Mike Taulty's Blog
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December 2009 - Mike Taulty's Blog

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  • Silverlight 4 Screencasts - the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)

    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...
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  • “Can a Mac-Only Shop do Silverlight Development?”

    Loved this; As an aside, I spent some time exploring Eclipse4SL in Eclipse on OS X the other week – I might post some thoughts on that here.
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  • Silverlight 4 – WebCams.OnceMoreWithAudio()

    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...
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  • Silverlight 4 – Yet More on Capturing Video from Webcams

    In this previous post , I wrote some code that took a particular approach to saving uncompressed AVI files (i.e. just frames consisting of device-independent-bitmaps) from the webcam in Silverlight 4 by writing an application that; Saved video from the webcam to isolated storage in a “raw” file format Offered a process to take these isolated storage files in “raw” file format and convert it to an AVI file stored outside of isolated storage I went this route because I’d originally intended to try and compress the video frames ( which would take a tonne of time and needed to be divorced from the capturing of the video ) but I never got there. Consequently, it all got a bit more complex than it perhaps needed to be and it also involved the application requiring elevated trust to do step (2) above. Over the Christmas break, I got to rewrite that code ( on a very rainy day ) and I’ve another version of the application. It’s embedded in the page below, doesn’t require full-trust and should run in the browser with the...
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  • Silverlight 4 – Grabbing Emails from the Outlook Inbox

    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...
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  • Highlights of 2009

    I copied this idea from Eric (and Mike ) and thought I’d try and drill out my own set of “top 5” blog posts for 2009 as it draws to a close. Here’s the top 5 most viewed blog posts that I wrote this year; Silverlight & WPF Control Browser A quick look at Silverlight 3- Data Validation A quick look at Silverlight 3- DataForm Control Silverlight 3 and GPU Acceleration C# and Optional Parameters it’s a bit of a mixed-bag in terms of content but from looking at the next 5 down; Expression Blend 3- More on Actions, Triggers, Behaviors Silverlight 3 and Navigation Applications WPF, ComboBox, FontFamilies Silverlight 3 – What Are RIA Services- A quick look at Silverlight 3- Save File Dialog I guess I can draw them together under the banner of “Silverlight and WPF” :-) In terms of content not written in 2009 but viewed in 2009 the top 5 are ( filtering out any of the previous content ); Windows Communication Foundation- Videos LINQ to Video #18 A word for WinDbg Silverlight 2 - Simple Editing of Web Service Data in...
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  • Giorgio’s Writing on IE8

    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
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  • Silverlight 4 – More on Capturing Video from WebCams

    Apply a pinch of salt here, this is a work-in-progress….:-) I wanted to follow up a little on the blog post I wrote about capturing video/audio from the webcam/microphone with Silverlight 4. In that post I’d written a little about how you could take the audio stream and write it out in some format ( specifically, I chose to write my captured audio out as a WAV file ) but I’d deliberately left out trying to write out the video stream because it felt like it would be “more difficult” and, naturally, I like to avoid any challenge that appears tricky :-) Tim’s also got a great video up on Silverlight.NET that also provides a much more “interactive” view of how to get this stuff up and running and builds it up from scratch so I’d recommend that as background as well. But…what to do about actually writing the video out somewhere and in what format? Capturing the video isn’t too tricky. The question is how to go from the frames captured to a recognisable video format and whether that’s do-able in a cross-platform way...
  • Windows 7 & WPF 4.0 Beta – Taskbar programming of jumplists and thumbnail previews

    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...
  • 17th December London: (Free) VS 2010 and Application Lifecycle Management Event

    Just a quick plug for an event happening in London on the 17th December in partnership with Black Marble – I’ve copied the description below from the original link DATE: 17 December.  Location - Royal College of Physicians, 11 St Andrews Place, London NW1 4LE Welcome to the Microsoft/Black Marble exploration of developer tools and application lifecycle management, now taking place in London for your convenience. Visual Studio 2010 is being designed inside and out to give developers and development teams every advantage in getting the next ground-breaking application to market – quickly. The upshot is that your business gets to reap the rewards of tomorrow's efficiency today. Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2010 will deliver new capabilities that embrace the needs of the users in the application lifecycle – from architects to developers, from project managers to testers. Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is the coordination of all aspects of software engineering - including the formulation and...
  • Updated Live Writer Search Plug-In with Bit.ly

    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...
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  • Hacking Kaxaml to work on .NET 4.0

    This is what’s known as a “on the train” project :-) I wanted to get a version of Kaxaml that understood WPF 4.0 Beta 2 and so I spotted that the source was on CodePlex and thought I’d set about downloading it and seeing if I could get something going. I should probably try and contribute to the project rather than just writing this blog-post but as far as I can tell the source on CodePlex isn’t the most recent version of Kaxaml as it doesn’t seem to have the Silverlight 2 support that the most recent version from the website looks to have. So, rather than contribute to the wrong code-base I took some simple steps that you might be able to replicate to get a Kaxaml for WPF 4 up and running. Took me about 10 mins on the train. Download and unzip the Kaxaml source using the link above. Download and unzip the source for SharpDevelop from this site . In the SharpDevelop code, navigate to the src\Libraries\ICSharpCode.TextEditor folder and open up the solution with VS 2010. Use the properties page on the ICSharpCode...
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  • Font Squirrel!

    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….
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  • Silverlight 4 – Sharing Assemblies with .NET Applications

    This one’s just a link but an important link for anyone who’s heard that you can share assemblies between the Silverlight CLR and the full .NET desktop/server CLR. The CLR team has a blog post with the details; Sharing Silverlight Assemblies with .NET Apps
  • Pete Brown on Silverlight and WPF Convergence

    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”...
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