April 2006 - Mike Taulty's Blog

I wanted to have a play at calling services from an XBAP application. Say I want to build a simple search page and I want to gather the top 10 hits from MSN Search and the top 10 from Google search and I want to bring at most the top 10 of these 2 together removing any duplicates. Both MSN Search and Google search have web services APIs so I can quite happily point Visual Studio 2005 at those services and build "ASMX" proxies that can be called from partial trust environments. However, I think that under default Code Access Security settings an XBAP application only has access to its site-of-origin so this means that by default my XBAP is not going to be able to call either of these services because the XBAP will come from www.mtaulty.com and the services do not. So, I need to host something at www.mtaulty.com that redirects requests through to these two services for me. I built a simple implementation of IHttpHandler which essentially takes a parameter on a query string; url=0 url=1 and it uses that parameter...

Richard Costall, Dave McMahon and John Price (collectively known as "The Coventry Three") have put together a new user group and are keen to attract your interest. Check out http://www.nxtgenug.net/ to see what the guys have put together and what they're planning to be up to in the future. The Coventry Flying Club venue that the guys have been associated with in the past looks to have survived but it's exciting (!) to see that there's a new Birmingham venue. The first event is to be on the 15th May in Coventry with a follow up in Brum on the 22nd May - topics look to be ASP.NET 2.0 Localisation and Code Access Security. I've not been invited (sniff) to speak at this group but I'm hoping that might change in the future, always enjoyed going down to visit these guys and it's not a million miles from where I live (well, at least it's not as far as London :-)).

I've just finished reading a book by Patrick Smacchia called " Practical .NET 2 and C# 2 ". I picked it up a few months ago but it's a pretty weighty book so it takes some time to get through it. The main thing that impressed me about the book is its combination of an enormous scope alongside a good level of depth. Just about every .NET topic that you might think of is in there from introductions to the assembly metadata tables through to discussions on localisation, threading, security, Windows Forms, Web Forms, Web Services and an interesting section of the book which talks about the C# language and does a comparison to C++ which is something that I haven't seen before. The other thing that I think is quite different about the book is that Patrick's quite happy to point to online resources to flesh out some of his chapters and so will quite frequently reference MSDN articles written by other authors in order that a reader can go away and get more info - good idea :-) The book's targetted at the beginner/intermediate...

I've been playing with the Expression Interactive Designer quite a bit of late (and a little bit with the Graphic Designer as well) and I've been really enjoying it although I must admit that it crashes from time to time (but, hey, it's a preview and you can generally still do what you want to do). I've learnt quite a lot about how you go about certain tasks with it although I think I've still a long way to go but I managed to build a very basic application with it and so I thought I'd share it here. It's an XBAP application so it runs in the browser and, like most of my applications, it helps with viewing the MSDN Nugget Videos that we publish to here as a web page and here as an RSS feed . In order to run the application you need to follow this link (requires WinFX Feb CTP runtime installed). What's really impressed me is the way in which I can work with a project file in the Interactive Designer and then quickly switch back and forwards to Visual Studio and hack around a little in there before switching back...

It's that time of year again :-) The UK Technical Roadshow has been announced and it's running in the following venues on the dates listed; Date Location Venue 03/05/06 Birmingham National Motor Cycle Museum 23/05/06 Edinburgh Dynamic Earth 07/06/06 Manchester Manchester Conference Centre 14/06/06 London (City) Inmarsat Centre 20/06/06 Bristol The Watershed I'd advise that you register sooner rather than later as the Roadshow slots have always filled up in previous years and I know for a fact this year that we are mostly in venues that are smaller than ones we've used in the past. One of the challenges for these kinds of events is trying to include as many of the technologies that we think people have a keen interest in but so that you're aware of what we were thinking about the focus this year is around WinFX - Presentation, Communication and Workflow and also around Windows Vista, the 2007 Microsoft Office System and the Atlas technologies. All in all, there should be something for everyone. I hope to see you...

This Channel 9 Video is really well worth watching as an introduction to WPF, XAML and Expression. Really worth 20 or so minutes of your time.