March 2009 - Posts
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One of the most common comments from Silverlight and WPF developers is their lack of design sense. Over the next little while, I’ll be posting (interspersed with other topics) on some of the basics of color theory and how they can be applied to WPF and
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Off-browser Silverlight is pretty cool. And one of the first questions that got raised is ‘where is it running’. Obviously, it’s not running within the browser. I mean, duh. But if not there, then where? I got the first inkling of an answer listening
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One of the first questions that arose from the announcement of off-browser Silverlight was “What will happen to WPF?” The obvious source of this concern is that since Silverlight 3 can run either as part of a Web page or installed in an off-browser mode,
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This session covers three separate scenarios for Silverlight and WCF interactions. The basic functionality of adding a service reference, creating proxy class and calling method hasn’t changed. However, they are trying to address some of the common pain
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The big announcement at yesterday’s keynote was the availability of an off-line and off-browser mode for Silverlight 3.0. Just to clarify the terms, off-line mode indicates that Silverlight will not require a live connection to the Internet in order to
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The fundamental philosophy used to develop the off-browser functionality for Silverlight applications was to reduce the friction surrounding the moving of the application from in-browser to out-of-browser. Specifically, there is no separate download that
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Because I already had some exposure to Silverlight 3 at the MVP Summit, I thought I’d start off with a session directed at creating user experiences. Not to mention that I was interested in the idea of going beyond the superlative of ‘best’ :) The basic
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Some additional Silverlight 3 improvements that are being announced. Data Binding improvements, specifically element-to-element bindings Validation error templates, although there is no support for the IDataErrorInfo interface improvements on the ability
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More stuff on the Web server side of the equation. There is a new version of the Web Platform Installer. This doesn’t have any impact on me, at least not in the past. But there is now a gallery of community-based applications, such as DotNetNuke, DasBlog
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The first part of the keynote was Bill Buxton talking about the benefits of considering user experience and design when creating an application. Certainly a good speaker with passion about hit topics. But I’m afraid that he’s preaching to the converted.
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I’m writing this particular blog post while in the air on the way to Las Vegas. For the next three days, I’m going to be at the MIX ‘09 conference. For regular readers of my blogs, that means you can expect a flurry of posts. I tend to live-blog the sessions
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I have been working with WPF and Silverlight pretty steadily for the past 6 months or so. And thanks to Rocky Lhotka , a problem that I didn’t even realize I had has been (probably) corrected. The problem was that occasionally Visual Studio would just
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As you might have gathered from reading my recent post on changing generated code in VS2008, I wasn’t thrilled when Microsoft changed the behavior of the prop snippet between VS2005 and VS2008. It’s almost two years later and my fingers still want to
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I’ve just come home from spending the last three days in Redmond at the MVP Summit. For those who might not be aware, the Summit is an annual event that Microsoft hosts for Most Valuable Professionals (MVP). The MVP designation is given to people who
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On the scale of annoyances, this is not a huge one. But the solution is so simple, that it’s worth a quick post. Have you ever been in the middle of debugging an application and used the hover functionality to display the current value of a variable?
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Have you ever been dissatisfied with the code that is automatically generated by Visual Studio in response to various commands that you perform. For example, in VS2005, I got used to using the prop snippet to create properties. This snippet created a
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