Mike Taulty's Blog
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November 2006 - Mike Taulty's Blog

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Mike Taulty's Blog

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  • ObjectiveView Article on C# 2.0/3.0

    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.
  • MSDN Roadshows in 2007

    We're doing some developer and IT Pro technology "Roadshows" again in early 2007 and the dates have now been published and registration is open on the web site. Here's the details on dates and registration URLs; MSDN Developer Events; Nottingham - 21st February Glasgow - 5th March Harrogate - 13th March London - 21st March Reading- 27th March TechNet IT Pro Events; Nottingham - 20th February Bristol - 27th February Glasgow - 6th March Harrogate - 12th March London - 20th March Hope to see you there :-)
  • SWF and XAML Side By Side

    Loved this demo up at the WPF Blog that uses the SWF2XAML converter that Mike Swanson published recently.
  • DevelopMentor Connected Systems Roadshow

    I did a slot today on Workflow Foundation with ASP.NET at the DevelopMentor Connected Systems Roadshow on the Microsoft Campus. This was part of a larger day of content that Dominick was doing around ASP.NET in general. The materials from the talk are here - this is the slides in PDF format along with all the Visual Studio solutions that I used. Note that this wasn't intended for re-use so it might be a bit tricky to re-assemble but hopefully not too difficult. It also isn't meant to represent any kind of best practise like anything that comes from this site :-)
  • Workflow Foundation == Lego

    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.
  • WF - "CallExternalMethod", "HandleExternalEvent"

    I sat in on a workshop on WF yesterday that David was running. One of the interesting discussions that came up was around the "CallExternalMethod"/"HandleExternalEvent" Activities. The idea of these Activities is that you can build a Workflow which makes a call out to the "outside world" using the "CallExternalMethod" Activity; You can also have a Workflow wait for something to happen in the "outside world" by using the "HandleExternalEvent" Activity; At build time with these Activities the only thing that the Workflow needs knowledge of is the definition of a .NET interface that provides methods that it (the Workflow Instance) can call and events that it (the Workflow Instance) can handle to receive data. This means that the Workflow definition is very much abstracted from the means by which it sends information "out" and the means by which it receives notifications "in". I made a few videos on this stuff which you can find up at http://wf.netfx3.com under the screencasts section. Specifically, MSDN UK WF Nuggets...
  • MSDN Article on Creating Custom WF Activities

    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.
  • Workflow Foundation in an XBAP

    Paul's got a post over here about running WF foundation in an XBAP. The upshot is that WF (like WCF proxies) won't run in a partial trust environment so if you're going to run WF in an XBAP then you need to alter the security policy to give your particular XBAP full trust. This sounds familiar in that I keep seeming to come across folks who give me a scenario which goes like this; "I want to run my application in a browser" "I'm quite happy to insist that the client installs .NET Framework V3.0" "I'm quite happy to alter the security policy on the client so that they can run my code" I don't really get this in that, for me, I tend to feel that the advantage of an XBAP is that people with .NET Framework 3.0 can casually browse to a URL and (without leaving their browser window) they can safely view a rich WPF application running in the "Internet Zone" sandbox. Now, AFAIK that's exactly the same situation as running a ClickOnce application from the "Internet Zone" apart from; ClickOnce applications can work online...
  • Interesting little article on non-SQL injections

    Over here (pulled straight from the front page of slashdot today).
  • Upgrading from Vista RC2 to Vista RTM

    I was reading that Daniel moved to Vista RTM and he mentioned that you can't go from RC2 to RTM. Now, on my laptop, I wiped the installation and started again with RTM but on my desktop at home I had RC2 and I thought I'd give it a whirl with the RTM and, as far as I can tell, it worked fine. Now, I'm not sure whether this is a supported scenario because there was definitely some noise about not being able to go from RC2 to RTM but it does seem to "work" so take care there and I'll post if I find problems as I go forward with that desktop installation.
  • PowerShell Released

    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.
  • Joe Stegman on WPF/E

    Joe Stegman's WPF/E blog is sparking into life again .
  • More VB9 Videos...

    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...
  • Workflow Designer & IGlyphProvider

    I was trying to build a very simplified version of the Workflow Monitor sample which ships in the WF SDK - I find that it does quite a lot to get to grips with so I just wanted something simple which would query my tracking database for running workflows and build a tree of the simple tracking events that it could find for those Activities. It ended up looking like this (sorry, this probably turns out to be a massive bitmap); and that's pretty much it. Whilst doing this I was trying to figure out how to highlight one of the Activities over there on the design surface and I came across IGlyphProvider for the first time which allows you to draw something on top of a particular Activity which is pretty cool - in my case I subverted the original "Commented out" Glyph in order to use that to highlight the Activity that the event in the Tree corresponds to. I didn't spend too long on this but if the source code is of interest to anybody then it's here (RTM version of Workflow Foundation but probably works on earlier...
  • Playing with Sparkle, WPF

    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...
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