What I love about Silverlight is that it does a lot of work for me. An example: fake software boxes. Let's say you have some software to advertise: isn't this box appealing?
So, you can go to the graphics department and nicely ask for such a box. Or follow the tutorial. But what if you have dozens of products to advertise? The graphic people don't want to do that and neither do you. I believe there are some smart graphic editors that do macros or something like that, but there's yet one more way, illustrated by the diagram below:
Here's what I did yesterday working on a website to advertise my company's software:
- I took two plain pictures, one for the front and one for the side (this one can be a textblock).
- I placed them on the canvas and surrounded them with borders.
- I added a rectangle for the top.
- I applied transformations to obtain the pseudo-3d effect you can see above.
Okay, this is the place where I should put the code, but I did this at work, which means it's copyrighted to my company and I'd have to ask my boss for his permission, which I couldn't really do these days because he's too busy and now I'm leaving work for a week to focus on school. Sorry about that.
Furthermore, this can be done better (look again at the picture on the top):
- one can apply a matrix transform to give perspective (that thing where parallel lines all meet somewhere... mine don't)
- one can add a shadow (which I definitely should)
- one can make rounded corners like Microsoft's software boxes have
- one can add a reflection, since it's web 2.0 and every single software box is standing on a shiny surface, and Silverlight is great for that too!
Well, if anyone feels inspired and wants to make a re-usable software box control, I'm sure a lot of people would re-use it, so let me know if you do!
