Making Use of Silverlight Technology — A Digital Picture Renaming Tool

In a previous article I introduced the Silverlight App that I call pixRename, and herein I'm announcing the "version 1.0" release of this tool.  To try it out on any computer that can run Microsoft's .NET Framework, follow the instructions at: http://bit.ly/pixRenameV1

Aside from wanting a "modern" version of my reName tool — I really do use it to process digital camera pictures — the other reason I created this was to get hands-on experience with the following Silverlight 4.0 technologies:

• Isolated Storage — relative to browser-based cookies, this persistence mechanism is a huge step for a pervasive development technology because it essentially gives you a database that's built-in. I use this to persist tool options and 1:many relationships that are really named sets of  (name,value) pairs — the so-called "Settings" or "[camera] profiles".
• Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is a modern technology for creating, persisting, connecting and deploying UI components  — app controls  — which I use for buttons, labels, radio controls, checkboxes, special-purpose combo boxes and dynamic controls that reflect the end user's personalizations.
• Child Windows which share data with the main App, greatly simplifying the UI that you normally see, providing mechanism for a "Splash screen", the log for a "Preview" command, & general-purpose dialogs.

The "Change Settings" PopUp

Demonstrate an Object Oriented design, implemented with C#, lots of encapsulation, developed following the Agile paradigm. Uses ExifLib — an external .NET library that I adapted to work with Silverlight, described in this article. Gain expertise using Silverlight to make OOBs — like "desktop apps" — that run outside of the browser. Doing something significant with the .NET framework, including the System.IO classes that allow direct access to files and folders on the local computer's hard drive. I created a "Browse Folders" User Control because Silverlight 4.0 has an OpenFile dialog but you can only use it for files (not folders). Handling a multi-page .xaml application with dynamic pages.

Any comments or feedback please contact me (Kevin Pammett, © 2010 DigitalMediaMagik.com)