One WPF control that we haven't taken a look at here on SOTC is the TreeView. Well, no more! Today we are going to rectify that, as we build an application that not only uses the TreeView, but also dynamically loads data into it on demand. We are going to cover a couple other new topics as well, including HierarchicalDataTemplates and CompositeCollections.

Sometimes, I sit around scratching my head trying to think of good tutorials to write. This time I am taking a cue from The Tallest. Recently, he wrote the tutorial, Silverlight 2 Transmitting Data Using JSON, which was a direct copy of an earlier post I wrote for Flex - well I decided to do the same thing except use Javascript with jQuery to handle the interaction. Now, I think as far as technologies go I believe it may be slightly easier to do this in Silverlight or Flex. My reasoning behind this is simply because the interface is quicker to layout. Other than that I think that it is just a easy to use jQuery to do this kind of interaction.

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.

The last tutorial on Flex and PHP included some code to send data back and forth from a MySQL database. One of the comments asked a question about sending only the relevant updated data to the server and I decided it would be nice to write a tutorial on how to do this. I am going to build off of the last tutorial for this so if you haven't looked at it I would advise it. Along with only updating the data that changes we are also going to differentiate between an update and delete.

To follow-up on the Flex and PHP tutorial we did earlier I thought it would be nice to do a complete tutorial on php, mysql, flex, and json. This tutorial should show a decent way to send data in a database to and from flex to php using json. I will explain this in more detail in just a moment.

To make sure we don't get too stuck in a rut with our tutorial posts I decided to branch out a little bit and talk about Adobe Flex 2.0. I recently spent a lot of time figuring out how to do this. Basically what I am going to go over here is how to use php and json to send data to your flex application, and then how to use that data in Flex.