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Monthly Archives: November 2007

  • Snope-It!

    Man, I have to install this.My father forwards me all sorts of junk in email, like how to boycott gas companies , the origin of golf, and the color of coke. Even better are the pages of Worth1000 photochops (w1k watermark clipped off, of course) passed off as real photos. He knows most of it is false, but he just can't help press that "send" key on the off chance that maybe there&...

    Published Wednesday, November 28, 2007 | Tagged: | Leave comment

  • Silverlight Firestarter in Malvern, PA

     I'll be doing the keynote and one of the follow-up sessions at the Silverlight Fire Starter event in Malvern PA (near Philadelphia) on Saturday December 15. It looks to be an exciting day and a great way to avoid Christmas shopping for your family ;-)For schedule and details, including sign-up information, check out Dani Diaz's blog.

    Published Tuesday, November 27, 2007 | Tagged: , , , | Leave comment

  • More Silverlight 1.1 Hints

    As is often the case with Silverlight 1.1 news, it's the little things said in other contexts that clue us in to what to expect with upcoming releases. I hate to pull out the tea leaves, but I can't help it this time :)In this post by Mke Harsh, he mentions that the team has put out the first Silverlight 1.0 service release. However, he also mentions this about 1.1:In the midst of ...

    Published Thursday, November 22, 2007 | Tagged: , | 5 comments

  • More on How Assemblies are Downloaded in Silverlight 1.1

    Assem in this thread on Silverlight.net pointed out that the downloader object isn't required to get assemblies down to the local machine in Silveright 1.1 (September alpha).I didn't believe that, so I did a test. Guess what? He's absolutely right. Calling Assembly.Load(name) is sufficient to cause the assembly to be downloaded to your workstation. Thinking about it in retrospect, t...

    Published Sunday, November 18, 2007 | Tagged: , | 5 comments

  • Links from today's NoVA Code Camp Advanced Silverlight Talk

    In a break from some of my previous Silverlight talks, today at the NoVA Code Camp, I did a mostly slideless open-topic dicussion on Silverlight. The topics covered were the instantiation of the Silverlight plugin, some general Silverlight background information, the basics of how to build controls, what you can do in Silverlight today and what to expect in the future.Here are some of the links...

    Published Saturday, November 17, 2007 | Tagged: , , , | Leave comment

  • Silverlight Talk at the NoVA Code Camp Tomorrow

    I'll be doing a mostly-demo Silverlight talk at tomorrow's NoVA code camp at 10:30 am.I'm finalizing the content, but the fact that there is going to be an excellent 9:00 "Silverlight for beginners" session frees me up to do some slight more in-depth stuff. Expect to see the instantiation model briefly covered and then an under-the-hood walkthrough of what is goi...

    Published Friday, November 16, 2007 | Tagged: , , , | Leave comment

  • Christmas Specials 2.0

    Growing up in the 70s and 80s, I have fond memories of the "TV Special". You know, the holiday specials that were preceeded by the funky drum and horns intro with the swirled-in "special" text (note: you can find just about anything on the internet. heh. here's a longer version for Rudolph.), then followed by a spot for Mounds and Almond Joy. They were an ...

    Published Thursday, November 15, 2007 | Tagged: | Leave comment

  • Rant : Adobe Acrobat Reader - what a mess

    Why can't Adobe Acrobat Reader, arguably one of the most essential pieces of software out there, just play nice with the rest of my systems?Through several browser versions on three different systems, over several system rebuilds, running three different operating systems (XP Pro, XP Media Center, and Vista), one thing has remained consistent: Acrobat reader has been and continues to be a s...

    Published Thursday, November 15, 2007 | Tagged: , , | 8 comments

  • Updates to the Panel and Treeview Controls

    I made some updates to the panel and treeview controls described in this post.Changed the name from AnimatedWrapPanel to AnimatedFlowPanel to be more consistent with established panel namesAdded Vertical layout to the AnimatedFlowPanelTweaked the icon for the Treeview Added a "using" around the stream in ControlBase.LoadXamlChanged the demo app so when you click a treeview n...

    Published Wednesday, November 14, 2007 | Tagged: , | 20 comments

  • Silverlight Assembly Preloader in Managed Code

    The Silverlight preloader example on the silverlight.net quickstarts site shows how to use unmanaged code to swap in a new page over an old one once the content is loaded. In the carbon calculator, that was the approach I took, as it was the only one out there. I never liked it as it was pretty hokey, seemed brittle, and required more javascript than I wanted in what was otherwise an all-c# app...

    Published Friday, November 9, 2007 | Tagged: , | 5 comments

  • Thank you! Say goodbye to "Click to Activate"

    One of the most annoying developments over recent years has been the "Click here to active this control" message you get whenever visiting sites that use Flash or other browser plugin technology. The worst is when it is used in a menu or some other critical navigation scheme, and you have to do this for each postback.You can get around that by using script to create the object tag. Th...

    Published Thursday, November 8, 2007 | Tagged: , | 4 comments

  • How Silverlight is Loaded and Instantiated

    At the end of the day on Saturday's Silverlight Dev Camp, I gave an ad-hoc talk on controls and silverlight. The conversation quickly turned to a lot of Q&A on how the Silverlight control and content is loaded. I covered that there, but for those who didn't attend, this is useful information.When file requests are made to the server, they currently follow normal browser caching and ...

    Published Wednesday, November 7, 2007 | Tagged: , , | 10 comments

  • Links from tonight's CMAP Talk on Extension Methods in VB9 and C# 3.0

    I spoke about extension methods in C# 3.0 and VB9 tonight at CMAP. Here are the links I promised:This VB9-oriented article does a great job covering the basics (sorry <g>) of extension methods.Here is my brief article on the same topic.

    Published Tuesday, November 6, 2007 | Tagged: , | Leave comment

  • The &quot;P&quot; in WPF

    I was over at ExpressionBlend.com and saw this article that rants about the boring old UIs being developed using windows-forms type developers working in WPF. This is a great example of the clash that is starting to happen as the worlds of RIA and traditional applications begin to converge: designers and developers looking at each other's work and walking away with a loud "tsk tsk...

    Published Monday, November 5, 2007 | Tagged: , , | Leave comment

  • More Photos from Silverlight DevCamp DC

    Here are a couple shots from my two talks at the Silverlight Dev Camp this past weekend at Microsoft in Reston, VA.Thanks again to Frank La Vigne for setting this whole event up and bringing Silverlight to the east coast, and for taking and posting the photos.My first talk was a walkthrough of a real-world SIlverlight 1.1 application: our Carbon Calculator. I went through it pretty quickly to m...

    Published Monday, November 5, 2007 | Tagged: , , , | Leave comment

  • Silverlight Dev Camp DC Slides

    Here are the slides from my morning presentation at the dev camp in Reston, VA. Slideshare really munged the fonts and formatting when converting, and didn't honor hidden slides staying hidden, but the content should still be good. Especially odd is how the text had a bunch of random spaces added in between the letters.Enjoy! | View | Upload your own

    Published Sunday, November 4, 2007 | Tagged: , , | Leave comment

  • Links from Silverlight Dev Camp DC

    If you attended today's Silverlight Dev Camp, thanks! If you hung around to the end and lasted through my ad-hoc deep-dive at the last hour, thanks even more :) I hope you enjoyed attending as much as I enjoyed presenting.A bunch of questions came up today at the dev camp. Since I didn't have time to link hunt while in the room, I thought I'd post a follow-up here. On with the links...

    Published Saturday, November 3, 2007 | Tagged: , , , | 1 comment

  • Photos from Silverlight Dev Camp DC

    Frank has posted some photos from today's Silverlight Dev Camp DC. Thanks again to Frank for setting this up!http://franksworld.com/blog/archive/2007/11/03/4985.aspx

    Published Saturday, November 3, 2007 | Tagged: , , | Leave comment

  • Silverlight 1.1 TreeView and Animated Wrap Panel Controls with Source Code

    Over the past couple nights, I've had a few hours to work on a wallpaper viewer for my site.As part of that development, I need a panel that I can use to display image thumbnails. For grins, I also decided to build a very simple treeview. While each is a partially complete (and non-optimized) work-in-progress, I think the code has reached a state where it could be useful to others...

    Published Thursday, November 1, 2007 | Tagged: , | 14 comments