April 2008 - Posts

posted Monday, April 28, 2008 3:57 PM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

Silverlight 2 - RegisterCreateableType

I spent about 2 hours trying to figure this out today so I thought I'd just share it here. Mostly, the time lost comes down to Javascript but that's no big surprise :-( Essentially, I'm playing with the HTML Bridge that lets Silverlight .NET code call Read More

Filed Under: ,
posted Monday, April 28, 2008 7:02 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

Microsoft Office Labs

Interesting stuff happening up here - I haven't installed these bits yet but they look worth a whirl. Read More

Filed Under:
posted Sunday, April 27, 2008 4:32 PM by mtaulty :: 2 Comments

CodeToLive Logos at the MSDN Roadshow

If you've been to our MSDN Roadshows ( approx 800 of you so far - thanks and thanks also for the feedback which we've gone through for Cardiff and London already ) or if you are planning to come along then you'll know that this year we're using cinemas. Read More

Filed Under:
posted Sunday, April 27, 2008 12:48 PM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

Silverlight 2 - Build Controls!

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 Read More

Filed Under:
posted Sunday, April 27, 2008 12:46 PM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

MEF?

Very interesting post over here. Read More

Filed Under:
posted Thursday, April 24, 2008 10:10 AM by mtaulty :: 4 Comments

Entity Framework Talk at Oracle .NET SIG

Thanks a lot to the people who came along to my Entity Framework talk at the Oracle and .NET Special Interest Group in London today. As promised, I've uploaded the slides in PPTX and PDF format if you need them for anything. Read More
posted Wednesday, April 23, 2008 2:45 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

Entity Framework Talk at VBUG Bristol

Thanks to the people who came along to my talk on Entity Framework at VBUG in Bristol yesterday. I promised that I'd make the slides available and they can be found here for download in PPTX format and PDF format. This was more or less the same talk Read More

Filed Under: , , ,
posted Wednesday, April 23, 2008 2:37 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

You've got to stop calling it "LINQ" :-)

<rant strength="veryMild"> A bit of a personal bugbear. I've met a lot of folks who say things like "How do you compare LINQ and traditional data access?" or something along those lines. Please. You've got to stop calling it "LINQ" :-) LINQ is Read More

Filed Under:
posted Friday, April 18, 2008 11:41 AM by mtaulty :: 6 Comments

Databinding XML in Silverlight 2

I passed across some code to Daniel just last night as he was struggling to get LINQ to XML to read some XML data from a web site ( actually, a web service ) for him. One of the things I miss in Silverlight ( from WPF ) is the ability to naturally bind Read More

Filed Under:
posted Thursday, April 17, 2008 2:25 PM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

Entity Framework Talk at NxtGen Southampton

Thanks a lot to the guys that run NxtGen Southampton and the attendees who came along to my talk on the ADO.NET Entity Framework this evening. I really enjoyed it and hope that you enjoyed it too if you came along - the venue was really interesting ( Read More

Filed Under:
posted Wednesday, April 16, 2008 6:57 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

Silverlight 2 - Video, Markers, XML

I encountered a chap the other day who was building an application which did something like this; Play a video Load a set of times and thumbnail images from an XML file. Highlight the thumbnail images at the point where the video hits the right position. Read More

Filed Under:
posted Tuesday, April 15, 2008 4:12 PM by mtaulty :: 2 Comments

Silverlight 2, Databinding to the MediaElement.Position property

In a word, don't :-) MediaElement.Position is very attractive because it's pretty common to display some UI to show an indicator displaying where you're up to within a particular video. MediaElement.Position is of type TimeSpan and it's a DependencyProperty Read More

Filed Under:
posted Tuesday, April 15, 2008 4:07 PM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Silverlight 2, Buttons in ListBoxes

Just something that I came across recently. If I have a ListBox like this; <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White"> <ListBox ItemsSource="{Binding}"> <ListBox.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> Read More

Filed Under:
posted Tuesday, April 15, 2008 4:01 PM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

Silverlight 2 - Getting to the ListBoxItems in a ListBox

If you've got a Silverlight UI like this; <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White"> <ListBox ItemsSource="{Binding}" x:Name="lstNumbers"> <ListBox.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> Read More

Filed Under:
posted Monday, April 14, 2008 4:37 AM by mtaulty :: 3 Comments

Silverlight - Dynamically Loading an Assembly

Just something that someone asked me about today so sharing here. Imagine that you want to define a portion of your Silverlight application but leave some other piece to run time. For example - a calculation engine or perhaps something more complicated Read More
posted Sunday, April 13, 2008 9:33 AM by mtaulty :: 2 Comments

Silverlight, Taking Action

I'm finding that in Silverlight 2, I quite often want to write code which does something, waits for it to finish and then does something else. Say I'm building a video player. I might have a UI like this;<UserControl x:Class="SilverlightApplication5.Page" Read More

Filed Under:
posted Friday, April 11, 2008 2:56 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Blog Reading in IE and Traffic Generation

After posting this, myself and MikeO were looking at my RSS.ASPX page in Fiddler. I was noticing that there are 2 requests for my aspx page, one for the page itself and the other for the stylesheet. The RSS.ASPX page brings back an RSS feed with 5 items Read More

Filed Under:
posted Friday, April 11, 2008 1:32 AM by mtaulty :: 2 Comments

Disruption in Blog Service

Apologies if you've visited this site recently and found it down. I've been having some hosting troubles - essentially, my site is causing my hosting company's server to hit 100% CPU and I don't have a dedicated service and so, consequently, they flipped Read More