The Windows 8/8.1 app version of Internet Explorer is also known as IE Metro because of the “Metro” codename (inspired by navigation signs in public transport] of the Modern UI design language promoted by Microsoft). However that version isn’t the full Internet Explorer, in that it is unfortunately not supporting extensibility via plugins in the ...

PivotViewer is an impressive Silverlight control (see my usage at http://gallery.clipflair.net), however Microsoft never released it for WPF. One could work arround this by embedding Silverlight in their WPF app using the WebBrowser control and talking to it via the JavaScript Bridge of Silverlight, however they could also embed one of those HTML5 ...

I was recently adding drop-files support to ClipFlair Studio, so I had to do some research on the related API that is available to Silverlight apps. Silverlight supports a limited set of Drag-and-Drop interaction with the operating system (supposedly for security reasons, but most probably because of the classic cross-platform implementation ...

My contribution to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1101841/linq-how-to-perform-max-on-a-property-of-all-objects-in-a-collection-and-ret Based on  another answer there, here is what I’ve just added to my enhanced version of SilverFlow library’s FloatingWindowHost (copying from FloatingWindowHost.cs at ...

One of our ClipFlair Studio users reported on having some issue trying to install Silverlight on MacOS-X, so I gathered some related info below:     First of all, at the Silverlight installation webpage, at the System Requirements tab, you can find the following requirements: Macintosh (Intel-based) Intel Core Duo 1.83-gigahertz (GHz) or ...

based on the other samples posted at StackOverflow on how to format XML created by DataContractSerializer, that use XmlWriter, here’s a version (from ClipFlair source code) that works with streams (and Ionic.Zip library in specific). It also shows how the code is when you don’t apply formatting (using conditional compilation).  ...

While stepping through “ShowDialog()” method of OpenFileDialog with Visual Studio 2010 debugger, at the Silverlight code pictured below (for loading a ClipFlair window’s stored options), I got a “Dialogs must be user-initiated” exception. Same behaviour will be shown with SaveFileDialog too, every time you try to step through the “ShowDialog()” ...

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 [...]

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 ...

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 ...

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 [...]

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 ...

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: ...

At LvS (the opensource application of LeViS), I’ve been using this (VB.net) code to set the UI language (for example to Greek): Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo("el") Others seem to have been using (C# – that’s why there is a trailing semicolon): Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = ...