July 2008 - Posts

posted Thursday, July 31, 2008 7:50 AM by mtaulty :: 4 Comments

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 - ASMX Services & XmlSerializer

It wasn't clear to me from reading the Silverlight SDK docs whether or not you could call ASMX services from Silverlight 2 Beta 2 if calling those services meant involing the XmlSerializer. Silverlight is using WCF to call services and WCF usually uses Read More

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posted Wednesday, July 30, 2008 11:24 AM by mtaulty :: 4 Comments

Silverlight 2 and HTML 5 - Being Online/Offline ( Part 2 )

Following up on this post, it seems that there's more to this online/offline malarky in HTML 5 in that this; http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-html5-20080122/#appcache  talks about Application Caches. As far as I can work out, that's to do with providing Read More

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posted Wednesday, July 30, 2008 5:15 AM by mtaulty :: 5 Comments

Silverlight 2 and HTML 5 - Being Online/Offline

One of the things that's coming in IE8 and is already present in FireFox 3 as far as I know is HTML 5's ability to detect whether the browser is online or offline and to provide some offline storage ( alongside cookies ) for the application. You can find Read More

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posted Wednesday, July 30, 2008 4:47 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

Dell Hybrid

Dell's got a (reasonably) nice looking little machine that might make a nice Media Center. I run ( Vista ) Media Center under my TV on a Shuttle box ( search the blog for Shuttle you'll find the specs ) every day and it works extremely well. For me, Media Read More

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posted Wednesday, July 30, 2008 1:22 AM by mtaulty :: 4 Comments

Using Excel as an XML Editor

In a couple of instances recently I've had cause to take data that exists in an Excel spreadsheet and save it out as XML and, whilst it's slightly off-topic, I thought I'd share as I find it "enjoyable" :-) I don't mean as a .XLSX file but, rather, as Read More

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posted Monday, July 28, 2008 3:10 PM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Silverlight 2 Videos on Silverlight.net

Nice to see that the videos that Mike and I made on Silverlight 2 are now on Silverlight.net up here; http://silverlight.net/Learn/videocat.aspx?cat=10 Read More

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posted Friday, July 25, 2008 4:00 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

Added (Updated) ADO.NET Data Services Videos to C9

I produced a new set of short videos around ADO.NET Data Services and dropped them on to Channel 9. You can find them here; http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/UK and that list will grow as time goes in ( specifically, it'll grow if I can get the publishing Read More
posted Thursday, July 24, 2008 1:32 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Don't Steal My Focus

I've been encoding videos today with Expression Encoder 2. I load up a batch of videos and set them transcoding. This takes ages and burns CPU cycles like nobody's business - at times like this you wish the age of quad-core, eight-core and so on was already Read More

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posted Monday, July 21, 2008 3:37 AM by mtaulty :: 6 Comments

Experiments in Building a Silverlight Photo Control ( Part 4 )

Following on from this post, I wanted to see what would happen if I opened my solution in Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview and tried to style my control a little. So, I opened it in Blend. I got a bit stuck straight away because when I tried to display Read More

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posted Monday, July 21, 2008 1:02 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

SQL Bits III

I've managed to submit a session for SQL Bits III in Hatfield on Saturday the 13th September. If I manage to make the vote then I'll be talking about ADO.NET Data Services as a way of ( productively ) exposing CRUD access to your data over RESTful web Read More

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posted Saturday, July 19, 2008 3:59 AM by mtaulty :: 6 Comments

Experiments in Building a Silverlight Photo Control ( Part 3 )

Following on from this post, and with reference to these posts by scorbs and this one by Ian, I thought it was time that my control got some states. I didn't want to be too ambitious with this so I figured that my control perhaps just needed some basic Read More

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posted Friday, July 18, 2008 4:30 AM by mtaulty :: 5 Comments

Experiments in Building a Silverlight Photo Control ( Part 2 )

Following on from this post. I wanted to make sure that I only ever had a maximum of [Previous, Current, Next] images loaded in my control whilst still pro-actively trying to load an image as a user "heads towards it". That is, if the user is on image Read More

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posted Friday, July 18, 2008 3:44 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

My Silverlight and WPF Dream

I've been having this dream about Silverlight and WPF. Alright, I haven't :-) But, I've talked to a few people about Silverlight and WPF integration recently and I have this vision in my head of what I'd really love to see. Now, don't get me wrong - Read More

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posted Thursday, July 17, 2008 4:59 PM by mtaulty :: 10 Comments

Experiments in Building a Silverlight Photo Control ( Part 1 )

On web pages, you often see a control that displays a set of pictures with a list of the total number of pictures and a next/previous button to move between them. MSN has one that looks like this; and I kind of fancied using this as a means to play Read More

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posted Tuesday, July 15, 2008 7:24 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Channel9

I've been posting some of my/Mike's Silverlight 2 B2 videos onto Channel 9. The page is here; http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/UK I'm hoping to use that page as a central place for video publishing going forward and possibly adapt it to other uses as well Read More

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posted Monday, July 14, 2008 1:44 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

LINQ to XML talk at Vista Squad, London on Wednesday of this week

Just a quick plug. On Wednesday evening of this week (16th July) I will be in our London offices talking to the Vista Squad user group about LINQ to XML. There are just 11 places left so if you're in the vicinity and you want to come along then click Read More
posted Thursday, July 03, 2008 3:29 PM by mtaulty :: 2 Comments

Outrageous Self-Promotion :-)

Somehow I've made it to ComputerWeekly's blogging beauty competition - the "IT Blog Awards 08". Please help this author by adding your vote if you feel that way inclined :-) Click the picture below... Read More
posted Thursday, July 03, 2008 2:25 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

Hardware Budgets

The first work development machine that I bought to sit on my desk cost approximately £20K. That was 16 years ago so you'd have to guess that'd be about the equivalent of £40K (or more) today. It was a huge amount of money but, at the time, it was a cost Read More

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posted Wednesday, July 02, 2008 2:22 PM by mtaulty :: 6 Comments

On Entity Framework, Concurrency

This is similar but not at all identical to this post about LINQ to SQL because it's using a different framework and that has different capabilities. Someone mailed and asked how we can detect concurrency problems with Entity Framework in order to ensure Read More
posted Wednesday, July 02, 2008 1:25 PM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Silverlight & Virtual Earth

Fantastic demonstration from IDV solutions; http://silverlight.idvsolutions.com/ It'd be really cool to be able to copy a link once you've annotated a map and share it with someone else. I liked the flyout menus on the tools on the right hand side :- Read More

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posted Wednesday, July 02, 2008 1:29 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

Give me back my CPU(s)

Too many times I'm seeing this in my system tray; What is that? It's Process Explorer ( I run that instead of Task Manager ) saying that my CPU is pegged ( again ). The primary culprits are; My Anti-Virus software. This has never detected a virus for Read More

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posted Tuesday, July 01, 2008 3:10 PM by mtaulty :: 8 Comments

On LINQ to SQL, Concurrency and Timestamps

I came across a bit of a glitch in using timestamps for checking concurrency violations in LINQ to SQL and thought I'd share. Say I've got a table like;create table Person ( id int identity primary key, firstName nvarchar(30), lastName nvarchar(30), Read More