The Fox Valley .Net User Group is putting on a local Day of .Net at the Fox Valley Tech Campus, Saturday, March 15th. You can view the schedule, sessions, and prizes at our Fox Valley Day of .Net Site. We are putting on 5 sessions that should be very informative.

As an exercise, I created a Session Viewer for the Day of .Net in Silverlight 1.1. This session viewer will be displayed between sessions during the event. I thought I would post it for viewing before the event. I am still planning on adding some thumbnail views and possibly some animations. I will post updates to my blog if I do.

MIX 08 News! Larry Clarkin has posted an excellent article for those of us who are unable to attend Mix08 in Vegas. View Larry's post. 

Well for most of us, Silverlight 2.0 won't be here till Mix08. But that hasn't stopped some articles being posted about how to develop with the 2.0 bits.

Scott Guthrie has posted a series of tutorials for Silverlight 2.0 on his blog.

And Brad Abrams posted an article for customizing the ASP.NET MediaPlayer using Silverlight called Islands of Richness with Silverlight.

Personally this almost makes the waiting unbearable, but only because it looks SO promising.

This is something I found frustrating in Silverlight. The problem I ran into is that the instructions I found in the Expression Blend User Guide don't work.

The good news is it is fairly straight forward to add a clipping region by editing the XAML directly in Visual Studio. I prefer editing the XAML in Visual Studio because IntelliSense works, making life much easier. To add clipping to a canvas use the following code:

<Canvas x:Name="Bio" Canvas.Left="435" Canvas.Top="133" Width="400" Height="300">
  <Canvas.Clip>
    <RectangleGeometry Rect="0, 0, 400, 300"/>
  </Canvas.Clip>

  <TextBlock Width="384" Height="54" Canvas.Left="16" Canvas.Top="8" Text="Session Title" x:Name="txtBio"/>
</Canvas>

This will allow you to assign any amount of text in the textblock and it will not spill past the edges of the canvas container.

As you have probably already guessed you can apply this clipping code to almost any object including rectangles and textblocks. In fact you could have shortened the above XAML by applying the clipping region to the textblock itself like so:

<TextBlock Width="384" Height="54" Canvas.Left="16" Canvas.Top="8" Text="Session Title" x:Name="txtBio">
  <TextBlock.Clip>
    <RectangleGeometry Rect="0, 0, 400, 300"/>
  </TextBlock.Clip>
</TextBlock>

Also if you look at the options in intellisense you can create clipping regions based on rectangle, ellipse, line, and path geometries. For now the rectangle seems to be enough for 99% of what I would want to do.