Misc



  • 0 comments  /  aggregated from  Dan Wahlin's WebLog  on  Apr 28, 2008 (8 months ago)   /   original article

    About 6 months ago my good friend Spike Xavier and I got together on a Saturday to work on a new song since we like to get away from programming now and then and mess around with music for fun.  It'd been awhile since we released our last song titled No More DLL Hell and we decided that we needed to write a new song about one of our favorite new application frameworks....Silverlight. ...(read more)



  • 0 comments  /  aggregated from  Mike Taulty's Blog  on  Apr 28, 2008 (8 months ago)   /   original article

    I've been building quite a bit of Silverlight 2 code and the one thing I'd pass on as a piece of advice is "Build Controls".

    Even in situations where I've found myself thinking "Oh, this will just be a lump of XAML" I soon find that approach results in a spaghetti-mess of XAML quite quickly and the easiest way is to very quickly split things up in separate controls.

    Ok, I know this isn't exactly radical advice :-) but it's something that I've noticed very quickly in building Silverlight code.

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  • 0 comments  /  aggregated from  Andy's Blog  on  Apr 25, 2008 (8 months ago)   /   original article

    According to this post from the Astoria Team Blog, it looks like we won't have a new Astoria (ADO.NET Data Services) client for Silverlight 2 until SL2 Beta 2 is released (perhaps May 2008?)

    Many of the data demos for Silverlight 2 have so far used LINQ to SQL for the data access layer. These demos involve creating a LINQ to SQL data model (using a nice drag/drop editor), and then exposing that model through a web service by manually coding a WCF Web Service or .asmx Service.

    Don't get me wrong, this is a pretty rapid development method...

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  • 1 comments  /  aggregated from  POKE 53280,0: Pete Brown's Blog : Silverlight  on  Apr 23, 2008 (8 months ago)   /   original article

    image Eugene Osovetsky made a pretty exciting announcement yesterday regarding pushing data to Silverlight in Beta 2.

    Beta 2 will likely include a new WCF capability for duplex services based on DuplexReceiver. IMHO, this helps eliminate socket coding for some of the more common scenarios:

    • Chat applications
    • Data update notifications in biz apps

    There will be both a client (Silverlight) and a server (WCF) component to this. In the spirit of keeping Silverlight's core platform agnostic, the client-side piece will be shipped as an extension assembly that you can include in your application as needed.

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  • 0 comments  /  aggregated from  Silverlight Brass Tacks  on  Apr 23, 2008 (8 months ago)   /   original article

    Forgive me if I'm being dense and this was obvious to other people, but I have been wondering about this for while.

    In most demos I see by the Silverlight Team and others, they typically declare the event handler in the XAML:

    "rect" MouseEnter="rect_MouseEnter"/>

    As a developer, it seems to me like this is a strange mix of code and design time stuff, and it would be cleaner to wire up the event handler in code, and then all of the event handling code is in one place.

    Read more ...
  • 0 comments  /  aggregated from  Eric Hexter  on  Apr 21, 2008 (8 months ago)   /   original article

    Now that we have a working test that can make the proper assertions, the next step is to make the test easier to understand.  First, here is the existing test.

    FluentUiTest

    The test is loaded with infrastructure code that helps execute the asynchronous calls with the testing framework. This does not help the readability of the tests.  More than half of the code in this methods are helper methods and plumbing.  This is far from ideal.  Another approach to this would be to use a fluent interface that abstracts the plumbing code and leaves a test that is easier to comprehend.

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  • 0 comments  /  aggregated from  .NET, Silverlight, and other ramblings (from the U  on  Apr 21, 2008 (8 months ago)   /   original article
    It turns out Isolated Storage folders are worth 1Kb.

    This is easy to test, as all you need to do is create a directory in Silverlight, and watch your available isolated storage space, reduce by 1Kb (1024 bytes).

    This is all very nice, but in Windows a directory is free (i.e. if you right click on properties of a folder, it takes up zero bytes). The interesting thing, is that if you add a windows folder manually to your isolated storage directory, Silverlight will read your new directory, however it will not take up any space in isolated storage.
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  • 0 comments  /  aggregated from  .NET, Silverlight, and other ramblings (from the U  on  Apr 21, 2008 (8 months ago)   /   original article
    Now that I am back from holiday, it is time to blog a little.

    I've been messing around with Isolated Storage for the past few days, and there is some interesting issues.

    It seems to me i can increase the Isolated Storage quota (the amount of allocated isolated storage), but I don't seem to have anyway to reduce it (in the beta)?

    The following code will ask the user permission to increase the quota to 1Mb (default starting quota is 100Kb)


    using (IsolatedStorageFile userStore =
                            IsolatedStorageFile.GetUserStoreForApplication())
                {
                    userStore.TryIncreaseQuotaTo(1048576);
                }


    which is all lovely and stuff, but I have no way to reduce the quota size in the future.
    Read more ...
  • 0 comments  /  aggregated from  Eric Hexter  on  Apr 21, 2008 (8 months ago)   /   original article 
    The Silverlight testing framework was recently released and shows some great potential for being
     a first class application platform. For more information about the test framework see this post from
    Jeff Wilcox. 
    To start off I choose to use a code sample that had some complexity in it.  Brad Abrams just posted 
    a Silverlight walk     End-to-End Data Centric Application with Silverlight 2.  This seemed like a good
     sample to use, since the post did not consider how to test the code.
    Step 1:  Add a test project and test class.
    Read more ...
  • 0 comments  /  aggregated from  The MossyBlog Times.  on  Apr 16, 2008 (8 months ago)   /   original article

    skateboard_closeupYou know those skateboards in the Silverlight intro videos, well Shane Morris (Shanemo aka UX Bloke) is about to give one of these away at ReMIX08.

    This is a rare piece of schwag, in that we only have a limited number of these in place, so think of these as in World of Warcraft Purple Item's rare.

    Be sure to check out  Shane Morris' blog - Design for Innovation -  for further details.

    http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DesignForInnovation/~3/271299509/a-silverlight-skateboard.aspx

    I want one of these and even I can't get one! - that's how rare they are.

    Read more ...