I haven't really included in any of the example Silverlight posts are the unit tests. There's continuous debate among developers concerning the effectiveness of unit tests, in my opinion they're absolutely necessary whenever you're building an application. Test driven development (TDD) on the other hand I still find very hard, it's a different way to approach development that seems difficult to pick up without peer programming with someone who already has this approach.

A client for duplex services in Silverlight

I'm currently working on a project that requires the use of duplex services to report progress on a long running event (I'll go more into the actual event in a later post). The reference material I started with was "How to: Build a Duplex Service" and "How to: Access a Duplex Service with the Channel Model", building the service itself its a relatively simple affair with a slight learning experience as I hadn't really used the Message class from WCF before.

Gotcha when databinding a ComboBox in Silverlight

Occasionally we all run into bugs in systems not built by ourselves. Some are minor, some however really make you wonder how much QA was really done. Sadly this was the latter.

My Silverlight 3 Wishlist

With MIX coming up I'd thought I'd list some of the things I'm wanting to see in Silverlight 3.

Why won't VisualStateManager work?

As someone who's still learning Silverlight I like to put together the xaml for all my examples and experiments by hand. Since xaml and the underlying object structure for a control are exactly the same once you can compose something in xaml you can do the same in C#.