July 2009 - Mike Taulty's Blog

Following up on this post , it’s very much worth pointing out that there’s a new version of the Silverlight Toolkit that goes alongside the version 3 bits. The Silverlight Toolkit includes a bunch of functionality that’s not present in Silverlight itself and allows for the teams to do some innovation around what [may/may not] go into the next version of the product. It’s available in both binary and source-code form ( under the Microsoft Public License ) and you can also get the unit tests for the framework just to add to the general level of goodness :-) What do you get in the toolkit? A bunch of controls and other bits that generally make your life building a Silverlight application a lot more pleasant. These controls are banded into 4 buckets according to how far along in their lifecycle they are; Experimental Preview Stable Mature I’m not sure whether there are any controls currently in the “Mature” band – perhaps that’s not unrealistic given the age of the Toolkit and the speed of innovation on both the Toolkit...

This post is made from a train where I got bored and noticed an email in a discussion list folder that mentioned that Silverlight could do WCF authentication using TransportWithMessageCredential security. I’m not at all sure if this is a new thing and suspect that it’s more likely that it’s always been there and I’d just missed it but it fell into the category of “learning something new every day” :-) Regardless, I had a quick experiment with it – essentially TransportWithMessageCredential means that you’re using the transport ( e.g. in Siverlight this means HTTPS ) to ensure the privacy of the message that you’re transmitting and, because of that, it’s ok to transfer some credential as part of the message. This is similar to using basic/digest authentication over HTTPS except in that case it’s the HTTP protocol that’s transporting the credentials whereas in this case it’s the SOAP message that’s transporting them. One of the nice things about that is that those credentials can flow straight into WCF code in order...

Just a quick follow up to all the people who were kind enough to donate in response to my post here in case you were thinking that I’d chickened out of the run and pocketed the donations :-) In the end, my run profile looked like this; http://www.nike.com/europerunning/grs/index.jsp?runner=746340&rid=122 although I have to say that I can’t see that Flash content on my machine right now – not sure what’s going on with that page instantiating the Flash plug-in but it seems to be looking for a specific version that I maybe don’t have? Anyway - I didn’t quite get under 50 minutes like I wanted to but it was close enough :-) I managed to raise £615 for the charity and I held back on posting this update whilst I checked to see if Microsoft Ltd would agree to match that donation. They very kindly agreed to do so and that doubles it up to a nice £1300 which I’m very pleased with. Thanks once again to all who donated and to Microsoft Ltd as well :-)

It was very warm and humid last night in Manchester, UK and so I sat up late catching up on a whole bunch of blog-reading that I haven’t done for a few weeks. I tend to use my blog-reader ( FeedDemon ) in the same way that I use Outlook. I go through everything, delete anything I’m less interested in and then revisit the other stuff at a later point and I thought I’d spend some time today visiting all those posts I’d flagged as interesting. Whilst doing that, I thought I’d share what they were here – note that some of this stuff is a little old now as I’ve not been reading those blogs as frequently as I used to. I’m sure I was meant to be doing something else but I found a day mostly made up of reading other people’s posts really useful and enjoyable so I reckon it was a day well spent. WPF Multi-touch in WPF 4 Beta 1 – this seemed particularly relevant to me based on my recent experiments with multi-touch Workflow 10-4 Good Buddy, First Look at WF 4 Learning by Example with 4 Introducing the WF4 Designer Introduction...

Following up on this post , I wanted to see if I could continue to use the interop wrappers in order to add inertia to my multi-touch manipulations. The intertia API in Windows 7 is really “just” a physics engine that you can use to add more realism to things like touch interactions. There’s some detail on that physics engine in the docs and, specifically, here . As an example, for a manipulation that involves a translation ( like a pan ) your object is moved in some direction by the manipulation along some 2D vector (Ai + Bj) and the inertia engine picks up when the manipulation is over and takes the object’s position, the displacement vector and a deceleration value and then calculates new positions for the object over a specified time period at a specified interval. The documents of course refer to the COM implementation whereas the interop wrappers wrap all this up for you and surface it a slightly different way and it took me a little while to get even a little used to what was going on – for me, perhaps...