Following up on The ultimate hack for Silverlight in Blend post from Josh Smith, I tried to make Blend display pictures from the My Pictures folder right in my Silverlight application. Needless to say, it worked as advertised :)

The ViewModel is set through d:DataContext:

public class MainPageViewModel
{
    public MainPageViewModel()
    {
        SetLocalPictures();
    }

    private void SetLocalPictures()
    {
        string folder = Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.MyPictures);
        IEnumerable<string> pictures = Directory.EnumerateFiles(folder);
        Pictures = (
            from p in pictures 
            select new Uri(string.Format("file://{0}", p.Replace('\\', '/')), UriKind.Absolute)
            ).ToArray();
    }

    public Uri[] Pictures { get; set; }
}

The thing is that this code wouldn’t work with Silverlight application running in a non-trust mode – it would throw a security exception. However, setting this ViewModel as the run-time DataContext and running with elevated permissions, the pictures would get displayed as well.

And of course this works in Visual Studio 2010 designer too:

A nice alternative for Blend’s sample data…