December 2009 - Mike Taulty's Blog

One of the interesting things about Silverlight 4 is the inclusion of the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) and I think it really helps to build the case for Silverlight 4 as a great platform for business applications. Silverlight applications are rich internet applications – the deployment model is strongly angled towards web deployment as the only way to install a Silverlight application is to start on a web page and run the application - the deployment is intended to be simple, quick and secure. As developers build more and increasingly complex applications with Silverlight they can hit a tension between preserving the ethos of Silverlight deployment ( i.e. simple, quick and secure ) and building an application with the rich set of functionality that they need. They also have to contend with the usual “abilities” of software development like making sure that the application is correct, performant, available, secure, scalable, maintainable and possibly extensible whilst being productive with the code they...

Ok, ok – this will be the last post about webcams and capturing video. I’ve got to stop :-) BUT…I thought I’d modify the code from the last post a little in order to try and capture audio along with the video. This opened up some “interesting questions” in that in Silverlight you derive from an AudioSink to capture audio and from a VideoSink to capture video. Now, those 2 base classes look awfully similar and if you want to capture both audio and video and try to synchronise the two then it feels a bit painful that you can’t implement some capturing interfaces rather than have to derive from base classes. Also, even though you feed both sinks into a CaptureSource, I noticed that I was getting audio samples a little before I was getting any video samples and so it looks like there a job involved to try and synchronize the two together. Silverlight does tell you where in the time sequence these various samples come from and it tells you how long they last but it could be expensive to try and analyse that information...

I’ve been using Twitter and one of the things that I followed recently was the Silverlight forums and that caused a question to bob up on my screen just yesterday; I haven’t replied back to the original poster as I don’t imagine that I’ve got the solution to his particular problem but it occurred to me that with Silverlight 4, reaching into an application like Outlook to use a little bit of functionality is exactly the kind of scenario that you can tackle with COM interop so that sparked my interest in experimenting with it. It feels like there’s a few possibilities around how you might do this with Silverlight 4; Staying within the sandbox you could try and do drag-and-drop from Outlook to Silverlight. I don’t think you can do a straight drag-drop because I don’t think Silverlight sees that as a file drop. I suspect you’d have to drag to desktop and then drag the resultant file to the Silverlight app. To do (2) and stay in the sandbox, you’d have to unpick the binary Outlook message format yourself which wouldn...

Giorgio has some interesting posts that he’s putting out over here on his blog; I’m just working my way through the most recent two at the time of writing; IE8 and HTML 5 IE8 and Web Standards

The other day I had a talk to give which included a little around Windows 7 shell programming in .NET 4.0 Beta 2 and I hadn’t really looked at it so I took a few mins out to take a look at how you can program the Taskbar in Windows 7 from WPF in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. I was really looking for a short, snappy screencast to take me through it and I didn’t find one ( which doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t exist but I did search around a little ) so I made a couple that I’ve embedded here. One is around jumplists; Windows 7 - Programming Taskbar jumplists with Visual Studio 2010 . and the other is around getting thumbnail previews of application windows on the Taskbar; Windows 7 - Programming Taskbar previews with Visual Studio 2010 . You’ll need Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 to follow along with these; Download Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Also, I mention that there is more complete Windows 7 functionality in the Windows API Code-Pack so take a look at that too; Download Windows API Code-Pack and, as always...

A long time ago I wrote a plug-in for Live Writer that did a Windows Live Search for you and let you paste the results. I won’t bang on about it too much here as I wrote it up at the time and it’s preserved for eternity here . I use this a lot in Live Writer but, increasingly, I don’t want to paste the actual URLs that come back from a search. What I want to insert is a shortened URL from Bit.ly. There’s a plug-in for doing that but I wanted to combine the Bit.ly service with my search dialog so I’ve updated it. In essence, you’re writing a blog post and you want to search for jellyfish so you go ahead and run my plug-in; and it springs up a Windows Forms 2.0 dialog where you can type in the search term ( it remembers them ); and it goes off and grabs results ( top 10 if I remember correctly ) and then you can select one of those and right mouse on it to shorten it with Bit.ly; and another dialog bobs up ( sorry, short of time :-) ); and clicking Shorten makes the REST call to Bit.ly and shortens the URL and takes...

I picked this up via Ian as a great resource for fonts so just blogging it here to avoid losing it;   I’m browsing the most downloaded as I write this….

Great post from Pete over here about Silverlight/WPF convergence; “The Future of Client App Dev: WPF and Silverlight Convergence” It’s funny as someone asked me just yesterday what my view was about Silverlight/WPF post-PDC and in the light of Silverlight 4 and I expressed pretty much the same view as Pete does here although less eloquently and in a lot fewer words in that I said something like; “I don’t think the position of the two technologies has changed too much” Hey, I’m a man of few words :-) Sure, Silverlight 4 has a bunch more functionality but fundamentally it still all hangs around the magic three words of; “Rich”, “Web” and “.NET” with attributes like; Quick, easy platform deployment Quick, easy app deployment Designed for cross platform Sandboxed by default with limited ( but significant ) options for breaking beyond that sandbox Network stack that’s optimised with functionality for the web rather than the LAN etc. etc. etc. etc. whereas WPF for me all hangs around the words of; “Rich”, “Windows”...