May 2009 - Mike Taulty's Blog

It’s a public holiday in the UK and the weather’s turned sour but playing with XAML and WPF can still bring on a smile – I’m not claiming it’s anything new or clever but I enjoyed it ( paste into Kaxaml or XamlPad to view ); <Page    xmlns=" http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"    xmlns:ctl="clr-namespace:System.Windows.Controls;assembly=PresentationFramework"    xmlns:env="clr-namespace:System.Diagnostics;assembly=System"    xmlns:x=" http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" >    <Page.Resources>     <Style x:Key="styleFontFamily" TargetType="{x:Type TextBlock}">       <Setter Property="FontFamily" Value="Calibri"/>     </Style>     <Style x:Key="styleTitleFont" BasedOn="{StaticResource styleFontFamily}" TargetType="{x:Type TextBlock...

On advice from Twitter :-) I’m trying a new code-formatting plug-in for Live Writer. It’s this one from here . Here’s an experimental piece of code that my previous plug-in wasn’t coping with very well, let’s see if this post shows up and whether it causes my blog engine to explode :-) using System; using System.Net; using System.Windows; using System.Windows.Controls; using System.Windows.Documents; using System.Windows.Ink; using System.Windows.Input; using System.Windows.Media; using System.Windows.Media.Animation; using System.Windows.Shapes; using Expression = Microsoft.Expression.Interactivity; using System.Linq; using System.Windows.Data; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Reflection; namespace MikesDragDropBits { public class DraggableBehavior : Expression. Behavior < FrameworkElement > { public DraggableBehavior() { } public string PropertyPath { get ; set ; } protected override void OnAttached() { base .OnAttached(); this .AssociatedObject.MouseLeftButtonDown += OnMouseDown; this .AssociatedObject...

Just a quick plug – tomorrow evening I’m doing a session on ADO.NET Data Services (“Astoria”) at the SQL Server User’s Group at Microsoft, Reading. See here for details; http://sqlserverfaq.com/events/167/Sessions-on-Understanding-ADONET-Data-Services-Windows-7-features-indepth-and-the-usual-SQL-Nuggets-and-Networking.aspx it’d be great to see you there.

I figured that it was time for me to try and fathom Behaviors in Expression Blend 3. I’d seen quite a bit about them, I’ve seen them used but I hadn’t sat down and tried to do anything with them myself. First off, I read some very good backgrounders over here; Blend 3 Behaviors- Interactivity Without Code Blend 3- Triggers, Actions, Behaviors Blend 3 Behaviors- A Sample Action and then I followed up with some bits over here which are equally good; A Quick Walkthrough Writing Your Own Triggers Looking at Triggers and Actions and, in terms of trying to write something original around these topics, I’m not sure that there’s much that I can add but I did want to write something down as it forces me to actually walk through it and think about it properly. Prior to Blend 3 Preview, both WPF and Silverlight have the idea of; Trigger - something that flags when an interesting thing happens like a property hitting some value or an event being fired Action – something to do like running a Storyboard, displaying a MessageBox...

I’ve just finished making my complete move to Windows 7. I’ve been running Windows 7 for a while on a number of machines but with the RC I thought I’d move lock-stock-and-barrel to Windows 7. One of the first things that hit me was around the UAC options. I’ve always left UAC switched on but I’ve generally configured it so that it doesn’t use the secure desktop. Now, I realise that this is slightly less secure than the default but I do it for a reason and that’s because I do a lot of demos on projectors and if you leave the secure desktop switched on then the screen tends to go dark when the UAC prompt fires up and the room goes a bit dark and the audience gets a bit of a “shock” :-) So, I usually switch off the secure desktop aspect – that is, in the local security policy I disable the middle on of these three; but then today I ran Task Manager and I asked it to “show processes from all users” and I was a bit surprised because I didn’t get a UAC prompt (I’m running as administrator on my machine but UAC is switched...