Customer Case Studies and tips to define button hit areas in Silverlight
Hello! We got an email letting us know about some video based case studies that show different agencies or customers in action using Silverlight and Expression. Folks like Library of Congress, WeatherBug, Terralever and EasyJet.com who talk in a documentary style their experiences with Silverlight. They are pretty fun. Personally I enjoyed the one from Terralever because they talk about games which I like.
I noticed a problem when using the Silverlight video player in the Case Studies site (they might have fixed by the time you read this). If you rollover the the Pause button in the video controls, you will notice that the cursor changes between Arrow and Hand kind of unexpectedly… just rollover this Pause icon slowly, move the cursor within the icon and you will see the cursor goes back to an arrow when you go in between the two little bars that make out the Pause icon. This is a typical problem I see in Silverlight apps. What you need to do in these kind of icons is draw a rectangle that helps you define the “hit” area of the button. Flash has something called “hit” area. In Flash, when you create a button… you have Normal, Rollover, Rollout and Hit. In Silverlight you have to provide the Hit area yourself. I created a small chart below to explain the approach to Hit areas using Silverlight. Let me know if you have any questions.
