Project Linker is a Visual Studio Extension that “helps to automatically create and maintain links from a source project to a target project to share code that is common to Silverlight and WPF”. In ClipFlair, where I have shared code between a Silverlight and a WPF project (I guess same would be for XNA projects [...]

When using MVVM design style for a Silverlight or WPF control, it is common to use the control’s DataContext to keep the associated ViewModel instance, so that in the XAML file for the control one can use simple binding statements from the UI to the view model (and back if TwoWay binding mode is specified) [...]

If you want to use the latest DotNetZip library (version 1.9.1.8) with Silverlight, you should get a patched version from http://dotnetzip.codeplex.com/workitem/14049, instead of the official download for Silverlight. It seems the Silverlight build in 1.9.1.8 official download doesn’t work correctly, since it tries to get IBM437 Encoding (as ...

At ClipFlair’s Playground Silverlight app I’m using DotNetZip library (Ionic.Zip namespace) for writing saved component state to a .ZIP file. In fact the Activity container there can create one .ZIP for each state that contains one .ZIP per-component it hosts (it can even host multiple instances of its own Activity componnt type to have nested ...

Was just debugging an issue with loading of saved state at ClipFlair’s Text component, when I realized that Silverlight’s (and WPF’s) RichTextBox control doesn’t accept an empty string at its Xaml proprerty to clear its contents as one would expect. Instead clearing the contents of the RichTextBox requires a call to Blocks.Clear(). In ClipFlair’s ...

ClipFlair’s project description website is based on WordPress (a quite extensible blogging platform based on PHP). The other day we had an issue with the AddThis Plugin for WordPress, which was adding tracking suffices (in the form #.UAxxxxx) to the end of our URLs on the browser address bar. Moreover this wasn’t occuring in Internet [...]

Opensource movies made with Blender (http://www.blender.org) http://orange.blender.org/download http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/index.php/download/ http://www.sintel.org/download http://mango.blender.org/download/ At the download page for some of them you can also find subtitle files. Also at list of featured Blender movies ...

One of the main goals of the ClipFlair project is to explore the use of Video Captioning (together with Revoicing) for Foreign Language Learning (FLL). There both are important enhancements compared to the simpler two-line subtitling that was put in use in its ancestor project LeViS. Captioning means that multi-row text is needed while text [...]

Supposing you have an MSDN Subscription, you could download say SQL Server 2012 Standard Edition (x86 and x64) – DVD (English) from the following URL: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/downloads/hh442898.aspx#FileId=48810 Suppose you do so and you keep that .ISO file (a CD/DVD image that you can burn to a disk using Windows 7 or ...

Since our onoing project ClipFlair is a follow-up of the succesful project LeViS, during its development I’m also looking at covering possible use-cases I infer from feedback entries at LvS application issue tracker on Codeplex (note that ClipFlair is also opensourced on Codeplex at http://ClipFlair.codeplex.com). One such issue ...

Here are some Smooth Streaming URLs I found on the Internet that you could use during development to test your smooth streaming players (like those based on SMF):   http://streams.smooth.vertigo.com/BigBuckBunny_30sec/bigbuck.ism/manifest http://video3.smoothhd.com.edgesuite.net/ondemand/Big%20Buck%20Bunny%20Adaptive.ism/Manifest   ...

Trying to make CaptionsGridWindow of ClipFlair serve captions editing on-the-fly to SMF (Silverlight Media Framework [now called MMPPF]) player component, I had a real hard time, plagued by a bug at TimedTextElementStyle. It seems to be setting default FontSize for captions using a “Cell” unit instead of using a “Pixel” unit. Currently SMF only ...

In the context of ClipFlair development, I was recently adding independent scaling (zooming) functionality to its ZUI container’s floating windows (apart from the container zooming functionality) and came across some strange behavior, where the windows seemed to also move apart from getting scaled. After banging my head a bit I decided to take a ...

While refactoring ClipFlair code to use MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) pattern, I came across the XAML error “Object reference not set to an instance of an object.”, shown in Visual Studio when trying to bind to my ViewModel (accessed implicitly, being set as the DataContext of the XAML control) for a property named Source. I have settled [...]

With Silverlight using a cut-down .NET API, some decisions have been at least ackward, causing Silverlight code to be sometimes unnecesserily more complex than its WPF counterpart and WPF code needing several changes to get ported for Silverlight. In ClipFlair I’ve implemented a WPFCompatibility layer to ease compiling WPF code for Silverlight ...

Just came accross a runtime error message that troubled me a bit to resolve while adding Prezi-like content scaling functionality in ClipFlair‘s FloatingWindowHostZUI (ZUI = Zoomable User Interface) container. I had added the following: /// Identifies the <see cref="FloatingWindow.Scale" /> dependency property. /// ...

Following up on my post on how to fix CSpeex (http://cspeex.codeplex.com) to compile at Silverlight 5 (see http://zoomicon.wordpress.com/2012/06/09/fix-compile-cspeex-audio-codec-at-silverlight-4-rc-and-silverlight-5/).  Initially I thought it was not working correctly, but then I noticed I was running it on Terminal Server and didn’t have an ...

According to http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/center.en.html#vertical CSS level 2 doesn’t have a property for centering things vertically. There will probably be one in CSS level 3. But even in CSS2 you can center blocks vertically, by combining a few properties. The trick is to specify that the outer block is to be formatted as a table ...

I was just examining a MonoX portal skin that our designer is authoring for the ClipFlair platform and noticed that in the Default.skin file, there’s a note pointing to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/911717 that speaks of an issue with Microsoft’s implementation of WebPartZone skins: There it says: The CssClass property does not affect the ...

Via trial and error, I recently found out that when creating a Uri combining another Uri and a suffix part (tried at Silverlight, but I guess it’s a .NET issue in general), it eats up the last part of the (first) Uri if it doesn’t end with "/". That is, if you combine http://test.com/a with [...]

If you use TimeUpDown control from Silverlight Toolkit in your XAML like below (copy pasting from CaptionGrid at ClipFlair source): <ResourceDictionary xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" > <DataTemplate ...

When you tell the Visual Studio IDE to generate a web project (instead of just using an autogenerated page) for a Silverlight project, it creates a project named SilverlightAppName.Web with a SilverlightAppNameTestPage.aspx (ASP.net) and an SilverlightAppNameTestPage.html. Either one can be served from a web server (obviously the .aspx one from ...

Following up on a note about Visual Studio 2010 crashing at my previous post, this is the XAML that crashes VS2010 when opened up in a Silverlight project: <UserControl x:Class="SilverlightApplication1.MainPage"   xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"   ...

While adding some properties to the back panels of ClipFlair windows, I came upon the issue of how to space items in a StackPanel. A Padding property is missing from multiple item containers (only single content controls have such), but a nice solution is described at: ...

During the development of ClipFlair (currently at Alpha1-internal version), I’ve been doing lots of research, hunting for information (documentation, related discussion threads, useful download links) needed when writing and refactoring source code etc. I have tried to organize these links as (Windows) Internet shortcut files into folders. They do ...