dnrTV

As babies smash on the keyboard, colored shapes, letters and numbers appear on the screen. Baby Smash will lock out the Windows Key, as well as Ctrl-Esc and Alt-Tab so your baby can’t get out of the application. Pressing ALT-F4 will exit the application and Shift-Ctrl-Alt-O brings up the options dialog. I’m always interested in your feedback as well!

I wrote BabySmash! for my 2 year old and 5 month old so they could bang on the keyboards of my Windows machines without hurting anything. It’s a copy/homage of the very fine and free AlphaBaby for the Macintosh. BabySmash is free also and the source code is available on my blog soon. Enjoy!

Baby Smash! by Scott Hanselman

A few weeks ago I wrote about an "app building" exercise we did on the Silverlight Toolkit team to help test our controls and identify potential issues with Silverlight 3 before it was released. My contribution to that effort was HeadTraxExtreme, an organizational hierarchy viewer loosely based on an internal tool. That blog post has been fairly popular, and I wanted to update the sample code for the recent release of Silverlight 3 so people can continue to learn from the sample and so I can walk through a fairly typical application upgrade scenario to show what’s involved.

Delay’s Blog : An "extreme" update for the Silverlight 3 release [HeadTraxExtreme sample application updated]

In this post, I will share the simplest, most direct method I’ve found to access SharePoint list data from a Silverlight control hosted within a SharePoint web part. Contrary to most examples I’ve seen, this methodology will not require any custom web services. I’m am however going to assume that you have a working knowledge of how to build a simple SharePoint Web Part and a simple Silverlight control.

In learning new programming techniques, I’d rather read code examples than listen to some one bloviate, so for your reference this article uses four code listings which can be found in this online repository. These listings are:

SharePoint Solutions Team Blog: Silverlight: The easiest method to get SharePoint list data

Data binding is a connection between the User Interface and a business object or other data provider . The User Interface object is called the target, the provider of the data is called the source.

Data-binding assists with the separation of the User Interface level of your application from the other layers of  your application (business objects, data, and so forth). This separation of responsibility is further reinforced by decoupling the UI target from its source through  the use of a Binding object.

The binding object can be thought of as a black box with a universal connectors on one side for the target and on the other side for the source. There are switches on top, the most important of which is the Data Binding Mode switch which determines which way the data will flow.

Tutorials : The Official Microsoft Silverlight Site

In this tutorial I’m going to explain how you can host a Silverlight 2 beta 2 application from within a SharePoint Web Part. The Web Part will pass the URL of the SharePoint site together with the name of the list for which the Silverlight application will show the data. The retrieval of the data will be done by the Silverlight application using the HttpWebRequest technique for calling the SharePoint web services. As the SharePoint web services return a chunk of XML the XML will be handled by using LINQ for XML. The data will be bound to the Silverlight controls.

Creating a SharePoint Web Part that hosts a data binding Silverlight application | SharePoint Magazine