If you've ever sat down to create a web application in Flash or Silverlight you might have run into cross-domain access restrictions. For security reasons, client side technologies won't let you access data on a different domain if the remote server doesn't explicitly allow it. Many APIs grant cross-domain access, however there are times there is no way to access the service directly. That's where this tutorial comes in. Back in 2007 Yahoo! released Pipes, which allows developers to combine and filter web-based information which is then re-hosted by Yahoo. The great thing about this is that Pipes allows cross domain access.

What started out as a tutorial about Silverlight 3's new BitmapCache feature has turned into something a little simpler. The documentation clearly states that render transforms will be hardware accelerated when bitmap caching is enabled, but I couldn't get it to work. It wasn't a total waste, however, as I did create an application that illustrates how to animate an object using render transforms, which is probably one of the fastest ways to animate an element's visual state.

So what do you need to make a game with Silverlight? Well, at the most basic level, you need something that moves around the screen. At the most basic level, four buttons that move a sprite in four directions. How do you do that? Well, there are multiple ways to accomplish this movement, some more flexible than others. Today, we are going to using Silverlight animations to do that job.

One of the many new things available in Silverlight 3 is the ability to create out-of-browser applications. At first glance, this new out-of-browser capability sounds like it is Microsoft's duplicate of Adobe AIR, but for a number of very important aspects, the two are completely different. In fact, Silverlight's out-of-browser ability has more in common with Mozilla's Prism or Google Gears.

In pretty much every Silverlight tutorial on this site, we have some XAML with backing classes in C# code. This is because, well, that is the standard language for pretty much anything in the .NET world these days (and no, you can't say that VB.NET is the standard. What are you doing still writing in VB anyway!?). But what if, for some reason, you hate semicolons and strictly typed languages, but you still want to write a Silverlight application. Well, worry no more, there is an option available for you - the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) and IronRuby/IronPython.

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.

Silverlight 3 has unleashed a host of new features available to us developers, and one that should provide a new level of user interface design is the introduction of perspective 3D. This features allows us to apply projections to any UIElement to give the appearance of 3 dimensions. In this tutorial, we're going to build a simple flipbook that lets users flip through images as if they were turning the pages on a book.

Silverlight 3 is out of beta and here. There are plenty of things that Silverlight 2 had that were really awesome, but what kind of new things does Silverlight 3 bring to the table? Well, after some perusing over at the Silverlight site, I have found a really neat feature that we can all use to make our applications look better: effects. The really cool thing is that they can be used with any Silverlight control, and even better, you can do everything right from your XAML source.

One of the nifty new features available in Silvering 3 is the Local Connection API. This makes it extremely easy to communicate between two different Silverlight applications. Granted, you could communicate between Silverlight instances before, but you had to use Javascript as a go-between. Now, it is much, much simpler, and as an added bonus, Silverlight apps can communicate from different browser pages! An app loaded in one browser tab can (with the right permissions) communicate to one on a different tab. Pretty cool, eh?

One of the new features in Silverlight 3 is enhanced binding abilities, this includes the ElementName property. What this allows you to do is bind values from other controls. While this is new to Silverlight, the desktop environment has had this for a while so you may have seen this before. However this feature is extremely useful for many different applications. This tutorial is going to show how to use this feature in a simple way.