January 2010 - Mike Taulty's Blog

I’ve been to lots of conferences or meetings where people (Microsoft or not) are delivering technical sessions relating to Microsoft technology. I’ve also spoken at lots of those things as well. A recurring problem is getting feedback. Sometimes it’s a long paper-based form to fill in. Sometimes it’s a website or a terminal where you tick boxes to provide your view on the sessions you’ve seen. Sometimes it seems that the organiser has gone to great lengths to make it so difficult for you to provide feedback that you don’t bother and the speaker is none the wiser as to whether they did a great job or not. The obvious solution these days is to use something like Twitter and people do exactly that but I wondered whether it might be possible to come up with a simple, “standardised” way of providing session feedback via Twitter rather than leaving it to be ad-hoc. How would that help? It’d help the speaker as they could easily formulate a Twitter search to find their feedback or write a tool to do it. It’d help the...

I was reading Tim’s post over here on “Silverlight 4 with COM can do anything – on Windows” which referenced Justin’s amazingly detailed post with a bunch of COM interop examples from Silverlight 4 . A Silverlight 4 beta application that has been explicitly installed as trusted by the user can create COM objects if they have a registered ProgId and if they implement IDispatch. As anyone who’s been around Windows for a while and especially anyone who wrote scripting code like ASP pages will know, that opens up quite a lot of code to those applications. I think that was made pretty clear at the PDC when the feature was first announced. My personal view is that the COM interop feature is something that you'd use sparingly to add additional functionality that becomes available when and where COM interop is turned on rather than writing a tonne of code that takes the COM interop route. Why’s that? Firstly, you might find your application goes into an environment where the users aren't allowed to run trusted...

I was looking for an example of how Silverlight content is drawn with vectors that I could use in a slide-deck and it occurred to me to look at Bing Maps . I think the Bing Maps beta is pretty stunning and I was searching my blog for where I’d made reference to the beta and I realised that I don’t think that I have made reference to it; I must have just dreamt it. Or, more likely, dropped it onto Twitter. Anyway, if you haven’t seen the Bing Maps beta with Silverlight & PhotoSynth and all that goodness then read this post from Chris and then go and check it out although I warn you that it can eat quite a bit of time once you get playing with it. Anyway, back to vectors. It’s easy to see the “vector effect” on Bing Maps by just zooming the browser up to 200% or 400% where you can see the quality of the fonts and UI elements such as;   and you can very quickly see where bitmaps are used in the UI like in this weather symbol ( and the maps :-) );

I was reviewing the traffic figures that my hoster ( http://www.webhost4life.com ) gives me for this blog site and I thought I’d share. This is how 2009 ended; So around ~30M hits to around ~15M pages and just under 1TB of data shifted across the network. Those are much bigger numbers than I’d have expected so a big “thanks!” to people who subscribe and read the feed and/or stumble across these pages from a web search. I’ve no idea how accurate the individual numbers are as I’ve never looked very hard at how they’re measured but I assume the hoster must know what they’re doing and they’re useful for relative comparisons to previous years like 2008 and 2007; which seems to indicate that the traffic coming to the site is generally growing although not every figure is growing in the same way so I should perhaps zoom into some of that in more detail - it’s definitely more than I had way back in 2004 which is the first full year that I have data for :-)   Now…to see if I can get those figures to go up through...

Just a quick plug for a session that I’m delivering at a new Microsoft User Group in Newcastle on the 20th January. The group is called “NEBytes” and you can find it and details of the sessions on the 20th by clicking their banner below; I’m delivering a session on Silverlight. The intention is to try and talk from version 1 through to version 4 with an emphasis on the later versions (3 and 4) – it should be entertaining to try and fit all of that into an hour long session so I’ll have to set a level for the talk that lets me get it in. If you’re in the area come along and support the new group & I look forward to catching you there.

One of the things that I talked about in the screencasts that I made about Silverlight 4 and MEF was the PackageCatalog. By the way – to make any sense of this stuff you need to install Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and Silverlight 4 Beta . The PackageCatalog is currently part of the Silverlight 4 Toolkit . It comes with a friend called Package which can asynchronously download a XAP file to produce an instance of Package. You can then take that instance and add it to a PackageCatalog that’s being used by a MEF CompositionContainer in order to add functionality dynamically and asynchronously to an already running application It’s important to remember that the Silverlight Toolkit represents a place for innovation and is something that’s not supported in the same way as Silverlight itself so when you’re using types from there, bear that in mind ( and especially when things are in beta/preview phases ). As a simple example, imagine I’ve got an “application” that looks like this ( code deliberately shortened to the shortest...