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Monthly Archives: June 2010

  • Announcing: The Redesigned MSDN Home Page and Hub Pages

    The larger group that I'm in, Server and Tools Online in the developer division, supports a large number of properties. One of our largest is MSDN. Scratch that. MSDN is enormous. It provides support for every single developer tool we offer. You'll find full documentation, samples, aggregated blog posts, articles, community content, forums, videos and more. I've never seen another learning res...

    Published Tuesday, June 29, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 11 comments

  • Introducing the PivotViewer Control for Silverlight

    The Silverlight PivotViewer control is now available. Jesse Liberty and I have been working closely with the Live Labs team to help transition the PivotViewer control out as a real product for the developer community. I'm excited to say that the control is no longer a lab project, but is now out and available for developers! My congratulations to the team; they worked really hard to get this ...

    Published Tuesday, June 29, 2010 | Tagged: , | 28 comments

  • Windows Client Developer Roundup for 6/28/2010

    This is Windows Client Developer roundup #30. The Windows Client Developer Roundup aggregates information of interest to Windows Client Developers, including WPF, Silverlight, Visual C++, XNA, Expression Blend, Surface, Windows 7, Windows Forms, Windows Phone and Visual Studio. If you have something interesting you've done or have run across, or you blog regularly on the topics included here,...

    Published Monday, June 28, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , , , | 3 comments

  • The 7.9 WEI PC

    Ok, so hitting a 7.9 WEI (Windows Experience Index) is a bit of an arbitrary rating. It's like the summer between my junior and senior year in high school when I (Mom, you're not reading this are you?) took my Mom's new '89 Hyundai Excel down Dresser Hill in MA and maxed out the speedometer just to see if we could do it. Trust me, it was a scary ride, and I couldn't make the turn at the bottom...

    Published Wednesday, June 23, 2010 | Tagged: , , | 2 comments

  • First Ever Meeting of the Washington, DC .NET User Group

    We have a new user group in town! For too long, folks in DC have been unable to attend the user groups in Northern Virginia or Maryland due to trouble just getting out of the district in time to make the meetings. Now, DC has its own in-town user group. Hang out and beat the exodus out of town while enjoying some .NET awesomeness. The American College of Cardiology http://www.cardiosource.org...

    Published Tuesday, June 22, 2010 | Tagged: , , | Leave comment

  • Book Excerpt: Creating Raw Media (Audio and Video)

    What follows is a raw excerpt (before copy editing or final tech reviews) from chapter 20 in my book, Silverlight in Action. This is just a small portion of chapter 20, which covers the media element, streaming, using IIS Smooth streaming, using the Silverlight Media Framework, creating raw video and audio, and using the webcam and microphone APIs. I've blogged bits and pieces on this topic be...

    Published Tuesday, June 22, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , | 2 comments

  • Windows Client Developer Roundup for 6/21/2010

    This is Windows Client Developer roundup #29. The Windows Client Developer Roundup aggregates information of interest to Windows Client Developers, including WPF, Silverlight, Visual C++, XNA, Expression Blend, Surface, Windows 7, Windows Forms, Windows Phone and Visual Studio. If you have something interesting you've done or have run across, or you blog regularly on the topics included here,...

    Published Monday, June 21, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Leave comment

  • Pete at Microsoft: WCF RIA Services Team Interview

    While on campus in May, I met with the WCF RIA Services team at Microsoft. We discussed both the awesome parts and the difficult parts of the recent product release. Microsoft WCF RIA Services simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms. RIA Services provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier a...

    Published Friday, June 18, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , | Leave comment

  • Silverlight Tip: Using LINQ to Select the Largest Available Webcam Resolution

    Sometimes in Silverlight, you just want to get the largest possible webcam resolution. This snippet shows how to obtain that using LINQ. if (CaptureDeviceConfiguration.AllowedDeviceAccess || CaptureDeviceConfiguration.RequestDeviceAccess()) { var camera = CaptureDeviceConfiguration.GetDefaultVideoCaptureDevice(); if (camera != null) { var source = new Captu...

    Published Tuesday, June 15, 2010 | Tagged: , | 5 comments

  • Windows Client Developer Roundup for 6/14/2010

    This is Windows Client Developer roundup #28. The Windows Client Developer Roundup aggregates information of interest to Windows Client Developers, including WPF, Silverlight, Visual C++, XNA, Expression Blend, Surface, Windows 7, Windows Forms, Windows Phone and Visual Studio. If you have something interesting you've done or have run across, or you blog regularly on the topics included here,...

    Published Monday, June 14, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Leave comment

  • Announcing: Silverlight Reporting on CodePlex

    Last month, I wrote a post with some ideas on how to create a report writer in Silverlight 4. At the time, I mentioned that I would upload the source to CodePlex and create a project out of it. So, here it is. Silverlight Reporting!   The initial source code release contains pretty much the same code I wrote in the mentioned blog post. Subsequent releases will fold in more of what Da...

    Published Friday, June 11, 2010 | Tagged: , | 5 comments

  • New Forums on Silverlight.net

    As part of the larger changes we're making to Silverlight.net, we just introduced four new forums as well as a slight regrouping of the existing forums. It's always tricky to balance the number of forums. If you have too many, discussions all end up being "this isn't the right forum, go here" too few, and important low volume topics get lost in the flow. The newly-added forums meet that balan...

    Published Wednesday, June 09, 2010 | Tagged: , | 5 comments

  • Quick Tip: Applying Text Options throughout your WPF 4 Application

    I recently put together a post showing how the font you select and the text rendering options you set can make a real difference in how text appears in your application. If you want to use the Display, ClearType combination to get GDI-compatible text rendering, you were probably thinking you had to make a huge number of changes throughout your application. Luckily, that's not the case. Setti...

    Published Monday, June 07, 2010 | Tagged: , | Leave comment

  • Windows Client Developer Roundup for June 7, 2010

    This is Windows Client Developer roundup #27 -- on Expression Studio 4 Launch Day! The Windows Client Developer Roundup aggregates information of interest to Windows Client Developers, including WPF, Surface, Windows 7, XNA, Windows Forms, Silverlight, Windows Phone and Visual Studio. If you have something interesting you've done or have run across, please send me the URL and brief descriptio...

    Published Monday, June 07, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Leave comment

  • WPF (and Silverlight): Choose your Fonts and Text Rendering Options Wisely

    "He Chose Poorly" was the first thing I thought when I saw the font rendering in a metro-themed WPF4 application I looked at the other day. (Metro is the name of the Zune/Windows Phone 7 user experience style). The application was really sweet, but suffered from some crummy font rendering. Ok, maybe not the first thought. My first thought was actually "This is WPF 4, there's no excuse for bad...

    Published Sunday, June 06, 2010 | Tagged: , , | 17 comments

  • Windows Client Developer Roundup for May 31, 2010, Holiday Edition

    This is Windows Client Developer roundup #26 on Memorial Day 2010, a few hours late. The Windows Client Developer Roundup aggregates information of interest to Windows Client Developers, including WPF, Surface, Windows 7, XNA, Windows Forms, Silverlight, Windows Phone and Visual Studio. If you have something interesting you've done or have run across, please send me the URL and brief descript...

    Published Tuesday, June 01, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Leave comment