Does your application have long context menus that get clipped inside small windows? First ask yourself is this the right user interface. If so then one solution is to add a vertical scroll bar automagically to the context menu. IntelliSense in Visual Studio uses a maximum size constant for the context menu to cope with the inordinate number of members on many classes (over 150 members on a Button): Another option, when screen space is at a premium and windows are small, is to peg the maximum size o[...]

Silverlight has become increasingly popular for applications that run both in-browser and on the desktop like Sky’s Go. One of the key new features in Silverlight 5 is multiple window support for desktop applications (often referred to as Out-of-Browser (OOB) applications). Why Multiple Windows? Multiple windows are common in quite a few applications: graphics packages like the GIMP video production software like Sony Vegas music editing software like CakeWalk IDEs like Visual Studio [...]

A ChildWindow in Silverlight is a control that can be displayed over a parent window blocking its interaction. Silverlight 5 introduces multiple window support for Out-of-Browser (OOB) applications with elevated trust. Unfortunately the ChildWindow control is not currently multi-window aware which means, as is, a child window may only appear in the main window. Finding the code With the release of Silverlight 5 the ChildWindow control is part of the main distribution, where previously in Silverlight 4 i[...]

Silverlight 5 provides multi-window support for Out-of-Browser (OOB) applications with elevated trust. Unfortunately the ContextMenu provided in the December 2011 release of the Silverlight Toolkit is not multi-window aware which means that context menu’s opened from secondary windows only appear in the main window. I’ve added a work item on the Toolkit’s issue tracker, but if in the meantime like me you can’t wait for it to be fixed, you can follow the steps below. Note: this is also an issue in the cu[...]

It’s a bit of a long story. A chain of events would unfurl that would lead me inextricably to writing a clone of a 70s video game. It started a few weeks ago while exploring early 90s dance tracks on Spotify, when I happened upon the seminal EP - Clonks Coming by the Sweet Exorcist. Later a lack of content on Spotify would push me towards YouTube and to find a hypnotic collage of Space Invaders, Beach Balls, Pong and the BBC test card girl.   Tapping along to the retro beeps on the train to London, a co[...]