November 2009 - Mike Taulty's Blog

Quick test post – I’ve spotted a problem with blog code formatting for examples such as; static void Main() {     int[] array = new int[10];     int i = 5;     int value = array[i]; } which my code formatter appears to put out as; static void Main() { int[] array = new int[10]; int i = 5; int value = array[i]; } and an emoticon appears to pop up instead of array[i] – ho hum, looks like it’s time to go around the loop again on “how to get code formatting to work on the website”. It looks fine in Live Writer but not when published. Update – this looks to be Community Server’s “emoticon filter”, attempting to change…

Note – these posts are put together after a short time with Silverlight 4 as a way of providing pointers to some of the new features that Silverlight 4 has to offer. I’m posting these from the PDC as Silverlight 4 is announced for the first time so please bear that in mind when working through these posts.   The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) has been getting a lot of interest lately and it’s something that’s out on CodePlex and it’s also part of .NET Framework 4.0. It’s also part of Silverlight 4. The name’s a good one – it’s a framework for building an application that is made up of a bunch of loosely coupled components with a lot of flexibility around component discovery, registration, lookup and lifetime management. If I had to sum it up in my own words I’d say something like; MEF composes an application by extensibly discovering a set of components which offer exported functionality and ( possibly ) rely on imported functionality. The link between the two is a simple string name ( a MEF “contract...

Note – these posts are put together after a short time with Silverlight 4 as a way of providing pointers to some of the new features that Silverlight 4 has to offer. I’m posting these from the PDC as Silverlight 4 is announced for the first time so please bear that in mind when working through these posts. A short one – Silverlight 4 has a new CompositeTransform class that you can use for your RenderTransform values – it looks like; and the transformations run scale->skew->rotate->translate – really this just saves you having to use separate ScaleTransform, SkewTransform, RotateTransform and TranslateTransform so saves on the length of XAML.

Note – these posts are put together after a short time with Silverlight 4 as a way of providing pointers to some of the new features that Silverlight 4 has to offer. I’m posting these from the PDC as Silverlight 4 is announced for the first time so please bear that in mind when working through these posts. Silverlight 3 added support for the MouseWheel event and it is present on the UIElement class. However, the controls in Silverlight don’t generally respond well to mouse wheel events whereas in Silverlight 4 you should expect to see controls doing the right thing in response to the mousewheel. As an example, here’s a quick ListBox; <UserControl x:Class="SilverlightApplication30.MainPage" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" mc:Ignorable="d"...

Note – these posts are put together after a short time with Silverlight 4 as a way of providing pointers to some of the new features that Silverlight 4 has to offer. I’m posting these from the PDC as Silverlight 4 is announced for the first time so please bear that in mind when working through these posts. Silverlight 3 introduced a new navigation style of application where a Silverlight application is structured out of a set of Pages which are displayed by a Frame that navigates to those pages ( by changing its Uri Source property to point at a specific page ). This is underpinned by a NavigationService which supports the idea of navigating forward/backwards and the functionality also integrates with the browser’s history and address bar. As pages are navigated to there’s a nice overload where they can run code and ( e.g. ) interrogate the query string to grab parameters from it. It means that a Silverlight application can behave exactly like the rest of the web with forward/backward navigation and can offer...

Note – these posts are put together after a short time with Silverlight 4 as a way of providing pointers to some of the new features that Silverlight 4 has to offer. I’m posting these from the PDC as Silverlight 4 is announced for the first time so please bear that in mind when working through these posts. With Silverlight 4 comes C# 4 and VB 10 and some of the new capabilities around being able to do dynamic dispatch. As in the full .NET framework that means that you can use new ways to invoke methods/properties/events at runtime via dynamic dispatch into objects either via; reflection COM interop some custom mechanism – i.e. the dynamic support is pluggable There’s a custom implementation in Silverlight 4 around dynamic invocation into the HTML DOM’s types. Since version 2, Silverlight has had a very strong story around integration with the HTML DOM and you can do all kinds of interoperability between the Silverlight world and the HTML world including manipulating the UI’s of the 2 worlds from their 2 programming...

Note – these posts are put together after a short time with Silverlight 4 as a way of providing pointers to some of the new features that Silverlight 4 has to offer. I’m posting these from the PDC as Silverlight 4 is announced for the first time so please bear that in mind when working through these posts. For an out-of-browser Silverlight 4 application, you can take more control around the Window that presents your application. Firstly, by changing the XML manifest you can control where the Window positions itself on the screen, for example; <OutOfBrowserSettings ShortName="SilverlightApplication24 Application" EnableGPUAcceleration="False" ShowInstallMenuItem="True"> <OutOfBrowserSettings.Blurb>SilverlightApplication24 Application on your desktop; at home, at work or on the go.</OutOfBrowserSettings.Blurb> <OutOfBrowserSettings.WindowSettings> <WindowSettings Title="SilverlightApplication24 Application" WindowStartupLocation="Manual"...