The idea for this project started back in August of 2010 as a simple site to show some local live election results for one county. It was a quick and simple application that worked really well.

In October, we started working on some improvements and decided to expand the scope of the results to cover all U.S. Senate, U.S. House races, and as many states as we could before November 2nd. Oh, and we redesigned the Silverlight UI and added a ton of functionality.

On top of that, the project now includes a mobile web version for the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry devices. And a custom Windows Phone 7 client application with some really advanced features. Not to mention a ton of new really smart high-availability back-end data services.

So, yeah, lots of work and not much sleep. But it’s really awesome and we’re very happy with it. Check it out: Live Election Results for November 2nd 2010.

But I noticed something strange: some columns were blank when I pasted them into Excel (or notepad). The blank columns were always DataGridTemplateColumn and that made sense. How could it know what to copy from one or more controls?

Turns out this is really easy to fix if you are using data binding. All you have to do is bind the ClipboardContentBinding property on the DataGridTemplateColumn with the value you want copied for this column.

For example:

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<data:DataGridTemplateColumn Header="Name" ClipboardContentBinding="{Binding Name}" SortMemberPath="Name">
  <data:DataGridTemplateColumn.CellTemplate>
     <DataTemplate>
        <HyperlinkButton Content="{Binding Name}" Margin="3" />
     </DataTemplate>
  </data:DataGridTemplateColumn.CellTemplate>
</data:DataGridTemplateColumn>

And that’s it. Control+C copy works as desired.

Check it out under Casual Games at: http://silverlight.net/Showcase/

Title from the game Strategic Command

That’s right, Strategic Command!

Two armies. One battlefield. One victor. Will it be you?

Use strategy and deception to maneuver your armed forces into your opponent’s territory and conquer their headquarters. The winner will be crowned with glory and live to see their name thunder down the hallowed corridors of time. The loser will be buried in infamy.

The fate of the war is in your hands. What will you do, commander?

This will be our entry in the Silverlight Server Quest Game Contest.

Strategic Command Screenshot

We’re planning to do a postmortem on the game and make some other exciting announcements so check back soon.

www.microsoft.com/express/download/
You can download an ISO with all the express editions or just the Web Developer edition. The only one you need is Visual Studio Web Developer 2008 SP1.

If you don’t have SP1 for Visual Studio 2008, get it here:
www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=FBEE1648-7106-44A7-9649-6D9F6D58056E

#2 Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1

Download the tools for developing applications of awesomeness here:
www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=c22d6a7b-546f-4407-8ef6-d60c8ee221ed&displaylang=en.
If you want some offline documentation, you can download that here:
www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=bce7684a-507b-4fc6-bc99-6933cd690cab&displaylang=en.

Optional: Expression Blend 2 Trial

This isn’t a requirement but it will give you a good place to start if you’ve never played with XAML. Download it here:
www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=5FF08106-B9F4-43CD-ABAD-4CC9D9C208D7&displaylang=en
and don’t forget Blend SP1
www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=EB9B5C48-BA2B-4C39-A1C3-135C60BBBE66&displaylang=en
or Expression Studio 2 Trial here:
www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=7AE2720C-72BA-489B-ADBB-EE6F3C79066D&displaylang=en

Optional: Deep Zoom composer

Needed if you want to develop deep zoom applications:
www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=457B17B7-52BF-4BDA-87A3-FA8A4673F8BF&displaylang=en

Optional: Silverlight Toolkit from Codeplex

Nice set of components from the community for you to use or extend in your Sliverlight applications. Download it here:
www.codeplex.com/Silverlight/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx

Other Options

If you want to go hardcore, check out this article on developing Silverlight applications in Eclipse: www.eclipse4sl.org/download/.

If you use Blender, the free open source 3D content creation suite, you might want to check out this XAML exporter. Not that it will fully work for Silverlight (it’s really for WPF). But it’s still pretty cool: www.codeplex.com/xamlexporter

That’s it! Go forth and develop!

Don’t forget to check out silverlight.net for videos, blogs, and forums. More resources: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/resources/tools.aspx.