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External News
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In my "spare time" I've been recording some screencasts about Silverlight 2 Beta 1 along with my colleague Mike. This managed to reach critical mass in that we've now built up a list of 50 screencasts so I thought it was definitely time to share rather than plough ahead because I imagine that it won't be too long before they all get to be out of date. Things move pretty fast. So, I've built a fairly simple custom application ( in Silverlight 2 Beta 1 of course :-) ) which allows for playing and... [ read more] |
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You'll know by now that we've shipped the first beta of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Fx 3.5 Sp 1 and it contains some elements of what was previously known as the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview. In my recent post about my roadshow session, I talk about where to get the various bits (MVC, Dynamic Data, Silverlight Controls, AJAX History). Sp 1 changes things somewhat. Service Pack 1 includes Dynamic Data and the AJAX History support (amongst many other things). It does not include the MVC framewo... [ read more] |
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If I was a builder, and there was a tool in my toolbox that I didn't understand, couldn't tell you what it was for, then I think that tool would stay in the box. I wouldn't decide one day to get that tool out and start trying it out for jobs that I already knew how to do with other tools. I might go out of my way to find out what it's for, of course, but until I knew, I wouldn't be trying to use it. That's common sense I think.
Why then do we, as developers, often not apply the... [ read more] |
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Normal service (if there is such a thing) will be resumed as soon as possible (around 21st May I should think).
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Earlier, I was looking at this page about quad-core processors from Intel. I know, I must have been bored :-) Anyway, I spotted something interesting. Towards the bottom of the page, they publish numbers of "Billions of Operations Per Second", and they claim 153,500 of those BOPS. That's pretty impressive, I thought; over 150 trillion operations per second? I followed their "more details" link, and on the next page BOPS was defined as "Business Operations per Second". T... [ read more] |
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The Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 dilemma. I want to be able to continue to do Silverlight 2 Beta 1 development. I need to install Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 for Entity Framework and Data Services.
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One of the demos I've been doing at the MSDN Roadshow is to take the new ASP.NET routing capabilities (currently in preview) and show them in isolation from MVC / Dynamic Data. Although the new routing capabilities were developed for the MVC framework, they've been factored out and are now shared with Dynamic Data and, of course, you can use them in your own ASP.NET applications as well. What do these new routing capabilities give you? Flexibility for one. Each request is intercepted and matche... [ read more] |
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I've been mad busy planning the UK Imagine Cup finals on the 5th June and haven't had a chance to stop....until we got a shipment of Popfly ducks for each of the attendees to the event! Thought it was worth a post :-)
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Based on questions I receive, there seems to be some confusion as to what needs to be installed in order to develop Silverlight applications. You only need ONE download: Silverlight 2 Beta 1 Tools for Visual Studio 2008 RTM (notice the file name is "chainer"). Note that this is not compatible with the recently released Orcas SP1.Optionally, if you have designer friends or you are a graphically inclined developer, you can download the Expression Blend 2.5 CTP (build 2.1.1113.0 is the one that als... [ read more] |
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Just links.... ScottGu Soma Entity Framework Data Services Download
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In my consulting days, I had quite a few engagements where you might call me a performance troubleshooter. That is, the client had already built an app, in some cases it was even in the hands of users, but performance was unacceptably bad. They turned to their platform vendor for help, and they got me.
Performance is a feature, but it's an unusual one in that it can be present one day and so easily obliterated the next, sometimes by changing a single line of code. One tech... [ read more] |
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I've seen introductory sessions where people jump straight into Visual Studio and/or Blend and start demonstrating how to build a Silverlight application. IMO, Silverlight is a relatively new technology and there are potentially people that have not seen examples of applications built with it. As such it is important to demonstrate its capabilities first by running some applications and clicking around. There are many samples to choose from the Showcase and from the Gallery, so take your pick.In... [ read more] |
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In the next issue of the MSDN Flash Newsletter I write about some of the upcoming features in ASP.NET including two new controls specifically designed to take advantage of the richness provided by Silverlight. The <asp:Silverlight> control allows you to easily incorporate Silverlight content into an ASP.NET page. If you've used Silverlight 2 Beta 1 you'll have noticed that the Visual Studio template offers you both an html page and an ASP.NET page to host your Silverlight application. The... [ read more] |
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I will be at DevDays in Amsterdam the week after this ( i.e. the 22nd and 23rd May ) doing some sessions on; LINQ to XML ADO.NET Entity Framework ADO.NET Data Services It would be nice to see you there if you're coming along. It's been a little bit of a hectic past few weeks for me in that schedule has involved a lot of travelling around. This week I'm doing; MSDN Roadshow in Glasgow on Tuesday VBUG Leeds on Wednesday MSDN Roadshow in Newcastle on Friday and there's a few more da... [ read more] |
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Interesting demonstration app up here; http://www.mscui.net/PatientJourneyDemonstrator/ put together by some of the MCS guys in the UK as far as I know. The terminology is a bit weird ( "Patient Journey?" ) but the app's quite cool as a playpen for Silverlight.
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Matt Warren has an "interesting" post on how you could hack your way to a mocked implementation of LINQ to SQL - if I had a pound for every time someone's asked me how to do this then I'd have at least 3 pounds :-) Seriously though, there is interest in doing this kind of thing and it's a good starting place if you're inclined to head down this route.
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Ed has the detail on us trying something new with our UK StudentZine Facebook page. The Facebook page features: Latest articles from the monthly newsletter Team blog posts Discussion boards to ask us questions Polls Competitions Videos We know that Facebook is one of the most popular social networking sites with university students in the UK and want to make sure you can get the most out of the student programmes Microsoft runs by putting content on there. And t... [ read more] |
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In my roadshow session I talk about where to get all the latest ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions bits. One word of warning, the latest drop of Dynamic Data (0423) doesn't play well with MVC Preview 2 - stick with the 0408 drop for now if you want to use both. If you install the 0423 drop you'll get something like this when you try to run your MVC app. Could not load type 'System.Web.HttpContextWrapper2' from assembly 'System.Web.Abstractions... Time to uninstall and re-install 0408... Technorati Tag... [ read more] |
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In last’s week Flash issue, I wrote 500 words About Silverlight 2.I have enjoyed being the editor of the UK MSDN Flash newsletter. Ever since I took it over, it has topped Microsoft's (worldwide) newsletter growth stats compared to previous years in more areas than one. Additionally, its format inspired other newsletters from other Microsoft subsidiaries outside the UK. Hope you don't mind me blowing my own horn and since I can't publically back up these claims with numbers, you'll just have to ... [ read more] |
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Not guilty. Never touched it. Absolutely nothing to do with me although I did receive some slightly strongly worded mails from some internal IT folks looking for the real culprit :-)
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The ASP.NET Dynamic Data Preview is essentially a powerful and flexible scaffolding framework for ASP.NET that allows you to very quickly create and customise data-driven ASP.NET applications. It does this by exploring the Linq to SQL data model and deriving the UI elements, navigation, validation etc from it.
Typically you would then customise the resulting application in a number of ways:
Customise and extending the model
Customise page templates
Globally (eg all List pages should look like ... [ read more] |
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Andy has posted about XNA CC codes going into MSDN AA - great news if you are teaching games programming (or want to) and want to get your students building games on Windows and Xbox 360. XNA Creators Club Codes are now in MSDN AA!
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ASP.NET webforms offers a number of different options for re-use including extending existing controls, composite controls, custom controls and user controls. While the ASP.NET MVC framework doesn't support server controls (this isn't strictly true - it does support a very limited set of server controls), it is possible to encapsulate functionality in the form of an MVC user control. MVC user controls derive from System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl (as opposed to System.Web.UI.UserControl) and can... [ read more] |
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Recently I was playing with some LINQ to XML for a demo I was preparing and was having trouble retrieving the expected values from what was a very straightforward query.Have a look at the XML file that looks like this (the results of programmatically calling this Amazon service).Each Item element represents a book and I wanted to retrieve the Title. How would you form that query with LINQ to XML?I went for the obvious: var res = from ia in XElement.Parse(e.Result).DescendantsAndSelf("ItemAtt... [ read more] |
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I wanted to upload some videos to Silverlight Streaming. There's an area of the admin site that says "Manage Videos" but, unfortunately, it only lets you upload one video at a time through the web page so that could prove painful if you've a few videos. There's an API to Silverlight Streaming so I wrote a bit of code to do my upload for me. It's really, really, really ( REALLY! ;-) ) basic but it might help someone at some point so I've shared it here ( hopefully minus my account id and key )... [ read more] |
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