October 2008 - Mike Taulty's Blog

Localisation/Globalisation isn't my subject and it's a gnarly old topic so I generally leave it to folks like Guy who has a specific interest in that area, knows his onions and wrote the book! :-) However, a couple of things sparked my interest here. One was because a customer was asking me about it earlier this week and I hadn't really looked at it other than to expect it to work much like the regular .NET Framework. Then I saw Tim's post over here and that sparked more interest so I thought I'd take a dig in and see if I could get a bit of understanding. Generally, when I think of globalisation/localisation I think of CultureInfo.CurrentCulture and CultureInfo.CurrentUICulture and how one drives the formatting for dates, times, decimals and so on and the other drives resource lookup. This is explained up here for Silverlight; Globalisation based on CurrentCulture Localisation based on CurrentUICulture but straight away I was foxed by the feature. I wrote a little code to see how CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture...

Hey, I was going to write up Ray's session but, really, what's the point? No way I can make it better than you'll get by popping up here; http://www.microsoftpdc.com and watching it yourself.

Thanks to all the people who came to our re-run of the MSDN Roadshow that went around the country earlier in the year - this was a bunch of sessions on; ADO.NET Entity Framework and Data Services ASP.NET MVC, Dynamic Data and other enhancements in VS 2008 Sp1 Silverlight V2 Visual Studio Team System and happened in our London office today. My slides on Silverlight V2 are here for download in PPTX format - other formats will no appear on the post events site . A few questions that came up that needed code-samples as answers ( interestingly, these were both WPF ). These were put together very quickly so apply a pinch of salt as I haven't spent a lot of time here. 1) Can ObservableCollection<T> cope with a particular element being replaced? Not Added. Not Deleted. Replaced. Answer is "yes". Not 100% sure if I've got the question right but if I've got a UI that looks like this; < Window x:Class ="WpfApplication1.Window1" xmlns ="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x ="http://schemas...

When I get a new laptop (or any PC) if it comes pre-loaded with software then I wipe it and start again as, generally, you can get stuck with what now seem to be called (cr)applets from someone who pre-installed the OS for you. When I got my OS up and running on my Lenovo T61p, I installed the drivers from Lenovo and then I found that I ended up with a bunch of applications that look something like this; and initially I thought that I'd somehow managed to install the wrong software but, over time, I've come to like these applets. Why is it that I like them? They seem to have a certain aesthetic to them and a responsive way of behaving that I don't expect from basic, driver-installed applications like this. I expect them to be dull and boring but these ones seem to have nice UI and nice effects when I interact with them. Today I got to puzzling over how these things are built and so off I went into Process Explorer and found that they're actually built with WPF. I then took one ( PWMUI.exe ) and dropped it into...

Looking better than ever ( and it always looked great );

Following on from this post , I changed the library code that I was using a little to make the job of creating HTML ( specifically in my case a table ) in Silverlight 2 easier again. If I want to get hold of a div called myDiv and create a table within it then I can do ( as an example ); HtmlElement el = HtmlPage.Document.GetElementById( "myDiv" ); el.Add( new HElement(HElementType.table, new HElement(HElementType.tbody, new HElement(HElementType.tr, HElement.Replicate(HElementType.th, "Number" , "Squared" , "Cubed" )), from i in Enumerable.Range(1, 10) select new HElement(HElementType.tr, HElement.Replicate(HElementType.td, i.ToString(), (i * i).ToString(), (i * i * i).ToString()), new HElement(HElementType.td, new HElement(HElementType.input, new HAttribute(HAttributeType.type, "button" ), new HAttribute(HAttributeType. value , "click" ), new HEventHandler(HEventType.onclick, (s, a) => MessageBox.Show( string .Format( "You click on row number {0}" , i))))))))); I changed the supporting classes around a little...

I like the HTML DOM interoperability in Silverlight, I spent quite a lot of time in my UK REMIX talk (up here http://www.microsoft.com/uk/remix08/agenda.aspx on day 2) demonstrating various things that we can do with it and it's very, very rich and powerful. Like it. Like it. Like it :-) However, it doesn't half look like the HTML DOM! I know that's a daft thing to say, that's what it's meant to look like so you'd expect nothing else but recent advances in API's such as LINQ to XML have left me not wanting to do that kind of DOM based programming any more. Here's a "for instance". Imagine that I'm in the .NET world and I create a brand new Silverlight project and I've created this "UI" in XAML; < UserControl x:Class ="SilverlightApplication5.Page" xmlns ="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x ="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" > < Grid x:Name ="LayoutRoot" Background ="Gray" > < TextBox x:Name ="txtPerson" MinWidth ="192" FontSize ="36" Margin ="20" Text...