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September 2007 - Posts

Grouping in LINQ is weird (IGrouping<K,T> is your friend)

Ok, it's not weird really - I was just trying for an "attention grabbing headline" :-) However, it does seem to throw people when they play with it so I thought I'd break it down a little here. Say I've got some data such as; class Fruit { public string Read More...
Posted Friday, September 28, 2007 7:09 AM by mtaulty | 3 Comments

MSDN Silverlight Talk in Reading (25th September)

Mike has published the demos and the slides that we used for our Silverlight talk in Reading on the 25th September. Read More...
Posted Friday, September 28, 2007 1:14 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Horace Goes Halo

I think that the first video game that I bought was Hungry Horace As I remember, this was 1982 and I was 11 or 12 depending upon when I bought it. I can remember that part way through the game you could press BREAK and drop into the BASIC source code Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 25, 2007 1:58 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Herb Sutter's Machine Architecture Talk

I've seen Herb Sutter talk a few times. I've read quite a few of his books (back in the day when I still wrote C++) and I used to religiously read the "Guru of the Week" although it's tailed off for me over time as I don't write much C++ these days. I Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 25, 2007 4:06 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

Expression Design, Blend and Effects

Something I hadn't really thought much about before today - the possible loss of fidelity when you go from something like Expression Design to Expression Blend. I drew this little bit of UI in Expression Design; Now, there are some effects applied to Read More...
Posted Friday, September 21, 2007 3:46 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments
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Silverlight - Simulating Streaming

Just a (perhaps not very useful) thought that I had today. If you'd got (say) a video that is 60 minutes long and you wanted to break it down into short pieces then with Silverlight you could quite easily chop it up into pieces that are, say, 2 minutes Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 20, 2007 3:32 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Waiting for Leopard

First I got one of these (very handy for running); Then I got one of these (very pleased with it so far - like the 80GB. Note to Mr Jobs - if you'd put 40GB in the Touch, I'd have got one but 16GB isn't enough); And now I'm waiting to get one of these; Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 20, 2007 3:27 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

UK MSDN Event Locations

One of the things that we've really tried to do this year in terms of our MSDN Events Programme is to get to more locations than we've done in previous years and to try and do that on a regular schedule. This is something that I feel relatively strongly Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 19, 2007 9:21 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Disconnected LINQ to Entities

Taking this post here and changing from LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities. What would that involve? Firstly, I add a new ADO.NET Entity Data Model to my project (call it Northwind.edmx). I add only my Customers table and I leave the default mapping alone. Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 19, 2007 2:58 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

VB XML Tool

The IntelliSense from Schema stuff when working with XML in VB is really quite cool and now there's a new tool to help with that . Another thing to add to my downloads list. Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 18, 2007 6:08 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

VB9 Dynamic Identifiers, Dynamic Interfaces, Partial Methods

Via Daniel I learnt that VB9 changed in Beta 2 of Visual Studio and that dynamic identifiers and interfaces have gone and that Partial Methods are now in. Must admit that I found it hard to verify this on the web without quite a bit of searching. The Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 18, 2007 6:04 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

RIA Job Trends & Salaries

Found this interesting . I wonder if I could get myself some kind of Silverlight, WPF, C# job then? :-) Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 18, 2007 5:57 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

Blend 2 September Preview

If you're playing with Silverlight then you'll no doubt be using Blend 2 and you might have spotted that it's recently been saying "Your trial is about to expire". Frankly, I was getting a bit panicky but it looks like there's a new drop of Blend just Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 18, 2007 5:43 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

Typing

Daniel wants me to try this . It said that I do 90 words/minute. Having said that, it didn't work perfectly for me in that the scrolling up the screen was a bit dodgy - I had to hit the scrollbar at one point and then it started scrolling just slightly Read More...
Posted Sunday, September 16, 2007 3:34 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Disconnected LINQ to SQL

It's a common scenario to build an application with multiple physical or logical tiers and a very common example would be where we have something like; If we imagine that our "web service" just does CRUD on some entity type (say Customer) then we've got Read More...
Posted Friday, September 14, 2007 4:32 AM by mtaulty | 4 Comments

Entity Framework Posts

I've been catching up with Julie's posts on the Entity Framework which are all great stuff. First look at the Entity Framework Designer Knocking off Danny Simmons Entity Framework Beta 2 List- #1- Complex Types Knocking off Danny Simmons Entity Framework Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 13, 2007 5:27 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

XML, LINQ, Databinding a ListBox to an Anonymous Type

I've got this XML file; it's an export of the Northwind Employees table. I load this up with LINQ to XML and then I want to databind it into a Windows Forms ListBox. In the ListBox, I want to display a concatenation of the firstName and lastName but I Read More...
Posted Monday, September 10, 2007 4:39 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments
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Northwind & Photos - How Many Times Will I Write This Code?

Not the first time I've done this (at least LINQ makes it a bit more interesting); static void Main( string [] args) { using (NorthwindDataContext ctx = new NorthwindDataContext()) { List<Employee> employees = ctx.Employees.ToList(); XElement photos Read More...
Posted Monday, September 10, 2007 3:59 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

LINQ to XML and Larger Files

LINQ to XML and the XML API that underpins it contained in the System.Xml.Linq namespace is essentially a DOM-like API. This means that documents are loaded into memory to form a "tree" representation and that act of loading into memory means that the Read More...
Posted Saturday, September 08, 2007 6:20 AM by mtaulty | 2 Comments
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Silverlight, Moonlight, XAML, .NET, Stuff

The release of Silverlight V1.0 and the announcement around Moonlight being a partnership between Microsoft and Novell had me reading Miguel's blog about the announcement and I found it all quite fascinating as I hadn't really looked at Moonlight properly Read More...
Posted Friday, September 07, 2007 4:26 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Silverlight at the Emmys

I like this app http://www.etonline.com/emmys/ Great video performance for me and I like the "play video on preview" kind of feature that you get in the listbox. Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 06, 2007 7:40 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Windows Live Suite

I went to install the new Windows Live Suite (see blog entry here ) and fell at the first fence in that it said "Sorry, this operating system is not supported". I think what that means is that there isn't a 64-bit version of the installer at the moment. Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 05, 2007 5:04 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

ADO.NET Entity Framework - LINQ. Getting Started.

Getting started with LINQ to Entities is relatively easy :-) Calling ObjectContext.CreateQuery<T> gives you back a ObjectQuery<T> . ObjectQuery<T> is IQueryable<T> and so we can use it for LINQ queries. That means that using a Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 05, 2007 1:11 AM by mtaulty | 3 Comments

Questions: #1 LINQ to SQL and NULLs

Mark mailed to ask; Mike, I enjoyed your short webcast entitled Linq to SQL: Nulls. I do have one question. Here is a snippet of your code from your webcast var query = from e in ctx.Employees where e.Region == null select e; If I wanted to change this Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 04, 2007 7:08 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Questions

As a result of having this blog and speaking at a few conferences here and there I get quite a lot of questions emailed to me and I try and do my best to answer them although I'm not a support service :-) and I admit to sometimes slowing down my response Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 04, 2007 6:34 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments