Bluefire Blog

Creating a Thumbnail Grid

Introduction

In Part 1 of this tutorial we stepped through the process of fetching and parsing an RSS feed from Feedbooks.com the results of which were bound to a DataGrid UI Control.

In this post we will detail how we can use the new WrapPanel and ViewBox controls, which are a part of the  Silverlight Toolkit December 2008 release to create grid of thumbnails from a Feedbooks RSS source.

Download Source

Feedbooks RSS Browser Application

See it in Action

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Tutorial - Creating a Simple Silverlight RSS Reader

Introduction

This is the first post of a multipart blog tutorial explaining how to create a simple Silverlight 2.0 Web Application that displays a grid of thumbnails from a Feedbooks RSS source.  Under each thumbnail is a button that allows users to download an ePub version of the book to their desktop.

Download Source See also: Tutorial Part 2

Feedbooks RSS Browser

See it in Action

In this first part we are going to step through the process of fetching and parsing an RSS feed with Silverlight and then bind the RSS data to a Silverlight DataGrid control.

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Believe it or not, 2008 was a great year for us.  We continued to work in the Digital Publishing arena, which we are really into. We did a few projects in the mobile space, which was a goal going into the year.  And in the fall we got a new client - the Flash Platform team at Adobe.  Given that we’ve always been a huge fan (and user) of Flash Player since the FutureSplash days it was very meaningful to us to do some R&D and a product demo for them.  I’ll try to blog about the various projects in some detail, but here’s an overview of our 2008 work:

• Adobe Digital Editions 1.5 -  UX design and Flex dev on this update that added content portability and support for the Sony Reader Digital Book.
• Adobe Content Server 4 Admin Console -  UX design and Flex dev of the admin console for Adobe’s new digital publishing and distribution management tool.
• Dexter Widget 1.5 - UX design and Flex dev to update a book preview Flex widget that added customizable styles,  fluid layout to work in a variety of sizes and screens,  and mySpace compatibility.
• World Class Text Tour - Creative and Flex dev on this interactive marketing piece that showcases the world languages and text layout features of Flash Player 10 and the Text Layout Framework.
• Mogreet Widget - Flash dev on this widget for sending fun video messages to mobile devices.
• Sumisho Website - Design and HTML on major update to a site we had done in a previous year.
• Mobile Application - UI designs for an un-announced mobile application: iphone and windows mobile versions.

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