If you are working on a web site that incorporates Silverlight you inevitably will need to do some level work with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). If you are not too familiar with CSS you should jump on the opportunity to download and watch a free CSS training course which is only available for the next 2 days (until June 11th)! This is a 3  hour course broken up in a 8-part video series.

The series includes:

• Introduction to CSS
• CSS Selectors
• Text Properties
• Inheritance
• The Cascade
• What’s Next?

If you are interested, head over to:

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2010/06/04/its-our-party-and-well-give-away-a-free-css-video-series-if-we-want-to/

or directly to:

http://www.sitepoint.com/videos/videocss1/

Thanks,
–Mike

Are you currently doing ASP.NET development in Visual Studio 2010? If so, we would love to hear your feedback!

We have created an online survey that will only take a few minutes to complete.

Click here to take survey

All feedback will be carefully considered and thoroughly reviewed during our planning for future release such as VS 2010 SP1.

The more details you can provide, the better.

Thank you for your time,
–Mike

With Silverlight 4 came support for Text Trimming. Text Trimming is a feature that applies to TextBlocks and is used to append “…” at the end of the string if the text in the TextBlock does not fit. In WPF this can be done at the character level or the word level. Silverlight 4 only supports trimming at the word level.

To set it simply set the property TextTrimming to “WordEllipsis” like this:

<TextBlock x:Name="TitleTB" TextTrimming="WordEllipsis"/>

Programmatically it would be done like this:

TitleTB.TextTrimming = TextTrimming.WordEllipsis;

So say I have a TextBlock set to the following string:

“This string is too long to fit here but you can append … by using the property TextTrimming”

Without Trimming it would look like this (notice the word TextTrimming is just missing):

With Trimming “…” is appended letting you know there is more text:

Thanks,
–Mike

Microsoft Developer User Research has upcoming opportunities for Rich Internet Application developers (Silverlight, Air etc) with experience using Silverlight and C# or VB.

The researchers would like to understand different scenarios, workflows etc.  that RIA developers are working on.  The researchers are particularly interested in developers who are currently taking their applications OOB (out of browser) or considering it.

The feedback received will be used to build features to support those scenarios in the next version of Silverlight.

The study will be conducted at your convenience between 6/3-6/24 and will take two hours.

Interested in providing feedback for this study? Email devur@microsoft.com with SV in the subject line. All participants will receive a gratuity item from a selection of current Microsoft products.

Thank you for your consideration, your support is greatly appreciated!

If you try to use the special/reserved characters in a string in XAML you will get a slew of errors in your Error List. Example reserved characters include:

• <
• >
• &
• “

For example, if you tried to do this:

<Button Width="100" Height="100" Content="Click &Me"/>

You would get these errors:

Error    5    Entity references or sequences beginning with an ampersand ‘&’ must be terminated with a semicolon ‘;’.   
Error    4    ‘"’ is an unexpected token. The expected token is ‘;’. Line 10, position 60.   

You can encode invalid characters for use in XAML by using the following encoding syntax:

So to fix the Button above you would insert “&amp;” wherever you want to use an “&”

<Button Width="100" Height="100" Content="Click &amp;Me"/>