As you go on with Silverlight, one thing sticks out if you are a designer: you have about 9 fonts to play around with. Well, with very little digging, you will find there is a way to get the fonts you want. You can easily take a font and add it to your Silverlight app, and best of all it is embedded into the app so it cannot be ripped out. Today, I will show you how to get custom fonts, not only in Visual Studio, but with Blend as well.

This is the 3rd and final part of my three-part tutorial on visualizing O'Reilly with Silverlight Deep Zoom. In the first part we looked at how to download hundreds of O'Reilly book covers using C#. In the second part, we saw how to stitch those images together into something a little more friendly for Deep Zoom Composer. In this part, we're going to create a Deep Zoom Composer project, export the final images, and build the finished Silverlight application.

Being the month of Silverlight over here at SOTC, I decided to get off my PHP and JS butt, and learn something new. I am incredibly new to the whole silvery-light thing, but luckily with Visual Studio on your side, it is pretty easy to get things going. I am also using VS2010 beta, which makes the whole experience a grand opening of new stuff for me.

Whenever you pit designers against developers, it always seems to be the developer that loses. It's very rare that controls like the Silverlight DataGrid are left alone - designers want little tweaks and polish to increase the user experience. This tutorial is going to illustrate how to use one of the most flexible solutions to theming a DataGrid - the DataGridTemplateColumn.

I've been wanting to work with Deep Zoom for quite a while, but sometimes the hardest part about working with a new technology is finding a reason to use it. Well, I found one. I've scoured O'Reilly's website and downloaded every cover to every book still in circulation (not really - I wrote a computer program do it). I then stitched them all together and wrapped it up in a Silverlight Deep Zoom application.

Even though the Netflix API was released back in October, I just recently discovered it. I enjoy seeing new APIs and was definitely interested in using this one since I'm also a Netflix subscriber. This tutorial will demonstrate how to build a simple Silverlight application on top of the Netflix API.

Today we are going to take a look at a handy way to pass in information to a silverlight application when a web page loads - the initParams. initParams are very similar to flash vars (except, of course, flash vars are for flex and flash apps). I find them very useful for passing in information like callbacks and paths - in fact in the silverlight tutorial the other day I used them to pass in the url for the callback php page.

So I'm sitting here, trying to come up with something interesting to write about for a Silverlight tutorial, when an idea struck - go look at our old Flex tutorials! The Fattest spent a bunch of time coming up with great examples of how to accomplish various tasks in Flex - and supposedly anything that Flex can do, Silverlight can do too. I went and looked, and I didn't have to look very far. In the very first tutorial The Fattest wrote on Flex here at SOTC ( Flex & PHP Tutorial - Transmitting data using JSON), I ran into something I didn't know how to do in Silverlight - use JSON.

So a little over a year ago, we posted a small rant about how you couldn't actually load images from client side disk (either user specified or from isolated storage) in Silverlight. Well, since the RTW (release to web) of Silverlight 2 was just the other day, I decided to take a look and see if this problem still existed.

It might be a surprise to see me (The Fattest) writing about Silverlight, but I have had some fun playing around with it recently. So I decided I would write up a quick tutorial on how to build a Silverlight widget that shows the last five tweets (messages) from twitter. Now be forewarned I am not a C# expert, two other people at SOTC are, nor am I a Silverlight expert. I do however really enjoy playing around on twitter (The Fattest's Twitter Account) and with RIAs so I think I am qualified enough. :)