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Monthly Archives: October 2007

  • Extension Methods in Silverlight and .NET 3.5

    In my spare time, I've been working on a Silverlight sample that can be used to browse the wallpaper on my main web site. As part of that, I have been implementing a custom panel with layout/positioning code. Since all coordinates in Silverlight are double values, you can sometimes get stuck in situations where you need to treat 1.0000001 and 1.00001 as the same value. Rather than implement...

    Published Tuesday, October 30, 2007 | Tagged: , | 1 comment

  • Optimizing the Silverlight Install Experience

    Tim Sneath has put together a post and his team a whitepaper  with information on how to do an in-place install of Silverlight. Using the default approach (as we did on our early work) is ok, but it isn't a great user experience. In that setup, the user is redirected to a separate page and must click through the EULA before moving on. They're off your site at that point, and t...

    Published Tuesday, October 30, 2007 | Tagged: , , | Leave comment

  • Silverlight LED Control

    Fello AIS'er Frank LaVigne put together a cool Silverlight 1.1 LED UserControl and posted it on his site. Check it outFrank also converted his Flash-based site navigation menu to Silverlight 1.0.

    Published Monday, October 29, 2007 | Tagged: , , | Leave comment

  • Upcoming Silverlight Talks and Events

    Recap of my upcoming talks and events:Thursday November 1: PAFox - Introduction to Silverlight (almost two hours of introduction to Silverlight)Saturday November 3: Silverlight DC Devcamp (this promises to be a great full-day event)Tuesday November 6: CMAP - 15 Minutes on Silverlight (topic TBD)Hope to see you there! 

    Published Monday, October 29, 2007 | Tagged: , , | Leave comment

  • Autumn Desktop Backgrounds

    My main website is pretty disjointed from my blog here, and with one exception, is rarely updated any more. I do plan to convert the main site over, prune out old stuff at somepoint, and make it as easy to update as my blog (WSS will likely be part of that solution)Anyway, the one part of my main site that does get updated on a fairly regular basis is the wallpaper subsite. This part of my...

    Published Monday, October 29, 2007 | Tagged: , , , | Leave comment

  • Introduction to Silverlight Talk on Thursday in Fairfax

    Andrew Duthie turned me on to the Potomac Area FoxPro Users Group (PAFOX) in Fairfax. This is a dedicated bunch of folks in Northern Virginia that, among other things, are doing some great work in FoxPro. It has been over a decade since I have written any FoxPro applications (I wrote some patient accounting systems and reporting software back in FoxPro 2.6), so it will be interesting to see whe...

    Published Sunday, October 28, 2007 | Tagged: , , | Leave comment

  • Welcome Steve to Blogging

    My colleague at AIS, Steve Suing, just started up his own blog today. Among other things, Steve was half of the team on the Carbon Calculator project as well as a contributor on Silverlight.net. Steve's a talented guy, so I'm sure we'll see some cool stuff in his new blog.

    Published Wednesday, October 24, 2007 | Tagged: , , | Leave comment

  • MySpace Sites - The Junk Drawer of the Internet

    I have to admit that I just didn't get into MySpace at all. I guess that's because I'm 35 and don't have a band or something.Every once in a while, a MySpace page comes up in search. I also get requests to use my desktop wallpaper backgrounds as MySpace backgrounds (something I never agree to). Some folks have deep-linked to my wallpaper, but they occasionally get more interesti...

    Published Tuesday, October 23, 2007 | Tagged: , | 1 comment

  • Brian Eastwood's article on the Silverlight Carbon Calculator

    Brian attended my session at ReMIX07 in Boston earlier this month, and wrote up this great article covering our real world Silverlight project. Thanks Brian! 

    Published Tuesday, October 23, 2007 | Tagged: , , | Leave comment

  • Vectorform Silverlight 1.0 Demos

    A number of decent demos here on the vectorform site. All are Silverlight 1.0 but could be translated conceptually or logically into 1.1

    Published Friday, October 19, 2007 | Tagged: | Leave comment

  • Expression Design SP1

    Expression Design Service Pack 1 has been released. See the Expression Design Team Blog here.These two features are one that I've really been waiting for:Text can now be exported as TextBlocks for Silverlight applications. In the release version of Expression Design, all objects were given default names. Naming objects is now optional. When the "Always name objects on export"...

    Published Friday, October 19, 2007 | Tagged: , , | Leave comment

  • SQL Injection Comic

    Yes, you are a geek if you laugh at this :)From Frank's World. Thanks Frank!

    Published Wednesday, October 17, 2007 | Tagged: | 1 comment

  • UserControls as Screens in Silverlight 1.1 - Part 2 of 2

    In Part 1, I outlined how we handled screen management in the Silverlight 1.1 Carbon Calculator. In Part 2, I'll present a basic framework for handling similar screen management in your own Silverlight applications. If you haven't yet read Part 1, please do so, as it presents the basics we're building upon here.Links for the demo application and the source code are both po...

    Published Tuesday, October 16, 2007 | Tagged: , , , | 34 comments

  • Cool Tools for Kids

    I'm in the middle of a never-ending home renovation project. As such, I tend to use my two Bosch drills a lot. My son (20 months old now) was obsessed with the "brrrumba" (his name for the drill, based on its sound), and would go nuts whenever I used it. So we bought him a toy drill. Unfortunately, because it had googly eyes and looked nothing like mine, he barely would use it. Wh...

    Published Tuesday, October 16, 2007 | Tagged: , | 1 comment

  • Silverlight In-Place Installs and Using CreateSilverlight.js and Silverlight.js

    This article on MSDN has some great detailed information for the parameters into the CreateSilverlight function. Among other things, it includes information on doing an inplace install. It also tells you how to detect the version of Silverlight installed.

    Published Friday, October 12, 2007 | Tagged: , | Leave comment

  • UserControls as Screens in Silverlight 1.1 - Part 1 of 2

    The main pattern I followed in the Silverlight 1.1 Carbon Calculator UI development was the pattern of using UserControls as screens. I spoke about this pattern in my Remix07 Presentation in Boston this week during my Real World Silverlight session.I presented about this pattern back in the late 90s when I talked about implementing it in VB6 for Outlook-like and Wizard-like application user int...

    Published Friday, October 12, 2007 | Tagged: , , | 10 comments

  • Hit Tracking, Usage, and Web Analytics in Silverlight 1.1

    I hadn't blogged about this before, because the solution was really simple. From looking around the net a bit, though, I see that folks have really struggled with this with other RIA platforms. So read below to see how simple this was to do in Silverlight.For the Carbon Calculator project, we had to integrate HitBox usage tracking into the application. Steve was in charge of that implementa...

    Published Friday, October 12, 2007 | Tagged: , , | Leave comment

  • Announcing squrl.us

    A colleague of mine at Applied Information Sciences, Oskar Austegard, just announced squrl.us on his blog at mo.notono.us Squrl does a few more things than your average short URL generator.For example, when I entered the URL for one of my blog pages, squrl generated:squrl: http://squrl.us/2t mobile: http://m.squrl.us/2t cache: http://c.squrl.us/2t translated: http://t.squrl.us/2t (if your origi...

    Published Wednesday, October 10, 2007 | Tagged: , | 18 comments

  • Nikhil Kothari's Web Development Helper

    If you attended Brad Abrams' Remix07 Boston session on Silverlight, Ajax and Video, you saw him use Nikhil Korhari's Web Development Helper.I highly recommend this tool. You can download it from Nikhil's projects site here.

    Published Wednesday, October 10, 2007 | Tagged: , | Leave comment

  • Links from my ReMIX07 Boston Silverlight Talk

    Here are some links from today's ReMIX 07 talk in Boston, and a couple extras that may be of interestSilverlight Community SiteApplied Information SciencesBalloons Demo with Source Code (be sure to read the past posts on it as well, linked via the trackbacks)Silverlight Carbon Calculator Production SiteCarbon Calculator "How We Did it" post at the Microsft SharePoin...

    Published Tuesday, October 9, 2007 | Tagged: , , , | Leave comment

  • I Love the Smell of Bandwidth in the Morning

    I'm at a hotel in Boston, doing some last-minute updates to my Remix07 slide deck. I tried to do these last night, but found it impossible; there wasn't even enough bandwidth for a consistent IM connection. The surest way to completely collapse a hotel's network infrastructure is to host a Microsoft conference there.7:00 in the morning, on the other hand, is a completely different e...

    Published Tuesday, October 9, 2007 | Tagged: | Leave comment

  • Silverlight Enterprise Deployment Guide

    Microsoft has release the Silverlight Enterprise Deployment GuideThis only includes 1.0 right now, but the deployment instructions and specifics should be pretty similar between versions.Microsoft wants to make sure Silverlight is taken seriously in the enterprise, something which has some pretty exciting possibilities.

    Published Wednesday, October 3, 2007 | Tagged: , | Leave comment