Mike Taulty's Blog
Bits and Bytes from Microsoft UK

August 2009 - Mike Taulty's Blog

Blogs

Mike Taulty's Blog

Elsewhere

  • Silverlight & WCF PollingDuplex Channel

    Interesting blog post with some performance numbers around the PollingDuplex channel in Silverlight 3.
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  • Rough Notes on Unity

    I’ve been looking at Unity a little lately. I appreciate that this doesn’t necessarily fall into the category of “new” as it’s been around for a while but I’m meeting more and more developers who are using it ( or other comparable frameworks ) and it also crops up in frameworks like Prism which, again, I’m seeing more and more people either using or referencing as they do work with WPF and/or Silverlight. What’s Unity? It’s a “dependency injection container”. Now, at that point a bunch of folks reading this will say “Yes, we know and we’re already using it for reasons A, B, C or we’ve elected not to use it for reasons X,Y,Z ” and I imagine a bunch of other folks might say; “Huh? What’s a dependency injection container?” This post is for the latter people – it’s not meant to be exhaustive but hopefully it’s not completely unhelpful either :-) The key word here is dependency . In software, we all know what it means to take dependencies on other components. Examples; The other component ships late and breaks your...
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  • WCF 4 and WF 4?

    Two fantastic articles up at MSDN around WCF and WF in V4.0. A Developer’s Introduction to Windows Communication Foundation (WCF4) in .NET 4 Beta 1 A Developer’s Introduction to Windows Workflow Foundation (WF4) in .NET 4 Beta 1
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  • Silverlight 3 UK Launch – Interview with Ian Ellison-Taylor

    At the recent Silverlight 3 UK launch I got a chance to catch up with Ian Ellison-Taylor who’s Microsoft’s General Manager for Presentation Platform and Tools. As usual at Microsoft, I had to ask for a translation around what that job title means and, in simple words, Ian owns; WPF and Silverlight which makes him a very interesting chap to chat to :-) Ian kindly keynoted the launch event for us and even agreed to answering semi-random questions from me around WPF and Silverlight so I captured the chat that we had on video and dropped it out to Channel 9 here; Silverlight 3 UK Launch- Chat with Ian Ellison-Taylor Whilst Ian has the scary word “manager” in his job title ;-) it’s very, very obvious from chatting to him that he “knows his stuff” inside and out and can talk at any level about what we’re doing around presentation technologies – seriously impressive stuff.
  • Silverlight Line of Business Applications in the UK ( Part 1 )

    At the recent Silverlight 3 UK launch I got a chance to catch up with a number of companies who are building line of business applications with Silverlight 2 or 3. In the early days of Silverlight most applications you’d see would relate to graphics/media/audio and would be displaying the richness that you can get with a Silverlight application. Naturally, I’m as much of a sucker for the elegance and productivity of a rich and well designed UI as the next man. As time goes by, we’re seeing more and more examples of people building business applications with Silverlight taking advantage of the strength of the .NET developer model, the flexibility of the control system, the richness of 3rd party controls, the power of data-binding, the safety of the application’s sandbox and its ability to interact in a secure way with the browser, the local machine and the network over web service interactions. Whilst at the launch I managed to sit down with a few of the companies that are doing this kind of work and grab a few...
  • Applications Using WPF

    A common question around technologies like WPF is; “Who’s using this?” and I picked up a really slick brochure the other day with some great references around customers using WPF across lots of different kinds of applications and so I thought I’d share here – bear in mind that this is just a handful of selected applications and ( as you might expect ) there’s a lot more WPF applications out there than we might be able to fit into a brochure :-) I snipped out all the images and dropped them into a DeepZoom project. The latest Deep Zoom Composer has a new SlideShow feature which makes this pretty easy to do so I just used that and then applied a slight hack to what was emitted from the tool to produce the player below for free;   Enjoy browsing the breadth of applications that people have built with WPF – the player is probably better if you set it to full screen as I’ve left it pretty small here but you can also view it here   Off-Topic – My Hack to DeepZoom Composer’s SlideShow Project…   If you...
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  • Installing .NET Framework V4.0 and Running .NET 2.0/3.0/3.5/3.5Sp1 Applications

    If you’ve looked at .NET 4.0 at all then I’m sure you’ll be aware that .NET 4.0 bears a similar relationship to .NET 3.5 Sp1 that .NET 2.0 did to .NET 1.1 in that the underlying Common Language Runtime has changed. This hasn’t happened for quite a while. The CLR has remained at “version 2.0” since .NET 2.0 shipped with Visual Studio 2005. I use quotes because various service packs have been applied along the way but the CLR can still be thought of as version 2.0. Windows Vista shipped with .NET Framework V3.0 and the CLR “stayed the same”. We just got new libraries for WPF, WCF, WF, CardSpace. Visual Studio 2008 shipped with .NET Framework V3.5 and the CLR “stayed the same” again. We got new libraries for things like LINQ and lots of other features. Those features went into new assemblies so as to avoid having to alter existing ones. Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 shipped with .NET Framework V3.5 Service Pack 1 and the CLR “stayed the same” again. We got new libraries for things like Entity Framework, ADO.NET...
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