March 2008 - Posts

posted Friday, March 28, 2008 9:06 AM by mtaulty :: 5 Comments

Silverlight 2 - Passing Data Across Plug-In Instances

Again, this falls into the category of "just for fun" but it's something that I wanted to experiment with. I wanted to see how easy it was to put together something that passed data from one Silverlight plug-in instance on a page to another instance (on Read More

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posted Friday, March 28, 2008 5:49 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Entity Framework - Serializing Graphs of Entities

Julie points to Danny and Danny points to the next CTP of Entity Framework - if you're interested in serializing the entities that Entity Framework returns back to you then you'll be interested in this; http://www.thedatafarm.com/blog/2008/03/28/HallelujahEntityGraphsWillBeXMLSerializable.asp Read More
posted Friday, March 28, 2008 3:00 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

Silverlight 2 - Update to previous post around clientaccesspolicy.xml

Just an update to this post as I got a little worried after publishing it :-) In case it wasn't obvious - you wouldn't really want to use a clientaccesspolicy.xml file like the one that I used which says "Allow anybody to do anything" as that'd more than Read More

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posted Thursday, March 27, 2008 5:06 PM by mtaulty :: 3 Comments

Silverlight 2 - Talking to a Local WCF Service from a Silverlight Application

This really falls into the category of "just because it's there" because it's something I was thinking about earlier today and wanted to experiment with. Silverlight 2 applications can make web service calls across domain boundaries if the domain that Read More

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posted Thursday, March 27, 2008 4:09 PM by mtaulty :: 14 Comments

Silverlight 2 - Simple Editing of Web Service Data in a DataGrid

Somebody asked how you use the DataGrid in Silverlight 2 in order to load data from a web service, modify it and submit it back so I thought I'd spend 5 minutes experimenting with that. I wrote a very simple web service with WCF; [DataContract] public Read More

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posted Wednesday, March 26, 2008 3:14 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

Skinning Silverlight Controls

Corrina has posted 4 skins so far for some of the standard Silverlight controls; Bubbly  View Download Red View Download Flat View Download and the 4th one is hanging off this post here; A New Control Skin Set Read More

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posted Friday, March 21, 2008 7:56 AM by mtaulty :: 3 Comments

Silverlight, Custom Controls, Generic.xaml, Dictionaries, Errors

I found these 3 posts really useful around controls, generic.xaml, resource dictionaries and error codes for Silverlight 2; http://marlongrech.wordpress.com/2008/03/19/genericxaml-in-silverlight-beta1-for-wpf-developers/ http://www.codeproject.com/KB/silverlight/mediabutton.aspx Read More

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posted Thursday, March 20, 2008 8:56 AM by mtaulty :: 2 Comments

LINQ to SQL and SqlConnection ( "when you're wrong, you're wrong" :-) )

I was talking to Ian and another chap at the UK Launch yesterday about LINQ to SQL and my use of the DataContext in some demo code where I always tend to write something like; using (DataContext ctx = new DataContext()) { } and whether Read More

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posted Thursday, March 20, 2008 6:02 AM by mtaulty :: 3 Comments

LINQ Talk at UK Visual Studio 2008 Launch

I did a talk yesterday down at the UK Launch of Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 about Language Integrated Query as it stands in VS 2008 and .NET Framework V3.5. Firstly, thanks to everyone who came along to the talk - much Read More

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posted Tuesday, March 18, 2008 8:17 AM by mtaulty :: 6 Comments

Silverlight 2 & Sockets

I was bored in my hotel room so I thought I'd have a bit of a play with Silverlight 2 and sockets - you can ( in beta 1 ) open sockets back to the site of origin within a restricted port range ( 4502 to 4532 ). I wrote a little Silverlight UI ( it's a Read More

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posted Monday, March 17, 2008 9:45 AM by mtaulty :: 2 Comments

Silverlight 2 Diagrams

I thought this diagram was good; and it is but then I found this diagram which is a different one but gives you all the template parts that make up the built in controls. Read More

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posted Monday, March 17, 2008 3:58 AM by mtaulty :: 2 Comments

Silverlight 2 - Path and File Resolution

Path and File resolution in Silverlight 2 is confusing so, fortunately, Pete Brown has a good post on it here. Read More

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posted Friday, March 14, 2008 2:53 AM by mtaulty :: 8 Comments

QCon Talk - Silverlight 2

I did a talk on Silverlight 2 at the QCon conference in London yesterday. I enjoyed it but there weren't a whole lot of people in attendance ( about 30 ) although I'd like to say thanks a lot to the people who did come along as QCon isn't necessarily Read More

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posted Thursday, March 13, 2008 3:31 PM by mtaulty :: 2 Comments

LINQ to SQL, Stored Procs, Output Params, Readers Reading

I had a discussion at DevWeek about when SqlDataReader.Read() gets called for resultsets coming back from stored procedures accessed with LINQ to SQL. I've got this stored proc;create procedure dbo.GetCustomersByCountry @country nvarchar(max) as Read More

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posted Thursday, March 13, 2008 12:22 PM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

DevWeek Talk - Understanding ADO.NET Entity Framework

I did a talk down at DevWeek this afternoon about ADO.NET Entity Framework. Whilst it was a small room, it was full and I had a great time - hopefully if you attended then you enjoyed it too and got something useful out of it. Thanks for all the questions Read More
posted Wednesday, March 12, 2008 10:29 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

ADO.NET Data Services - Identity columns and id values on the client

Someone asked me about this so I thought I'd share here. The question was around how you can work with database generated values and have them returned to the client after the insert. My experiment ran like this. I created a table;create table test ( Read More
posted Saturday, March 08, 2008 9:51 AM by mtaulty :: 2 Comments

Silverlight 2 - Update to MultiScaleImage Post

Quick update to this post - firstly I changed my OnKeyDown function;   void OnKeyDown(object sender, KeyEventArgs e) { double centreX = msi.ViewportOrigin.X + (msi.ViewportWidth / 2); double viewportHeight = msi.ViewportWidth Read More

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posted Friday, March 07, 2008 5:08 AM by mtaulty :: 3 Comments

Silverlight 2 - Clearing Isolated Storage and Quota == Long.MaxValue

I got into a situation where IsoloatedStorageFile.Quota was returning Long.MaxValue to me ( no idea why ). It looks like Silverlight2 isolated storage is being stored in; c:\users\userName\AppData\LocalLow\Microsoft\Silverlight\is so I just used process Read More

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posted Friday, March 07, 2008 4:02 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Silverlight 2 - Resizing Isolated Storage has to be from the UI

I got myself caught in a gotcha today. I was building a little demo which uses WebClient to download a file and then tries to cache it using Isolated Storage ( I'm not sure that's particularly useful because I think the browser will cache it anyway ). Read More

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posted Thursday, March 06, 2008 8:16 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Silverlight 2 - Compilation Error "Object Reference Not Set To Instance of An Object"

I was moving some WPF XAML across to Silverlight and when I build it in Visual Studio I keep getting; "Object Reference Not Set to An Instance Of An Object" This was driving me nuts and I had to do a binary chop on the XAML file removing pieces until Read More

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posted Wednesday, March 05, 2008 5:46 PM by mtaulty :: 11 Comments

Silverlight 2 - First Attempt with MultiScaleImage

I couldn't find much in the way of documentation around this so I thought I'd post something rough here as I was playing with it. I should caveat this by saying that this is my first attempt so don't expect it to be necessarily "right". I can't find any Read More

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posted Wednesday, March 05, 2008 11:57 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Announcement Days

These announcement days always make me feel a bit panicky. There's so much stuff being announced over at MIX that I get into a panic that I won't be able to keep up :-) I've been doing a little playing with Silverlight 2 just recently and using Blend Read More

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posted Tuesday, March 04, 2008 2:27 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Catching up on blog posts

Just been catching up on my blog reading and learnt a few things about what's going on with UK devs. Congratulations to Alex who's managed to achieve the unachievable :-) Working for Redmond and living in the UK. Commiserations to Dave who's hit the Read More

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