September 2010 - Mike Taulty's Blog

7th October, Manchester–FREE Windows Phone 7 Jump Start

The days are ticking down to the Windows Phone 7 launch. The platform and tools bits are out there and it’s just a matter of waiting for devices… For a brief while I managed to get my XAML-centric, Silverlight-centric, client-centric mits on Windows Phone 7...

Published Mon, Sep 27 2010 11:21 PM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, UKCommunities, VisualStudio, WindowsPhone

Blend Bits 13: Fluid Layout and the Popup Panel

This comes directly from something that I was doing today with Blend. Let’s imagine that I have a UI like this one; and I have it set such that when my mouse enters the scene, that little grid at the bottom animates in from the bottom and when my mouse leaves...

Published Mon, Sep 27 2010 2:21 PM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, Silverlight, Blend, BlendBits

Blend Bits 12: States, Groups, Transitions

One of the most powerful ideas in Silverlight UI development is the idea that interfaces and controls within them present altered UI depending on what combination of states are currently active. A simple example. I might have this UI for navigating my way through...

Published Tue, Sep 21 2010 4:02 PM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, Silverlight, Blend, BlendBits, Expression

Blend Bits 11: Effects

Silverlight supports built-in and custom effects that you can easily use in Blend on the artboard. I’ve got some text here inside a ViewBox on the artboard; and I can find the properties of either the TextBlock or the Viewbox and apply an effect to it over...

Published Mon, Sep 20 2010 2:25 PM by mtaulty

Filed under: Silverlight, Blend, BlendBits, Expression

Blend Bits 10: Being More Resourceful

Tim wrote a great blog post a while ago about the new JetPack theme for Silverlight that’s available for download along with its friends. You can try them all on the web by clicking on the images below; If I wanted to use these in Blend I can grab the download...

Published Fri, Sep 17 2010 7:11 PM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, Silverlight, Blend, BlendBits

Expression Encoder 4 Pro for Silverlight Video Players

I use Expression Encoder 4 Pro quite a lot as I’ve put together a number of screen capture videos. I tend to use it in order to capture screencasts and then I transcode them to some other format (e.g. H.264) and publish them somewhere. If they’re going on the...

Published Fri, Sep 17 2010 2:59 PM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, Silverlight, Expression

Blend Bits 9: Animations

One of the areas that Visual Studio doesn’t touch at all is the creation of animations which are entirely in the realm of Blend although you can hand-crank the XAML if you’re feeling up to the challenge. Blend’s really powerful when it comes to animations but...

Published Fri, Sep 17 2010 1:32 PM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, Silverlight, Blend, BlendBits

Silverlight, Out-Of-Browser and Multiple Windows

I was talking to a developer the other day about Silverlight out-of-browser applications and how there’s not really any support for opening multiple windows so that (e.g.) you might have a master window in the application and the ability to open sub-windows...

Published Thu, Sep 16 2010 6:13 PM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, Silverlight

Slides from Silverlight Networking Session, NxtGen User Group, Birmingham

Thanks to everyone who came along to my talk this evening on networking in Silverlight 4 at the NxtGen User Group in Birmingham . There were a couple of questions that I wanted to check answers to; How many concurrent connections are allowed on the HTTP client...

Published Wed, Sep 15 2010 12:17 AM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, Silverlight, UKCommunities

Blend Bits 8: Trigger Fires Action

Blend 3 introduced the idea of Triggers, Actions and Behaviors as a way in which a developer can package up functionality for re-use by a designer in a drag-drop manner. The way I think of them in my head; Action – piece of code that does some single thing...

Published Tue, Sep 14 2010 12:33 PM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, Silverlight, Blend, BlendBits

UK Windows Azure Online Conference–8th October

The UK is running an online conference on Azure on the 8th October with 3 cloud-based tracks; I’ve stolen the details of this from Steve’s blog where you can find the abstracts for the sessions and details of the speakers but just click the image above to register...

Published Tue, Sep 14 2010 9:48 AM by mtaulty

Filed under: UKCommunities, WindowsAzure, VisualStudio

“iPhone 4 is Dead”

Sure, it’s an attention-grabbing title and, of course, it’s complete nonsense. I was watching the #Silverlight and #WPF tags on Twitter this week and saw a stream of noise about how various client technologies from Microsoft are “dead” and the killer seemed...

Published Fri, Sep 10 2010 8:56 AM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, WPF, Silverlight, Windows7, IE

Blend Bits 7: Be Resourceful

Resources are easy enough to understand. Lots of elements used in XAML markup have a little dictionary of resources associated with them that can store an object of any type as long as it has a key associated with it (except in one case which I’ll come back...

Published Thu, Sep 9 2010 7:34 PM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, Silverlight, Blend, BlendBits

Trader Media Group and Silverlight

I had a chance to visit Trader Media Group (TMG) at their offices in Warrington a few weeks ago and have a chat to Chris Kelly who’s an architect over there and gets to work on some pretty big scale sites like (of course); There can’t be many people in the...

Published Thu, Sep 9 2010 6:43 PM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, Silverlight, PRISM

“Hardcore Entity Framework” in London with Julie Lerman, 22nd October

Entity Framework is a different beast in .NET 4.0 than it was in its first incarnation and it’s the strategic .NET ORM from Microsoft which means that it shows up in lots of places like WCF Data Services, WCF RIA Services, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, etc. I feel...

Published Thu, Sep 9 2010 11:55 AM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, EntityFramework, UKCommunities, VisualStudio

September 2010 - Mike Taulty's Blog

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7th October, Manchester–FREE Windows Phone 7 Jump Start

Blend Bits 13: Fluid Layout and the Popup Panel

Blend Bits 12: States, Groups, Transitions

Blend Bits 11: Effects

Blend Bits 10: Being More Resourceful

Expression Encoder 4 Pro for Silverlight Video Players

Blend Bits 9: Animations

Silverlight, Out-Of-Browser and Multiple Windows

Slides from Silverlight Networking Session, NxtGen User Group, Birmingham

Blend Bits 8: Trigger Fires Action

UK Windows Azure Online Conference–8th October

“iPhone 4 is Dead”

Blend Bits 7: Be Resourceful

Trader Media Group and Silverlight

“Hardcore Entity Framework” in London with Julie Lerman, 22nd October