June 2009 - Mike Taulty's Blog

I’ve been a bit stuck with blog engines. I run Community Server and have done for a long time and, during that time, the product’s become very big and very rich and I only use about 10% of what it does. I just want a blog engine. I was recently considering what to do about this as I’ve been getting behind on Community Server versions. I tried Graffiti CMS which looks to be a fork of Community Server designed for people like me who just want the blog engine bits but, frankly, whilst the UI looked great and it seemed so much simpler than Community Server I found that the migration process from Community Server didn’t really work for me and I was also left wondering whether the product was very “alive” as there’s quite a bit of discussion out there about it dying off and my questions to the forums went unanswered. So, I returned to Community Server and decided that it was time to upgrade to the latest and greatest and I thought I’d blog my experiences for anyone else that has the same situation. Firstly, let me explain...

I was down in the Microsoft Technology Centre at Reading the other week where I got a chance to take a look at a piece of proof-of-concept work that one of our customers is doing around using touch in Windows 7 to improve the user experience of one of their applications. ( I’ve captured this on video and will share at a later point as I’m not able to just at the moment ). But this got me thinking about Multi-Touch in Windows 7 and wondering how easy/hard it is. I’ve done some work with the Tablet PC in my time and that wasn’t too tricky and I gave an example of that at DevDays the other week in that I used a simple WPF application that handles basic ink gestures; and that’s just using a WPF InkCanvas with its gesture mode set to GestureOnly and a little code behind it ( download the source here if you like ). So, that was easy enough but what about Multi-Touch? Well, the first “problem” I have is that I don’t have any multi-touch-enabled hardware. I’ve seen 2 multi-touch-enabled machines, the HP TouchSmart; and...

Just a quick plug – I’ll be doing some sessions on Silverlight 3 at MIX Essentials in Dublin on the 24th June. Click the picture above to jump to the site where you can register. It’s an all day event with 2 tracks running concurrently and I like the strap-line that says “ Completely Free” :-) Maybe see you there…

Following on from this post . As expected, porting my Utilities library to WPF wasn’t too difficult. It was a matter of creating a WPFUtilities class library, adding the existing source from Utilities as linked code files and then referencing PresentationCore and PresentationFramework and hitting build. then again, there were only a couple of very basic classes in there so it’s not too surprising. Next, I thought I’d try and port my Security project and so created another Class Library project WPFSecurity and added the existing source files as linked files again. This project though is a bit more complex in that it has 2 sets of WCF service references in order to call the Authentication and Role services made available by ASP.NET. I need to add service references to my WPFSecurity project and try and ensure as few code changes as possible by doing that. In adding the references, I made sure to use the same proxy namespace names; and also all references in Silverlight are asynchronous and so my...

Following up on this post I thought the first control I’d build would be a graph control so I just referenced the Silverlight Toolkit for its graphs and very quickly had; <UserControl x:Class="SilverlightApplication6.Controls.ChartDisplayControl" xmlns=" http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x=" http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:charts="clr-namespace:System.Windows.Controls.DataVisualization.Charting;assembly=System.Windows.Controls.DataVisualization.Toolkit" xmlns:localCtl="clr-namespace:SilverlightApplication6.Controls"> <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> <RowDefinition Height="*" /> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> <TextBlock Text="Historical sales data for product" /> <TextBlock Margin="5,0,0,0" Text="{Binding ProductName...

Following up from this post , I set about building some services to power my application’s data requirements. These aren’t perfect by any means but they’re enough for a sample application to get going with. Working from the sketch of how the services need to look given at the end of the previous post , I put together a LINQ to SQL diagram; and left LINQ to SQL to do concurrency checking based on every column in the Product table ( I only plan to modify the Product table ) which is its default if I remember correctly ( and, usually, overkill but it’ll do for me here ). And I then produced a rough service interface; public class L o o k u p D a t a I t e m { public int I d { get ; set ; } public string T i t l e { get ; set ; } } public class P r o d u c t S a l e s { public string M o n t h Y e a r L a b e l { get ; set ; } public decimal T o t a l S a l e s { get ; set ; } } public class P r o d u c t S e a r c h R e s u l t { public int P a g e { get ; set ; } public int T o t a l P a...

I was at the NxtGen Fest 09 event in Cambrdige today talking about Silverlight 3. A truly fantastic day with a cracking start from Professor Chris Bishop of Royal Institute Christmas lectures fame;   who was talking about 3rd generation artificial intelligence technologies. There were other great sessions from Dinis Cruz, Chris Hay amongst others. By contrast to Chris’ talk, my talk was the fairly mundane topic of; I had an interesting problem with a demo where a Silverlight client was calling a web service and I was serving up that service from Cassini and the project had been left to use dynamic ports ( by mistake ) and the port changed during the demo and the client couldn’t find the server. Truly foxed me but I took the British route of; and tried to fix it with the debugger before giving up and moving on so hopefully ( if you came along ) your enjoyment was improved by seeing me wrestling with Visual Studio rather than reduced by it :-) The slides from the talk are here for download and all the demos...

I found myself reading this post today as I wanted to build a Silverlight control which is a little like Viewbox in that it has ( let’s say ) a single lump of content that it wants to display and I was struggling to find the right base class for it. Why? Because in WPF there are methods like AddLogicalChild on FrameworkElement whereas in Silverlight you don’t have this so you have to look for a control to sub-class which already has some notion of content ( like ContentControl perhaps :-) ). Anyway, it’s an interesting read to see how Viewbox had to function a particular way when implemented by the Silverlight Toolkit team and ( if you look at the beta bits for Silverlight 3 ) you’ll find that it now works as you’d expect especially when you write XAML like; <controls:Viewbox>             <TextBlock                 x:Name="xyz" />        ...