Working with Expression Blend

[TonyAlmeida]

Blend seems like a real cool interactive program for GIS. I have been trying to use is with GIS, but there seems to be lacking documentation in relation to ESRI GIS. I've been trying to incorporate a "Search" & "Query" in Expression Blend 4 but i can't seem to find documentation to follow. Anyone have any information how how to go about creating the search & query in Expression Blend?

[LisaChesley]

Good morning, Tony!

I'm using Expression Blend/Visual Studio for my development, and, while I find Blend to be incredibly useful for the visual/layout part of the development, it's not very good at all for coding with.  You can have a project open in both Blend and Visual Studio at the same time, and if you remember to save your design changes in Blend, and compile after you make code changes in Visual Studio, the two play quite nicely together.

Visual Studio will also have much better documentation for code, or you could always use the online reference guide and interactive samples hosted here on ESRI's website (I've found the samples quite helpful - http://help.arcgis.com/en/webapi/silverlight/samples/start.htm).

In short, use Blend for your visual needs, and set up your code in Visual Studio.

Thanks!

Lisa

[TonyAlmeida]

Thanks Lisa,

When i bring it up my project in Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2010 Express and run the project Invalid URI scheme "invalid uri scheme�??file://�?? for map control control must be hosted in a http(s) website". Any suggestions?

[DominiqueBroux]

See Morten's answer here : http://forums.esri.com/Thread.asp?c=213&f=2455&t=296015

You will need two projects in your solution: One is the Silverlight project, and the other is the website that you will be hosting your silverlight project in. The website must be the startup project. If your Silverlight project is the startup project, the page is run from a file://... URL, instead of http://...
Since the map control is talking to REST services hosted on HTTP(S), the silverlight application MUST run under a http:// url. Running as file:// is considered "cross scheme" and is blocked by Silverlight for security reasons.

Normally when you create a new Silverlight project, you will be asked if you want to create a website to host it in. Always answer yes to this, and it should be set up automatically (however this might be different in the Express versions though)

[TonyAlmeida]

ok, so how do i create the website host at this point?

[LisaChesley]

Good afternoon, Tony!

When you create a new Silverlight application, either the ESRI template ones or the regular Silverlight applications, you have the option of creating a web site to host your project.  There will be a dialog box that pops up after you have named your new project, with a check box (Host the Silverlight application in a new Web Site), a text box to name your web project, a dropdown to choose your web project type (the default option is fine), and then another dropdown to choose your Silverlight version (your choice of Silverlight 3 or 4), and finally a checkbox to enable WCF RIA services (not likely something you'll need at this point in time).

Make sure the first checkbox is checked, and the web project will be created for you automatically, and set as the default start project.

If you haven't gone too far in your previous project, I would definitely recommend starting a new project, as it's much easier to set up the first time than to try to go back and change it.  You can copy and paste the code from your old project across, so it shouldn't cause much in the way of lost time.

Lisa