September 2008 - Posts

posted Tuesday, September 30, 2008 4:20 PM by mtaulty :: 3 Comments

Surprised by WPF DataGrid :-)

Here's what I did. I took the WPF DataGrid and used it in my project. More specifically; Then add a reference to the DataGrid's assembly ( I have mine in d:\wpftoolkit\ ); Then "built a UI" which is an overstatement :-)<Window x:Class="BlogPost.Window1" Read More

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posted Monday, September 29, 2008 7:21 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

PC Speakers

I seem to be working my way down Cnet's review of PC speakers. In my office, I have these; which I've had for quite a long time and really like and I just got myself a set of these below to attach to the Media Center ( deliberately trying to avoid Read More

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posted Monday, September 29, 2008 7:11 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

10

There's a video up on C9 ( largely around Team System ) which announces that the next version of Visual Studio will be 2010 and the next version of the Framework will be V4.0. They can't decide whether to pronounce this; "Two thousand and ten" or "Twenty Read More

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posted Friday, September 26, 2008 1:39 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Silverlight 2 RC Available

From ScottGu - key thing here is that there are Beta 2->RTM breaking changes so if you have applications on Silverlight 2 Beta 2 then you need to see about moving them over to the RC in order that they'll run when we get to RTM. Also noted - new controls Read More

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posted Thursday, September 25, 2008 4:48 PM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Shuttle D10 with Touch-Screen

Hmm, speaking of Shuttle caused me to go looking at what they're currently selling. This looks really interesting to me. If you go with a "living room" Media Center then one of the odd things about it is the idea that you need to switch on your TV in Read More

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posted Thursday, September 25, 2008 4:11 PM by mtaulty :: 3 Comments

GeForce 6200 in my Vista Sp1 Media Center

One of the very best things about Vista is Media Center. You never really hear people talk about Media Center when they talk about Vista but Media Center is one app that I can easily put hand on heart and say that, for me, in Vista it's 100% better than Read More

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posted Thursday, September 25, 2008 12:29 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

PDC 2008 - Windows 7 Sessions Published

Having just built my sketchy list of the sessions I'm interested in at PDC here the game just changed a little in that there are now 17 sessions on Windows 7 rather than the 3-5 that there were announced before. Time for a re-think to my agenda I suspect. Read More
posted Wednesday, September 24, 2008 11:08 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

WPF 3.5 Sp1 - Now I'm Trying to Write Pixel Shaders :-S

I've been quite content up until today to say "I can't write Pixel Shaders" and "I don't know what High Level Shader Language" is. But I thought I'd have a crack at it. Turns out, it just looks like C whereas I expected it to look like assembly. I read Read More

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posted Wednesday, September 24, 2008 6:36 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

WPF V3.5 Sp1 and Effects - A Bit of an Embarrassing Gaffe

Update ( 30/09/08 ) : I had this wrong at least twice. I've tried to fix it now. When it comes to WPF V3.5 Sp1, I've been showing people a lump of XAML to demonstrate the improvements in effects rendering and I think I've just realised today that I've Read More

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posted Wednesday, September 24, 2008 5:19 AM by mtaulty :: 2 Comments

ASP.NET 3.5 Sp1 Dynamic Data

There's lots of stuff written around dynamic data elsewhere so I won't duplicate it here. I did a little bit of experimentation with it today rather than just watch Mike walk me through it. My first surprise in springing up dynamic data was this dialog; Read More

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posted Wednesday, September 24, 2008 1:04 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

WPF Effects & Shaders

Just blogging this link to Adam Kinney's blog which has some great resources about effects/shaders in WPF V3.5 Sp1. I've had this link open in my browser for 3 days so I need a place to park it permanently so I don't lose it; http://adamkinney.com/blog/365/default.asp Read More

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posted Tuesday, September 23, 2008 10:21 AM by mtaulty :: 2 Comments

The Strange Case of the RouteValueDictionary

In playing with ASP.NET routing, I came across this really weird piece of code in a class called RouteValueDictionary which I can reproduce here;RouteValueDictionary dictionary = new RouteValueDictionary( new { key1 = "value1", key2 = "value2", Read More

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posted Tuesday, September 23, 2008 7:42 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Enjoying ASP.NET 3.5 Sp1 Routing

I'm not a web developer. Anyone that knows me knows this. I'm bad with ASP.NET Web Forms these days in that I understood it when it shipped back in 2002 and I've kind of lost track of it in the meantime although I can talk about it at "some level". Read More

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posted Tuesday, September 23, 2008 1:13 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

5 Weeks to PDC 2008

PDC draws nearer and nearer. I have my plane, I have my registration, I'm good to go. The latest countdown video hosted up; here gives some more information as to what's coming and themes this PDC it being the "Software + Services" PDC. One of the Read More
posted Sunday, September 21, 2008 4:09 PM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

REMIX UK Follow Up - "Beyond Silverlight with WPF"

Just in case someone lands here looking for resources from my REMIX UK talk last week (the WPF talk rather than the Silverlight talk). There's some links here; Windows Presentation Foundation, Event Samples Read More

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posted Sunday, September 21, 2008 3:28 PM by mtaulty :: 3 Comments

Silverlight - Drawing Outside the Control Region

Another question from chatting at REMIX UK; Can Silverlight draw outside the region of its control? I think the answer is a "no" here but I suspect that you can achieve the effect that you want by either using one Silverlight control in a transparent Read More

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posted Sunday, September 21, 2008 4:49 AM by mtaulty :: 6 Comments

Silverlight and WPF - Sharing Library Projects

One thing that I got asked a couple of times down at REMIX UK was the question of; How come I can't reference a regular .NET library from a Silverlight project? Which really comes down to the CLR that's in Silverlight ( the "CoreCLR" ) not being the Read More

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posted Saturday, September 20, 2008 3:59 AM by mtaulty :: 2 Comments

REMIX UK - "No Silverlight Application is an Island" Code

I'm just back from REMIX UK down in Brighton where I did a couple of sessions - one on Silverlight and another on Windows Presentation Foundation. Thanks to all who came along and apologies if you were either chatting to me or in my session and thought Read More

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posted Wednesday, September 17, 2008 7:26 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

REMIX UK - Down in Brighton

I made it down to Brighton for REMIX UK, with all of these people; http://remixuk08.backnetwork.com/people/default.aspx?listtype=detailed and I guess a whole bunch more who haven't registered themselves on the site yet :-) I seem to have picked up some Read More

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posted Thursday, September 11, 2008 9:08 AM by mtaulty :: 2 Comments

Messing with Dynamic LINQ Queries

Mike was chatting to me about how you'd take something like this ( against LINQ to SQL and the Northwind database ); using (NorthwindDataContext ctx = new NorthwindDataContext() { Log = Console.Out }) { string[] values = { "A", "B", "C" Read More

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posted Tuesday, September 09, 2008 2:44 AM by mtaulty :: 3 Comments

Silverlight 2 - Binding Images to Uri's

This came via Mike who was playing with some Silverlight sample but I thought it was worth sharing. Say I've got this really simple piece of UI in Silverlight;<UserControl x:Class="SilverlightApplication2.Page" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" Read More

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posted Tuesday, September 09, 2008 2:00 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

ChromeRendererDesktop?

Writing this post made me nostalgic for my own desktop management software so I ran it up just to remember how well/badly it worked. Part of the functionality of my tool is that when it is first run up, it enumerates desktops to find out "What's out there". Read More

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posted Tuesday, September 09, 2008 1:32 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Desktops 1.0

For anyone looking for a virtual desktop manager, the SysInternals guys have now got one; http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/cc817881.aspx I find it a little bit comforting that even MarkR/BryceC hit the same problem that I hit here; http://mtaulty.com/CommunityServer/blogs/mike_taultys_blog/archive/2008/01/18/10138.aspx Read More

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posted Monday, September 08, 2008 4:24 PM by mtaulty :: 4 Comments

Silverlight, Async, Events

Warning - long post with a lot of sketched code. Largely just me "thinking aloud". I'd been reading this post about how events are a bad mechanism to use for the asynchronous programming model in Silverlight and then this follow up post. This reminded Read More

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posted Monday, September 08, 2008 7:56 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

SQL 2008, Filestream, Docs from VB

Someone asked me if I had a simple sample of how to read/write documents into a database table using FILESTREAM in SQL Server 2008. I set about it. Firstly, I had to find out how to switch FILESTREAM on in the RTM of SQL Server. At times like this you Read More

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posted Monday, September 08, 2008 5:17 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

Installation - Silverlight/Flash

I met a customer the other day who had concerns around the way in which Silverlight was being installed. Specifically, he compared it to the way in which Adobe installs their Flash player and his question left me a bit confused so I thought I'd write Read More

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posted Monday, September 08, 2008 3:18 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Expression Blend 2 in MSDN

A bit of an unusual post this one but someone asked me at an event last week; "How come only Expression Blend V1 is on MSDN and not V2" Now, this struck me as a little odd but I don't have an active MSDN subscription at the moment ( note to self - get Read More

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posted Monday, September 08, 2008 12:25 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

DevDays Amsterdam Content

I never knew this was here but the content from DevDays Amsterdam with sessions from my self around ADO.NET Data Services and ADO.NET Entity Framework are all available online up here; http://www.microsoft.com/emea/msdn/spotlight/event.aspx?id=102 There's Read More
posted Sunday, September 07, 2008 4:38 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

Vista Complete PC Restore, 0x80042401, DiskPart, WbAdmin

I picked up a new laptop, a Lenovo T61P to go alongside ( or, more likely replace depending on the "powers that be" ) my existing HP NC8430. I wanted to kick start the process of moving from one machine to the other or of running the two in tandem by Read More

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posted Thursday, September 04, 2008 2:42 AM by mtaulty :: 4 Comments

XBAPs are Rich Internet Applications

We did an event the other day that was called something along the lines of; "Building Rich Internet Applications with Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1" as part of that, we spent some time talking about Silverlight V2 and some time talking about WPF Read More

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posted Tuesday, September 02, 2008 7:59 AM by mtaulty :: 7 Comments

Windows Presentation Foundation, Event Samples

I did a talk down at the Microsoft offices in Reading today which was called something like "Beyond Silverlight with WPF Clients". One of the attendees asked me to share my demos and so here is my attempt to do that here. I hadn't originally intended Read More

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