November 2006 - Mike Taulty's Blog

Quite a while back I wrote what started out as a "little article" on C# V2.0 and V3.0 for ObjectiveView magazine. If you take a look you'll see that it grew quite a lot as it went along and got published here (PDF). This is nothing earth-shattering in that it's information that's available elsewhere so all the correct bits come from what other people told me whilst any mistakes have been inserted by me :-) That last sentence kind of reminds me of the bit in Bookends which is something like "preserve your memories, they're all that's left you" whereas I guess my version is "preserve your mistakes, they're all that's left you" :-) Blimey, getting philosophical in my old age.

Loved this demo up at the WPF Blog that uses the SWF2XAML converter that Mike Swanson published recently.

Just something random that popped into my head today - programming with Workflow Foundation is like building things with Lego. It's the way in which Activities expose properties that just snap together with other Activities and it's somehow very satisfying when it happens. programming is like building with When it comes to building a car with Lego, you just need a brick with wheels on it. When it comes to building a DB app with WF, you just need an Activity that can run SQL commands (there's one up here by the way). Very powerful stuff.

Nice article over on MSDN about creating activities for WF. I've done a few WF talks this week and I think one of the things that people struggle with is the section entitled Asynchronous and Event-Based Activities. That is - how do you have activities that do things that take a long time? (I had a stab at this a while back here ) because at first glance I think it's hard to align the seemingly conflicting behaviour of event-driven Activities with the WF capability to persist workflow instances.

Over here (pulled straight from the front page of slashdot today).

I was talking to some chaps the other day about PowerShell and I realised that I didn't really know where it was up to only to find that they'd gone and released it :-) Here's the link - PowerShell V1.0 for Windows XP, Server 2003 and Vista. Time to move shells I think (I said this about 6-12 months ago and haven't done it yet :-(). It's interesting in that I think the "MS Powers that be" see PowerShell as targetting the IT admin kind of guy and I'm sure it does but I also think an awful lot of devs spend their time in command windows rather than UI's and a .NET extensible shell is something that seems really attractive to me as a dev.

After these VB9 Videos come some more and a new RSS Feed which lists all videos across all topics. VB9 - XML Support VB9 becomes the best .NET language for creating and manipulating XML with XML features built natively in the language. In this session, we'll take a quick look at what you can expect. Click here to watch the video online or here to download a zip file to watch offline VB9 - Pieces of LINQ In previous VB9 sessions we've explored various features that facilitate LINQ. In this session we'll try and look at how LINQ actually works with those features to add extensible querying support into the language. Click here to watch the video online or here to download a zip file to watch offline VB9 - Dynamic Identifiers Dynamic identifiers in VB9 allow you to easily invoke methods without necessarily knowing that the method is called at compile time. Whilst this is possible today, the VB9 syntax makes it natural and easy. Click here to watch the video online or here to download a zip file to watch offline VB9...

I saw this piece of UI over at http://www.samsung.com that's done in Flash and it seemed effective so I thought that I'd have a go with WPF and Sparkle to see if I could reproduce it. Essentially, there are 3 small rectangles over a background image and there's a repeating animation that expands an image into Rectangle1, then 2, then 3 to try and entice you to hover over that rectangle and if you do then the main image is replaced with the one you hovered over and there's more animation in terms of a sharpening effect and an expanding effect. I had a go at this with WPF and built an XBAP which you can get to here (you need .NET Framework 3.0). It looks like this; Essentially, what I've got on the screen is a Canvas. On that Canvas is a main Rectangle with a height of 0. It lives at the bottom of the Canvas. There is also a ListBox and that is databound to an XML file that lists 3 more image files and a name for the images (Image 1, 2, 3). The ListBox, its ItemsPanel, its ListBoxItem have all been styled (specifically...