February 2011 - Mike Taulty's Blog

Thinking about MIX11

I spent a little time today thinking about MIX11…

Published Mon, Feb 28 2011 5:49 PM by mtaulty

Building with WCF RIA Services?

Are you in the UK and building with Silverlight and WCF RIA Services? Drop me a line! mike dot taulty at microsoft dot com

Published Fri, Feb 25 2011 5:11 PM by mtaulty

Filed under: C#, Silverlight, UKCommunities, WCFRIAServices, UK ISVs

Just a fairly obvious thought that’s been kicking around in the empty space between my ears for a few weeks now. It really came to the fore when I was casting my eyes over HP’s webOS developer platform. I didn’t read so much of it but I did read ( from here...

Published Tue, Feb 22 2011 10:46 AM by mtaulty

Filed under: HTML5, Browsers

MIX11 Silverlight Bootcamp Workshop, April 11, Las Vegas

Just a quick plug for the MIX11 workshop that I’m delivering along with John Papa ( you may know him as the star of TV shows such as “Silverlight TV” ) on April the 11th. John and I ran a workshop at MIX last year and had a really good time working together...

Published Mon, Feb 21 2011 10:35 AM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, C#, Silverlight, WCFRIAServices, WCFDataServices

2 Videos: SteveB and SteveJ

I was watching an interesting video with SteveB from a recent Swiss event. Part of it is where the attendees got to put questions directly to him and he (as always) answers with a frightening level of knowledge that spans from business to tech and back again...

Published Sun, Feb 20 2011 10:58 PM by mtaulty

Filed under: Windows

How Modern is Modern?

In the light of the recent release of the RC for IE9 ( grab a download and try it out here ), Mozilla evangelist Paul Rouget picks a fight with IE9 over it not being a “modern browser”. My colleague at our Redmond based mother-ship, Tim Sneath takes up the...

Published Wed, Feb 16 2011 9:33 AM by mtaulty

Filed under: IE

Blend Bits 25–Templating Part 3

Another important part of templating contols in Blend is the ability to go from the control parts to the control quite quickly. This works incredibly quickly for something like a Button – let’s say that I wanted an irregularly shaped button. If I just go ahead...

Published Mon, Feb 14 2011 2:35 PM by mtaulty

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

Blend Bits 24–Templating Part 2

The previous post took a simple Checkbox and played with its template a little but we see quite a few more templates if we wander into a control like a ListBox. Dropping a ListBox onto the artboard and then setting up some data that it can bind to ( using the...

Published Fri, Feb 11 2011 5:27 PM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, C#, Silverlight, VisualStudio, Blend, BlendBits, Expression

Blend Bits 23–Templating Part 1

One of the real strengths of Expression Blend is in its deep understanding of control templates. Visual Studio doesn’t really go near control templates and so you really need Blend unless you’re a pure consumer of someone else’s templated controls. Control...

Published Fri, Feb 11 2011 2:47 PM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, C#, Silverlight, VisualStudio, Blend, BlendBits

Blend Bits 22–Being Stylish

I’m amazed to find that I got so far into this series of posts around Blend without writing a post about styles. How did that happen? Let’s rectify that problem here. Styles are simple but powerful. Essentially, they’re just a bunch of property setters grouped...

Published Fri, Feb 11 2011 11:18 AM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, C#, Silverlight, VisualStudio, Blend, BlendBits

ClickOnce, TaskDialogs, Common Controls and WPF Applications

One of the things that I talked a little about in my talk about “Modern Windows Applications on Windows 7” was around the idea of using a TaskDialog when you’re trying to get a response from the user rather than using your own custom dialog or a MessageBox...

Published Fri, Feb 11 2011 8:49 AM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, C#, Windows7, VisualStudio

(Not Quite) Putting a Silverlight App in the Chrome Web Store?

I must admit that I had a little bit of an “eye opening” experience today with the “Chrome Web Store”. Firstly, before you jump on me for talking about a web-browser other than IE let me say that I, of course, run IE and I’m currently running the IE9 beta as...

Published Thu, Feb 3 2011 6:39 PM by mtaulty

Filed under: C#, Silverlight, VisualStudio

Blend Bits 21–Importing from Photoshop & Illustrator…

If I had a penny for every time I heard someone from Microsoft say “I’m not a designer” when working with Blend then I’d be a rich man. Naturally, Microsoft does have some very fine designers but, unfortunately, it’s not me so I also end up having to say the...

Published Thu, Feb 3 2011 4:49 PM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, C#, WPF, Silverlight, VisualStudio, Blend, BlendBits

Silverlight and NESL Redux–Touch

Stephen pointed out last week that there’s a preview update to the “Native Extensions to Silverlight” up on CodePlex and this preview adds some capabilities around touch and having written a little around that topic recently; Touched ( Part 1 )–Getting Touch...

Published Wed, Feb 2 2011 12:04 AM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, C#, Silverlight, VisualStudio, Rx, Touch, NESL

Microsoft UK TechDays 23rd to 25th May, London

A date for your diary – Microsoft will be hosting its second TechDays event this year in London on the 23rd to 25th May. The full details aren’t out yet but you can get more info by clicking on the big picture below; I’m planning to put one day together around...

Published Tue, Feb 1 2011 10:28 AM by mtaulty

Filed under: UKCommunities, Microsoft UK