Mike Taulty's Blog

Silverlight 5 Released

mtaulty — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 00:13:30 GMT

Silverlight 5 has been released today – you can find the official announcement over on the Silverlight site along with a link to the download and a list of the improvements in Silverlight 5 up on MSDN including features like; platform invocation integration of the PivotViewer control 3D Graphics capabilities remote control support variable rate media playback and hardware accelerated H.264 decoding text improvements (unfettered) local file system access for trusted applications multiple window support...(read more)

CSS3 Transitions and Animations

mtaulty — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 10:52:01 GMT

Animations in the XAML based world I first really came to animations as part of UI (other than the odd animated GIF that we used to use to display file copy progress and so on) with the arrival into my world of WPF and then Silverlight. In that world, you have the notion of a Storyboard which contains a bunch of animations. I once drew this diagram of it; and so an animation transitions a property from some start value to some end value over some period of time using some easing function (including...(read more)

Zooming & Panning with CSS in IE 10

mtaulty — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 09:17:19 GMT

Something that I’ve been experimenting with just a little lately in the IE10 Preview (available on the Windows Developer Preview) is the idea of how simple HTML content (e.g. a DIV or an IMG) can respond to touch events in order to support the sort of gesture based interactions that a user might expect to use on a touch-first device – specifically here for zooming and panning. Where touch isn’t the primary input mechanism, the same interactions can be driven by mouse/keyboard. In the past, I'd...(read more)

Laying out HTML with CSS Grids

mtaulty — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 14:39:07 GMT

I’ve been working quite a lot lately with HTML and CSS and one of the things that I’m more than prepared to admit that I’m rubbish at is CSS-based layout. For those without a black-belt, CSS layout feels like a set of incantations that you have to get in exactly the right order for your content to appear even vaguely near where you hoped it might. For me, coming from a background of XAML based layouts, I’ve found this to be a challenge until I started to make use of the CSS grid layout. It’s worth...(read more)

Debugging Fun with the Async CTP

mtaulty — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 18:38:08 GMT

I was writing a short talk about the Async CTP and as part of that, I wrote this little WPF form which goes off to my local web server to grab an image and display it; produces when you click on the “Get Image” button that that image is just served up by my local web server and accessed with an HTTP GET. The code for that looks something like this where OnGetImage is the event handler for the button on the screen; namespace TaskPlayground { using System.IO; using System.Net; using System.Windows;...(read more)

Visual Studio Async CTP–Simple Examples in ‘Quiz’ Form

mtaulty — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 16:04:32 GMT

This one’s just a bit of “fun” for a Friday afternoon ( depending on how you define “fun” ). I was writing some asynchronous code yesterday in JavaScript and I then had cause to duplicate it in .NET using the await support of the Async CTP which I’ve tried to write about before ( generally and combined with Rx ). This led into a debate with a colleague where we started passing bits of code backwards and forwards and got down to some simple cases and I thought I’d share here in the form of a “quiz...(read more)

JavaScript OMG #26 to #30

mtaulty — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 08:58:12 GMT

The Blurb: This is mostly just a bit of fun and in form of some rough notes as I’ve been sticking my head into a few JavaScript books and thought I’d write down what strikes me as odd/interesting along the way. Of course, I’ve written some bits of JavaScript but I’ve never really sat down and read up on it. I’m not trying to be definitive and nor am I trying to take a particular view – just poking around OMG #26 – Partial Application & Mapping Nothing radical in this OMG, it’s really one for...(read more)

“Reactive Extensions for .NET” talk from DDD North

mtaulty — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 12:57:09 GMT

Following up on that previous post about the DDD North event here’s the screen-captured version of my Rx talk from the event with a couple of longer sections inserted into it that I ( quietly ) took out on the day based on the timing. I’d recommend going full-screen on that video if you want to view the source code and so on. If you want more information on Rx then follow the links on this post . If you want the WPF application that I use in the talk to try and illustrate combining sequences then...(read more)

DDD North–Sunderland, 8th October

mtaulty — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 10:40:07 GMT

I spent most of the day up at the first DDD North event in Sunderland yesterday and had a really good time – major congratulations to the guys that organised the event and thanks to speakers, sponsors, helpers and delegates who all devoted their time to making it such a big success. I hope (and I’m sure) that more will follow I took a few photos while I was there – some are a bit blurry as I took my old camera and I’d forgotten how to use it and also I didn’t want the flash going off in various places...(read more)

Back from BUILD

mtaulty — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 12:22:29 GMT

I’m fresh back from the BUILD conference over in California where I had a fantastic time. Naturally, it’s a very exciting time to be at Microsoft and working with client technologies and seeing the opportunities that the future holds for applications and developers I’ve been developing for the Windows platform in one way or another since Windows NT arrived in 1993 and, as you might have spotted, I’m a huge believer in the power of rich client devices to provide the very best user experience. On a...(read more)

JavaScript OMG #21 to #25

mtaulty — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 18:07:20 GMT

The Blurb: This is mostly just a bit of fun and in form of some rough notes as I’ve been sticking my head into a few JavaScript books and thought I’d write down what strikes me as odd/interesting along the way. Of course, I’ve written some bits of JavaScript but I’ve never really sat down and read up on it. I’m not trying to be definitive and nor am I trying to take a particular view – just poking around OMG #21 – Everything’s a Function There’s a piece of code in Crockford’s book that I had to read...(read more)

Expression Blend Preview for Silverlight 5

mtaulty — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 09:21:31 GMT

If you moved to the Silverlight 5 RC then you’d probably be wanting the companion version of Expression Blend. Microsoft Expression Blend Preview for Silverlight 5 Enjoy...(read more)

HP8540W–Installing Windows 7 from USB Key (USB3?)

mtaulty — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 08:56:56 GMT

I got an HP8540W laptop a couple of months ago and at the time I had a bit of fun and games installing it. The machine has a main drive in it (SSD) and a secondary bay that can take a DVD-drive or another hard-drive and I have another hard-drive in there. I’m a bit “manual” when it comes to installing operating systems and so when it came around to doing this I thought that there’d be no problem in that I’d just put the OS onto a USB key, boot from that and then install. this walk-through takes you...(read more)

JavaScript OMG!: #16 to #20

mtaulty — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 18:13:29 GMT

The Blurb: This is mostly just a bit of fun and in form of some rough notes as I’ve been sticking my head into a few JavaScript books and thought I’d write down what strikes me as odd/interesting along the way. Of course, I’ve written some bits of JavaScript but I’ve never really sat down and read up on it. I’m not trying to be definitive and nor am I trying to take a particular view – just poking around OMG#16 – Function Arguments I think it was C# 4.0 that finally got around to the notion of optional...(read more)

JavaScript OMG! #11 to #15

mtaulty — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 18:11:21 GMT

The Blurb: This is mostly just a bit of fun and in form of some rough notes as I’ve been sticking my head into a few JavaScript books and thought I’d write down what strikes me as odd/interesting along the way. Of course, I’ve written some bits of JavaScript but I’ve never really sat down and read up on it. I’m not trying to be definitive and nor am I trying to take a particular view – just poking around OMG #11 – Variable Scope and Hoisting It was a bit of a surprise to find that JavaScript didn...(read more)