Blogs

In my head, I see Silverlight 4 applications as either running; In Browser Out of Browser Out of Browser and Trusted Out of Browser and Trusted and in the presence of COM interop ( i.e. on Windows ) and you might write functionality that only works in certain of those contexts – e.g.; HTML display only works out of browser. You can only read the contents of “My Documents” when out of browser and elevated You can only run any COM interop code when in the presence of COM interop and I thought that it might be a good use of MEF as a way of only bringing in the functionality that is going to work in a particular context. So, I defined an enum; [Flags] public enum AppContextStatus { InBrowser = 1, OutOfBrowser = 2, InOrOutOfBrowser = 3, OutOfBrowserTrusted = 4, OutOfBrowserCOMInterop = 8, All = 15 } and then I wanted to be able to figure out which of these particular states my code might be running in. So, a little class; public static class AppContext { public static AppContextStatus CurrentStatus { get { AppContextStatus...

Just a quick advert for something that I thought I’d already publicised but now I’m “not so sure” as I can’t find it on my site :-) I’ll be giving a talk about the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) in Silverlight down at the Silverlight User Group in London on Wednesday evening this week. This happens in the Microsoft office and you can find the details & registration by clicking the image below to jump over toe Mark’s blog which details the agenda including a session on Bing Maps from Johannes .   Hope to see you there :-)

There’s an ad over on MSN UK for the new “Mass Effect 2” game and it’s very distinctive as it’s done in Silverlight and has some really cool aspects to it such as making use of Smooth Streaming and DeepZoom. It’s not often ( well, ever ) that I’ve linked to an ad before or suggested that someone watch one but I think this is really worth a look at to see the sort of quality that you can get from Silverlight in an ad like this. It’s also worth going full screen with it and experimenting with the navigation system. Click the image below to jump to the page ( although, of course, ads run for a duration and so I guess it may not still be there if you get to this post in a few days/weeks time ). You can find more detail on the ad from the guys at Metia ( ooh – nice Silverlight home page too :-) ) who put it together. Steve Ellis has a post over here about it and Dean Gifford has one here which spells out a little more detail about what you’re looking at. I don’t know whether it’s a “true first” for Silverlight or not...

Back in the old days, I used to do a lot more in-person talks/sessions for developers and one of the things that myself and colleagues would discuss is whether a topic was well developed enough to warrant a; What Is? session or a; What’s New With? session. That is – was the technology new enough that people still needed to start from scratch or was it well enough advanced that you bore most people by explaining the core concepts yet again by doing what I’ve heard described as a; “ First the Earth cooled…” kind of session. The reality of turning up at a company or a user group or a conference is that it’s rare that someone gives you time to do both an introduction to the basics alongside coverage of recent additions to a technology. If you decide to try and do both in the space of the 45,60,75,90 minute slot that someone’s given you then you invariably end up talking at a very high level and the attendees feel that you’ve cheated them in some way by only managing to say “IIS is a web server and there’s some new...

One of the things that seems hard-baked into MEF if you watch the Silverlight 4 and MEF screencasts that I’ve made is that MEF relies on attributes. It’s common to see an example such as this skeleton class; public class PluginManager { public PluginManager() { PartInitializer.SatisfyImports(this); } [ImportMany] public IEnumerable<IPlugin> Plugins { get; set; } } which is using an ImportMany attribute so if it happens to be composed with these 2 types below; [Export(typeof(IPlugin))] public class PluginA : IPlugin { public string Name { get { return ("PluginA"); } } public void DoSomething() { throw new NotImplementedException(); } } [Export(typeof(IPlugin))] public class PluginB : IPlugin { public string Name { get { return ("PluginB"); } } public void DoSomething() { throw new NotImplementedException(); } } then creating a new instance of PluginManager would result in MEF composing an instance of PluginA and PluginB onto/into that property called Plugins on PluginManager. However,...

One of the things I often find when publishing blog posts is that I want to display a bunch of files. For instance – in talking about WPF or Silverlight you might be trying to show something that involves a XAML file and a couple of code files and it can be a bit painful if you have to do that with 3 separate lumps of embedded text inside of a blog post. I was thinking about that problem a bit more generally and I wondered how I could do something such that I’d have a control that I could just drop into a blog post in order to display a number of files. Almost like a mini-explorer view across a set of files. I figured that I could use Silverlight for this and then I pondered a little on how I’d want to file-set packaged in order that it’d be as little trouble as possible to create one of these plug-ins. I decided on Zip. There are a few zip libraries out there for .NET but I settled on using the DotNetZip   project from CodePlex which I brought down in source form and hacked to work with Silverlight. When...

Just a little plug for a video I made just before Xmas with the guys from iMeta , a UK company that’s built a scrum tool called iMeta Agility with Silverlight. The picture’s hyperlinked to their video on Channel 9 – click to take a look and, also, try the latest version of the application .