Mike Taulty's Blog
Bits and Bytes from Microsoft UK

March 2009 - Mike Taulty's Blog

Blogs

Mike Taulty's Blog

Elsewhere

  • Parallel Extensions in Visual Studio Beta 1

    Meanwhile, over in a corner of the internet; http://blogs.msdn.com/pfxteam/archive/2009/03/27/9514938.aspx news starts to leak out about what the Parallel Extensions might look like in Beta 1 of Visual Studio 2010. Does this mean a beta is on its way? Stay tuned… (no, I don’t know either :-)). I’m liking the look of the new cancellation bits though.
  • Expression Blend 3: Triggers, Actions, Behaviours

    From the Expression Blend blog; An Introduction to Behaviors, Triggers, and Actions Behaviors Under the Hood – API Details and Constraining the Type My only worry about some of this stuff is that it seems to be happening in Expression Blend rather than in Silverlight itself and that makes me wonder; What happens for the Silverlight developer who’s not running Blend? Will this functionality ultimately end up duplicated back in Silverlight itself? How does this line up with what’s already in WPF and what does it mean for code/XAML that needs to move between both? WPF already has Triggers and Actions so how does this line up? From what I’ve seen though, the functionality offered by Behaviours and the way that the designer surfaces it is very impressive so I’d expect them to become pretty pervasive pretty quickly.
    Filed under: , ,
  • Planning a Silverlight 2 Talk

    I’ve got some Silverlight 2 talks to deliver this week and I was planning them a little on the sofa tonight whilst watching Damages (with its plots-on-top-of-plots :-S) and so I thought it might be fun to share my sketches. I often plan out talks like this as a cheap and cheerful way of figuring out what is in/out and what sort of route the thing might take. As I say, “just for fun” :-) Apologies for all the images… I’ll see if the talks actually shape up anything like this!
    Filed under:
  • ADO.NET Data Services Session at SQL Bits Manchester

    A big thanks to all the people who came along to my session at SQLBits today on ADO.NET Data Services and also to the organisers and community around SQLBits that made the event happen in the first place. I was there for most of the afternoon and it seemed like a fantastic event to me in a cool venue. As promised, my slides from the session are here for download – you’ll perhaps notice that there are a few additional (hidden) slides in the slide-deck that I didn’t use in this talk as I collapsed this talk down from an earlier talk and updated it to reflect the RTM version of Data Services and also the various CTPs/Previews that are currently kicking around. So…you get a little more than I actually used at the conference. Enjoy :-)
  • C# and Optional Parameters

    I talked a little at DevWeek about C# 4 and Visual Basic 10 and, in the C# section of that talk, I talked about optional parameters and named parameters coming into the language. I presented an example class something like this one; class P e r s o n { public void W a l k ( ) { W a l k ( 1 ) ; } public void W a l k ( int h o w F a r ) { W a l k ( 1 , 3 . 0 ) ; } public void W a l k ( int h o w F a r , double s p e e d ) { W a l k ( 1 , 3 . 0 , false ) ; } public void W a l k ( int h o w F a r , double s p e e d , bool c o m e B a c k ) { } } with a method like Walk here which ends up having a number of overloads because I want to offer the calling programmer a bit of convenience around how many (or few) arguments they need to pass to the function. I’ve always found it a bit painful to have to write N methods like this when, really, there’s only one method called Walk and we just want to mark a number of parameters as optional which is exactly what C# 4 will let us do. So, in C# 4 we can do something like; class...
  • Windows Azure - .NET Services and the Service Bus

    I’ll be honest. I haven’t done much with Windows Azure at this point. The list of technologies that I need to “spend time on” never seems to shrink and the pieces in Azure have so far escaped me although I do have a long-standing interest in all this service-based stuff spanning back through WF, WCF, ASMX and BizTalk. I did spend some time with some of the Live Services so that puts a small tick into one of the boxes on the block diagram from the PDC; but, as always, there’s a tonne more to do. However…one thing that I definitely picked up at DevWeek is that I need to take a bunch more interest in what falls into that category of Microsoft .NET Services , namely; Access Control Service Bus Workflow Services so that’s been pushed onto my stack marked “TO DO” ( along with a tonne of other stuff :-) ).
  • DevWeek Follow Up

    I did a couple of sessions at DevWeek this week and had a really good time meeting up with various folks and chatting about technologies. My sessions were on; VB and C# in Visual Studio 2010 Parallel Extensions in Visual Studio 2010 Silverlight and HTML/Javascript interoperability (in Silverlight 2) You can grab the slides from here . I’ll also put them on SlideShare so that they are more generally available. As is 99% the case with me – these are not Microsoft generic slides taken from somewhere else, these are all hand-cranked from me to try and find the best way that I can of telling a story so if they don’t line up with something you saw elsewhere then feel free to assume that I am wrong and the other story you saw was probably the right one :-)
  • Expression Blend 3 & Behaviours

    I’m still very much in a mode where I’m trying to catch up with Mix09. I’ve been watching this video about Behaviours in Expression Blend 3 and it led me on to this gallery of behaviours up here which looks pretty cool to me. So far I’ve only tried the MessageBox and the Drag behaviour which both worked perfectly for me and left me with the feeling that I need to know a lot more about behaviours!
  • Microsoft Architect Insight Conference – 8th May, London

    A quick word for the AIC, the Microsoft Architect Insight Conference happening in the Microsoft offices in London on the 8th May – you can find the full details by clicking on the picture below; It’s an action-packed agenda with around 20 speakers taking part in a single day’s event with topics ranging from Modelling with Oslo though to architectural choices around “Cloud” and on to mobility. Should be a very cool day, take a look at the website and sign up :-)
    Filed under:
  • DevDays 2009 – 28th and 29th May, World Forum in the Hague

    I’m very pleased to say that I’m going to be returning to Holland for DevDays 2009. Last year was the first year that I’ve been to DevDays and it was largely on the advice of Daniel who I have to thank for introducing me to one of the most enjoyable (and well run) technical conferences that I’ve been to. This year I’m going to be doing a couple of sessions on Silverlight 3 focusing on the new functionality and I’ll also be doing an updated version of my “ Beyond Silverlight with WPF” talk. Developers in the UK should consider this conference (if budgets allow – I know that money’s tight right now) as it really does have a great atmosphere and great speakers such as; David Chappell Aaron Skonnard Fritz Onion Ingo Rammer Keith Brown Oliver Sturm Rob Miles Sara Ford and many, many more. Hope to see you there :–) Ps. Not so sure about the “brain with legs and baseball boots” logo!
    Filed under: , ,
  • DevWeek 2009

    Just a quick advertisement to say that I’ll be at DevWeek in London next week from Tuesday until Thursday. I’m doing sessions on; C# and VB in Visual Studio 2010 Parallel Extensions to .NET in Visual Studio 2010 Silverlight and HTML/JavaScript interoperability but in the downtime I’ll be around the venue or at the Microsoft stand so if anyone wants to meet up, have a chat, grab a coffee then do please come along and say “Hello”.
    Filed under:
  • Silverlight 3 – What Are RIA Services?

    Via Brad Abrams; http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2009/03/19/what-is-net-ria-services.aspx
    Filed under: ,
  • Silverlight 3: More Posts?

    Just a quick note – I didn’t want anyone to think that I’d given up on Silverlight 3 or that these posts; A quick look at Silverlight 3- MIX 08 WPF Demo Copy in Silverlight 3 A quick look at Silverlight 3- Projections A quick look at Silverlight 3- Running Outside the Browser A quick look at Silverlight 3- Detecting network status A quick look at Silverlight 3- Effects A quick look at Silverlight 3- Easing Animations A quick look at Silverlight 3- Data Validation A quick look at Silverlight 3- Packaging Assemblies for Download A quick look at Silverlight 3- Local Connection A quick look at Silverlight 3- Element to Element Data Binding A quick look at Silverlight 3- Derived Styles A quick look at Silverlight 3- Save File Dialog A quick look at Silverlight 3- DataForm Control were meant to be a definitive feature list of anything like that ( nowhere near! :-) ) but they were all I’ve managed to find time for so far and I’ve got to turn my attention away from Silverlight 3 for a week or two to “do the day job”....
    Filed under: ,
  • A quick look at Silverlight 3: DataForm Control

    There’s a really cool new data control in Silverlight 3, the DataForm – it’s quite a big control so rather than write about it here, I made a screencast about it which is up here;
    Filed under: ,
  • A quick look at Silverlight 3: Save File Dialog

    Silverlight 3 gets a Save File Dialog. Anyone who’s used Silverlight 2 and its Open File Dialog will feel instantly at home as in; S a v e F i l e D i a l o g s f d = new S a v e F i l e D i a l o g ( ) { D e f a u l t E x t = "txt" , F i l t e r = "Text files (*.txt)|*.txt|All files (*.*)|*.*" , F i l t e r I n d e x = 1 } ; if ( s f d . S h o w D i a l o g ( ) = = true ) { // User selected item. Only property we can get to is. using ( S t r e a m s t r e a m = s f d . O p e n F i l e ( ) ) { s t r e a m . C l o s e ( ) ; } } As with the Open File Dialog, the dialog has to be raised in response to a direct user interaction like clicking on a button – it can’t be raised by a (potentially malicious) piece of code. Similarly, the only thing you can do with the dialog is to call the OpenFile() method and that gives you no details about the user’s machine or their file system but simply a Stream that you can write into and close off. So…pretty simple stuff to use but great in terms of the number...
    Filed under: ,
1 2 3 Next >