ObjectSharp

The age of cloud computing is fast approaching. Or at least that's what the numerous vendors of cloud computing would have you believe. The challenge that you (and all developers) face is to determine just what cloud computing is and how you should take advantage of it. Not to mention whether you even should take advantage of it. While there is ...

One of my current tasks for a client has been to facilitate the integration between a Java client and a WCF service. The mechanism for doing this is JSON and I have been quite grateful that WCF makes it relatively easy to implement this type of communication. However, there is one area that has been causing some grief for me (and my Java ...

Silverlight 3 will soon be released.  And to properly celebrate the excitement of its release, ObjectSharp is teaming up with Microsoft to present an action-packed first look at the UX3 platform, live from the Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto.  As one of the first companies to be featured on Microsoft’s Silverlight gallery, our ...

I’m sure that, for the vast majority of the readers of my blog, becoming more productive with your programming tools is a desirable goal. Not all developers go out of their way to advance their skills, but the very fact that you read blogs means that getting better is of interest to you. And, for most companies, they would also like you to make ...

My final presentation in my April World Speaking tour was at the Toronto Code Camp this afternoon. As always, the code camp was a huge success. The efforts of many people went into making it so, but the organization was top notch. As part of the lead-up to my presentation, Joey de Villa made good on a promise to wear Microsoft branded assless ...

I finished presentation four of my April World Tour of the GTA earlier today. It was actually a co-presentation with Deb Forsyth and I was basically code-monkey and the 'developer’ that she could point to with here ‘bad developer’ stories. This was an unusual conference for me, in that I was a lone developer in a room full of testers. Daniel never ...

I was asked an unusual question yesterday about cookies, Silverlight and WCF. The scenario was that a Silverlight application was being used in a consumer-facing situation. The application itself communicates with the server using WCF. The service which is the target of the communication uses ASP.NET Authentication to authenticate the user. It’s ...

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 Silverlight. To start with, let’s talk about one of the fundamental artifacts of color theory – ...

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 to Mike Harsh’s presentation on off-browser Silverlight at MIX ‘09 (slides, demos and video can ...

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, why would there ever be a reason to write a WPF application? And since Silverlight seems to be ...