.Net Technical Blog

When you already have some XAML code and you want to show a ChildWindow afterwards, it can be that the ChildWindow is not displayed. Normally everything should work out of the box when you start a new project and try it out in the constructor of your XAML page.

However, I found a small fix if you encounter this problem. The following code ensures that the page is fully loaded (using the Loaded Event) before we show our Child Window.

        public Page()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
            Loaded += new RoutedEventHandler(Page_Loaded);
        }

        void Page_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
        {
                ChildWindow cw = new LoginForm(this);
                cw.Show();
        }

Although it was fun to create this one. Jermemy Likness wrote a nice article about constructing your service configuration dynamically. It’s an easy solution that I saw too late! You can find it in detail here: http://csharperimage.jeremylikness.com/2009/07/abstracting-wcf-service-calls-in.html

For development, you are probably pointing to your localhost when you need to call your webservices. When you have a scenario where you are not sure about the endpoint service URLs of your silverlight application, you need to change the ServiceReferences.ClientConfig file manually (or make it configurable in code, but we don’t know the URLs anyways…) after it has been packaged in a XAP file. Also if you’re working with HTTPS in silverlight, you need to change the ClientConfig file in order to work with Transport Security. If you have to deploy your XAP file to a lot of machines (or just a lot of times) you always need to perform 6 steps:

• Rename your XAP file to zip
• Extract the zip file to a folder
• Edit the ServiceReferences.ClientConfig
• Add the folder contents to a zip file
• Paste the ZIP file in the ClientConfig folder and delete your old one
• Rename the zip file to XAP

To avoid those steps, I made a little WPF application. It can perform all of these steps for you. You can also run it from the command line so you can automate everything (just a change in your clientconfig to point to the right service is required).

This is the application when you double click the EXE file.

You can drag and drop your files in the window to load your XAP and/or ServiceReferences.ClientConfig file. If you do not specify a ClientConfig, you need to paste your config text in the textbox. The application will automatically pick it up and inject a new ServiceReferences.ClientConfig file for you. By default the application will backup your old XAP file. If there is already a backup, it will add an increasing value before the extension.

You can also use the application in Command Line Mode. To begin, just browse to your folder and enter ServiceInjection.exe -h. You’ll see the following output:

A sample of a commandline execution in a batch file would be (files are in the same folder):

CD “C:\ServiceInjection\”
ServiceInjection.exe -x \MySuperSilverligtFile.xap -s \ServiceReferences.ClientConfig -b true

You can specify a full path if your files are not in the same folder:

CD “C:\ServiceInjection\”
ServiceInjection.exe -x “C:\XapFiles\MySuperSilverligtFile.xap” -s “C:\ServiceFiles\DeploymentServer1\ServiceReferences.ClientConfig” -b true

Download the application single executable:
ServiceInjection Application

Download the source project (make changes as you wish to fit your needs):
ServiceInjection Program Source

There are a lot of resources on the net where you can find datapaging using RIA Services. But what if you don’t want to bind to a DomainDataSource. You only want to bind to your collection and add DataPaging to your grid.

It’s fairly easy as you can read on MSDN

You just need to bind your datagrid to a PagedCollectionView.

The reason why I’m posting this is because I had trouble with my datagrid once it has been datapaged. The datagrid was frozen, I couldn’t sort, I couldn’t reorder my datagrid columns and I even couldn’t make a selection. You should make sure that your controls are on different rows in your grid.