I’ll be presenting on WPF at the September 21st .Net Meetup.

A breezy tour of topics in WPF from the ground up with demo examples and source code.  Each topic will be given a one minute treatment.  For anyone interested in, new to, or learning WPF you can see the scope of the platform and see what you want to learn.  For anyone working in WPF, enjoy the highlights of your platform.  You might even see something you’ve missed.

Everything will apply equally to Silverlight, subject of course to this diagram.

• OData PowerShell Explorer
• OData Browser for the iPhone
• OData Explorer (Silverlight 4)
• Sesame Data Browser (Silverlight 4)
• LINQPad (Beta)
• Open Data Protocol Visualizer VS.Net 2010 Extension

via OData Primer

via Microsoft UK Application Development Consulting

I like Jeffrey Snover’s tweet – Become a first follower and join the dance! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW8amMCVAJQ&sns=em

• Silverlight Profiling PowerShell helper – Jason Jarrett uses PowerShell to capture and simply the steps of profiling his Silverlight app
• Script everything with PowerShell and IronRuby – shows how to use PowerShell Runspaces in IronRuby. Same as you would in C#
• Creating WPF UIs for PowerShell with PowerBoots and Visual Studio WPF Designer – Joel Bennett creates a WPF GUI in Visual Studio and use the Xaml file in PowerShell PowerBoots
• A PowerShell Wander: ToolBox Mindset, –ExpandProperty, DMZs and Remote Profiles – Jeffrey Snover writes about PowerShell as a toolbox and has general purpose utilities that creative people can use their inspiration to do things that the tool designers didn’t think of when they developed the tool
• Richard Siddaway uses the Compare-Object cmdlet in Comparing folder contents for diffing subdirectories
• Very useful Test-Member – The Missing PowerShell Cmdlet – Verifies whether a specific property or method member exists for a given .NET object
• PowerShell Script to Connect .ISO to a VM [Hyper-V]

Its funny because its true.  When there’s property setting or UI resizing or several other common UI related problems, putting the next statement on the Dispatcher to let an operation complete first is just the trick.  Handy as Duct Tape.  Case in point, the focus at startup issue.

As an out of the box solution, QTP (version 10) did not provide sufficient granularity with respect to Silverlight object recognition.

Having already been required to install the .Net and WPF plugins, research and contact with HP uncovered the need for three additional patches to be installed; before the spy tool could actually drill down through the Silverlight Window to identify object properties.

Once up and running; one of the noticeable differences between QTP and one of the other tools we evaluated (ArtofTest DesignCanvas 2.0) was the slowness of script capture.

We have to continue with QTP; as the client is understandably reluctant to invest further money in a second tool. Even with this in mind I still have reservations as to the suitability of the tool long term. By admission of HP support site, the patches provided are compatible with Silverlight 2, and ‘may’ be compatible with Silverlight 3; which throws instant concern as Silverlight 4 is available with talk of a Silverlight 5 release early next year. As more projects embrace RIA technologies such as Silverlight and Adobe Flex; HP will need to ensure that their toolsets move with the times; especially with unit costs as high as they are; even with reseller discounts applied.

HtmlPage.Plugin.Focus();
Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(() => YourControl.Focus());

This may be the first (and probably the last) actual Silverlight mystery I have solved.  A couple months ago, I was searching the internet for the way to do this and found absolutely nothing.

Yippee-Kai-Yay for me

I’m a fan of Flash, but like most things in life, it isn’t perfect.  Flex and Actionscript have been an integral part of my career and I would like them to continue to be so.  I would like to touch on certain concepts that I think would add more value to the current software offerings and in turn give Adobe an edge over the competition.

Time is an important asset for a company, which is why increasing development efficiency will be a key factor in winning this war. I’m talking about reducing the compiler time, making it smarter and bug free, and adding 64bit support to utilise workstation performance. This improvement can save valuable minutes or even hours depending on the developer.

Speaking of development efficiency, I also suggest that Flash Builder starts supporting Linux.  Adobe doesn’t even have to officially support it, just make sure the eclipse plug-in can work in a Linux environment with or without design view (I personally never use it).  The feature request for having Flash Builder on Linux is one of the most popular requests on the Adobe bug tracker.

Irritations while using Flash products also need to be eliminated. I personally enjoy development work (geek alert!), but when something doesn’t work like expected, it frustrates me to no end. The Flex framework is fairly good at doing exactly that; it’s supposed to save time, and it does, but there are some components that have been buggy ever since its inception and they aren’t being fixed.

The next point is cause for debate between developers, in the end it comes down to preference, but it needs to be addressed. Of course, I’m talking about Cairngorm – or more specifically your decision to support it. I personally don’t think MVC is the pattern to use when handling a Flex application, and other developers in the community agree; hence the creation of several new open- source frameworks. It seems to me that Adobe is playing favorites with Cairngorm and could instead use that development effort in a more productive way.  Adobe should work on enhancing the Flash API and opening up doors to allow third party frameworks to improve their usability.

With complex applications come crucial new ways to design the flow and interaction within the system.  For that, a developer needs tools to show this visually.  Tools like wireframe UI timeline or UML round-trip engineering can combine both design and functionality in a uniform way that all developers can understand.  A lot could be learned from Java and their tools: e.g. offering code hot-swapping to greatly reduce debugging time.

If Adobe is serious about creating a developer language, then a more complex language needs to be their goal.  Multiple-inheritance, polymorphism, overloading, enumerators, abstract classes, destructors, private constructors, decimal data type, threading support – these are only a few of the things that Actionscript is lacking. Some would argue that there are a lot more. I’m not saying it’s a bad language, after all, it does do what it’s supposed to do, but with bigger systems come more architectural complexities that the current language cannot support.

A common topic when debating Silverlight vs Flex is the lack of multi-threading.  I really do hope that this will be implemented in the next iteration of the language because the possibilities it would open would be mind-blowing.  Imagine a system that can execute complex algorithms and computations without disrupting the user experience; that would be a major improvement! Heck, even if the language doesn’t give developers access to threads, just allowing the player to run different threads for visual components and for computations would be a great improvement.

Let me leave you with this: I’ve been a fan of Adobe since I was a kid, and I still am. If any business is capable of surmounting the upcoming challenge, it will be Adobe. I believe that the community surrounding this product will be a key factor in this war; if Adobe listens and responds to our suggestions, only great things can happen.

Speaking of community, I invite all developers and designers to debate and comment on this topic. I think it is one that will be talked about for quite some time to come.  I’d also like to thank Joe Morrison, a Director at Lab49, for letting me bounce ideas off of him.

There’s a consensus developing that says dependency properties are usually too heavyweight and people are using INotifyPropertyChanged instead.  I miss the snippet that creates a dependency property, so I made a similar snippet for INotifyPropertyChanged.  You can download the code here.

To make a snippet, just go to Tools / Code Snippets Manager and find a snippet to start with.  I started with the “Define a Dependency Property” snippet since I was doing almost the same thing.  The Snippets Manager will tell you where that file is:

Go to the file system and copy the file to your My Code Snippets folder.  If you highlight the folder in the Code Snippet Manager, it will tell you where it is — you can copy the path from the location field.  The file is an xml file, but needs to be named “.snippet”.

Editing the file is very straightforward and the snippet will be available immediately – no restart needed.

One interesting thing about the code is that I’m using a simple method to do all the work:

I basically combined this CodeProject work with Jeff Yates object.Equals idea from here in order to handle both reference and value types in a single call:

Here’s how the snippet comes out by default (the myNames and type are the replaceable fields):

int _myField;

public int MyProperty
{
    get { return _myField; }
    set
    {
        CheckPropertyChanged("MyProperty",
            ref _myField, ref value);
    }
}

This is the method that does a check and notify in the base class:

protected bool CheckPropertyChanged<T>
      (string propertyName, ref T oldValue, ref T newValue)
      {

            if (!Equals(oldValue, newValue))

            {

                oldValue = newValue;

                RaisePropertyChanged(propertyName);

                return true;

            }

            return false;

        }

via Jeffrey Snover

I finally go to shake the hand of Jeffrey Snover, the man behind the vision of PowerShell. We got to chat for a few minutes before he was on the panel Microsoft Perspectives on the Future of Programming. Some great thinkers on the panel, Butler Lampson, Erik Meijer, Don Box, Jeffrey Snover, Herb Sutter, Burton Smith. Covered Parallel programming (we’ll still be figuring it out in the next 5-10 years), textual DSLs, modeling, importance of glue languages and more.

I’ll be doing some posts on SQL Modeling Services (aka Oslo). Just finished downloading the latest CTP on my main box. It has a dependency on .NET 4, works in VS 2010, has more features and better integration with SQL and VS. Don’t forget to download Pinky’s DynamicObject Over M values. It is a implementation of .NET 4.0 dynamic object over Node/Edge data model provides a read-only object-based view over M values.

Plus sat in on the PowerShell talks. Layering GUIs over PowerShell. Very cool and just the beginning. Download the demos here. They give insight to how Microsoft Exchange re-worked there GUIs to sit on top of PowerShell. Restricted Runspaces for security, Runspace Pools to execute PowerShell asynchronously, Remoting, and the start of how to ‘record’ the PowerShell commands the user is clicking on in the GUI.

Lot’s to experiment, enjoy and engage with.

Went to the .Net Meetup Tuesday night and had a great time.  Plenty of interesting discussion and some laughs too. (All that and free pizza too). Highly recommended:

        if (yourGeekiness >= myGeekiness)

Daniel Chait (my boss led the meeting.  The below info is mostly from Dan’s notes which he wrote on the overhead in real-time (I take credit for any errors or omissions).  As you can see, if you didn’t attend, you missed a lot.  These are mostly just the topics.  Each one generated lively discussion:

PDC 2009 started today:

- Microsoft CodeName “Dallas” announced.

Microsoft “Micro Framework” open sourced:

(not including some stuff like Crypto etc)

Scott Hanselman had a podcast about it?

Azure going live in February (cloud services)

Business Model announced.

Cloud Computing : Compare Azure vs others

Vs Amazon EC2?  Amazon gives you a virtual machine, whereas Microsoft gives you specific services (i.e. web, database, WCF services).  Also cloud-based Pub/Sub model.

BizSpark!!!

- For co’s & individuals

–Co less than 3 yrs. old, less than $1MM, private

- You get all Microsoft stuff basically for 3 yrs. free.

- Check out the “Program Guide” off the website for more details

WebSpark?

- You get VS, SQL Server, and Blend, etc. to get started

- 3 year license for free

PowerPivot

- Part of Office 2010 (was codename “Gemini”)

WPF Grid Controls?

- Using DevExpress (WinForms grid)

- Infragistics – not much new there. tech support pretty good.  glaring bugs in new versions.  difficult upgrading between different versions due to problems with style upgrades

- WPF Toolkit has a grid control: very basic, missing a lot of features (i.e. Filtering etc)

- XCeed well regarded. Been around the longest, full featured.  Cons: tech support iffy.  Licensing may be problematic – issues when you convert from demo to licensed version.

Data Direct products:

- XML converters

- Database connectors

- Difficult licenses

.NET Framework v4?

- Tasks, parallel stuff – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Extensions

- WorkFlow changing a lot in V4 as well

- Documentation is very minimal at this point

- Maybe some good PDC content coming out?  i.e.
http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/P09-22

- Maybe some channel9 stuff to find?
- Hello Workflow 4

- WF4.0 A First Look
- More

What do people actually use WF for?

- Sharepoint development.  Basic stuff.

Architecture in .NET Question: Model Approach to Database Access?

- ORM Software: Developers make clean code which makes horrible queries

- Call Stored Procs from software: nice queries but ugly to call

- Entity Spaces

- Experience: Easy to use, decent performance but on a simple app

- In ALL cases, need to analyze queries in detail, can’t just rely on the ORM to sort it out

- Microsoft Entity Framework 1.0 – not full featured enough

- New one coming out

- Linq2SQL is dead

- Linq2SQL used a GUID(?) which killed query caching

- NHibernate – “granddaddy of them”.

- Cons : “Has a case of the Java’s”.  XML Configuration, FactoryFactoryFactory…, etc.

GRAND CLAIM: Try to avoid open source:

- Hmm…

- IF something is just a small, weekend project on CodePlex, probably worth avoiding.  But, like, …

- NUnit

- NHibernate

- NCover

- NMock, moq, RhinoMock

- Log4Net, nlog

- log better, easier to configure

- Fluent NHibernate

- The MONO project

- Need to treat it more like “code” than a “product” from a vendor.  Actually understand the code don’t just consume it.

- Open source projects are driven by enthusiasm

- JQuery plugins for example

One user mono in production spoke up.

- Follows the Pareto Principle – for example doesn’t use code signing

- Implementing silverlight (i.e. Moonlight) which works on the iPhone

- Castle project – ActiveRecord implementation – says it’s at least as good as say RoR – just does property setting in code, built on top of NHibernate, scaffolding, etc.

The Munawar principle – 20% will be good, 80% will be garbage

FBK #2: Sturgeon’s Law – “90% of everything is crap”

NCover – code coverage tool

“Where’s my LINQ2 Mainframe?”

SubSonic – open source framework for stuff – http://www.subsonicproject.com/

- “A Super High-fidelity Batman Utility Belt that works up your Data Access (using Linq in 3.0), throws in some much-needed utility functions, and generally speeds along your dev cycle.”

[long discourse about non programmers.  in short, they are inconvenient.]

AJAX / ASP.NET – still buying into it?  As opposed to WPF / Silverlight / Flex?

- Corollary – as a novice, what should I be getting in to

- Corollary 2 – if I want to get out of ASP.NET and get into WPF and realtime .NET desktop apps, how do I do it?

- Endless debate about Silverlight vs Flex

- Silverlight can be applied-ish to WPF knowledge

- Flex VERY easy to learn

Silverlight vs WPF?

- Third party controls maybe a bit better in WPF at present

- If heavy desktop integration, use WPF, else Silverlight by default

- Silverlight Out of Browser – still in the sandbox but just looks like the browser is missing.

- Databinding in Silverlight not nearly as good as WPF.  A bit better in 3.0 but still not great

[spontaneous demo of Castle ActiveRecord]

Good localization solution?  Want to translate our site into multiple languages….

- Sharepoint can do some of this but not ALL languages

- New version of Sharepoint (2008?) does this

- Beware of language specifics (i.e. German has long words)

- Maybe any content management solutions that exist?

- How to handle caching?

- Generate static content or regenerate on the fly every time?

- See http://latino.msn.com/ for more

- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/c6zyy3s9.aspx

]]> http://goldmanalpha.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/net-meetup/feed 0 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DevelopmentInABlink/~3/VaqND8NQ3fo/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DevelopmentInABlink/~3/VaqND8NQ3fo/#comments Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:10:47 +0000 Doug Finke http://dougfinke.com/blog/index.php/2009/11/18/silverlight-4-the-new-wpf/

i think silverlight just swallowed wpf from the inside

Bill Wagner

• Download it http://team.silverlight.net/announcement/silverlight-4-beta-is-now-available/
• Silverlight 4 Debuts with Killer Demos at PDC09
• Silverlight 4 Beta – A guide to the new features
• Channel 9 training http://channel9.msdn.com/learn/courses/Silverlight4/
• Shawn Wildermuth
  • Silverlight 4 Beta Announced!
  • Data Binding Changes in Silverlight 4
• Microsoft Silverlight 4 Beta Offline Documentation
• Silverlight 4 Rough Notes: Managed Extensibility Framework

Silverlight 4 not only brings in all these features, but also a pile of others.  Interestingly, they seem to be making a direct pitch against Adobe AIR with many of the features.  The new Elevated Trust Applications feature (for out-of-browser apps), enables a host of features typically reserved for desktop applications: Local file access; Notifications API; Full-screen full-keyboard access; Cross-domain policy-free networking; and Drop targets.  Of course, features aside, the huge advantage of the Silverlight desktop approach over AIR is that there is only one runtime plugin required.

At the speed Microsoft is moving forward with Silverlight, Adobe is going to have to start seriously upping their commitment to the Flash platform if they want to stay at the top of the game.  Up to now, they could always give the argument of Flex being more feature-rich, and the ease of adaptation to the desktop with AIR – with both of these arguments now void, and Microsoft firmly remaining miles ahead in the developer tooling scene, Adobe’s work is cut out.  They still have greater marketplace penetration with Flash player, but that lead is only going to narrow also.

You’ve got to love competition!

A weekly roundup of interesting things I hear about at the Lab, since this is the first one, it covers a bit more than a week.

A couple of Flex developers commented that WPF and Silverlight are so much more mature, easier and feature rich.  They were half right as this popular diagram shows:

Some UX designers working with Expression Blend said it’s not horrible, so now I don’t feel too bad asking them to use it.

This fun character interaction chart was much discussed (small version here).  I think it gives an interesting summary of some great movies.  It may bear a resemblance to the Napoleon March Map.

And the movie Primer, with the scribbly chart, is about time travel.  One commenter suggests the creator of the chart didn’t understand the movie, but it looks like a movie I’ve got to see.

Who builds domain specific languages? I just met a couple of guys @Lab and it makes more sense than I thought.  One application is to build a really small and focused keyword set so users can write programs they can validate and maintain.

MongoDB (from “humongous”) “is a high-performance, open source, schema-free document-oriented database.”  That’s heavy verbiage to say you can store and retrieve and you don’t have to design your database, whatever you send it, it will just save for you, no tables, no troubles.   Looks great for a lot of web storage needs. We had a seminar @Lab and document oriented dbs seem to have a definite niche. CouchDB is another product in the space.

Its hard to see a parade when you’re 20 stories over it, but throwing stuff was loads of fun:

]]> http://goldmanalpha.wordpress.com/2009/11/07/lab-this-week/feed 0 http://blog.lab49.com/archives/3662 http://blog.lab49.com/archives/3662#comments Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:44:09 +0000 Sergey Kogan http://blog.lab49.com/?p=3662 I have a Silverlight application consuming a WCF service. And as you may know WCF errors are not serialized on the Silverlight side and all you get is generic NotFound error.

I was experiencing the error only in certain rare cases.
Everything seemed fine in the WCF side, no exceptions were thrown in my service contracts.

I fiddled with the Fiddler but that did not capture anything.

I fixed the issue purely by  divide/conqure method. Turns out I was passing an object with an enum type property, but was never setting that property. The debugger showed that the value of the enum property was the first item in the enum as one would expect.
However, when I explicitly set the property it all started to work!

And then the dreaded 404 came back! The previuosly used debugging techniques showed it’s a different issue and was related to how much data I was returning out. The usual suspects message, buffer, maxarray sizes did not help.

Fiddler was useless again. So I decided to try WCF tracing. I found a post by Yi-Lun Luo http://forums.silverlight.net/forums/p/17733/83940.aspx?PageIndex=3 that helped me do it. I also found using the WCF Config Edit tool usable for that purpose.

Finally, I found something helpfull for debugging 404 errors between Silverlight and WCF!
The trace showed that I was exceeding maxItemsInObjectGraph; a setting I never heard about before.

Again WCF Config Edit tool was helpfull and I upped the max number and no more stupid 404.

On a side note me and my comrad felt the app was snappier after this setting.

I have to think though, perhaps the effort would have been better spent creating a port of Blend for the Mac… it seems to me that only a tiny minority of developers would opt for Eclipse over Visual Studio; whereas I’d guess nearly all designers would prefer to work natively within MacOS.

I can kind of understand why they’ve done it, but I can only hope there’s another project underway with that Blend port…

Documentation for coding a Silverlight 3 player against IIS Smooth Streaming is a little sparse.  IIS.net has several articles on the server setup, but I couldn’t find anywhere obvious regarding the client connection.

Unlike progressive video playback, you can’t just point the MediaElement.source at the video path then call play().  After a bit of searching, most people were talking about some AdaptiveStreamingSource class, which isn’t available in the base SL toolkit, but rather only found in SmoothStreaming.dll within the template players generated from Expression Encoder!

Per some handy forum posts, the steps required are:

1. With Expression Encoder installed, go to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Expression\Encoder 3\Templates\en, select any template, and copy the SmoothStreaming.xap file.
2. Rename your copied .xap file to .zip, unzip, and take out the SmoothStreaming.dll and PlugInMssCtrl.dll files.
3. Reference these assemblies in your project, and you can then start using AdaptiveStreamingSource.

So, once you can finally access the required assemblies, you can then invoke your IIS Smooth Streaming service with something along the lines of the following:

var mediaPath = "testClip_h1080p.ism/manifest";
var source = new AdaptiveStreamingSource
{
   ManifestUrl = new Uri(mediaPath, UriKind.RelativeOrAbsolute),
   MediaElement = streamElement // the xaml MediaElement
};
source.StartPlayback();

Make sure you put the trailing ‘/manifest’ after your stream path.

Simple enough, once you’ve figured out the basics! Not exactly sure what MS were thinking by not including the SmoothStreaming assemblies in the SL3 toolkit? Surely they realise not everyone wants to use a templated player. Or have I missed something here?

The solution was simple enough – run the VS Command Prompt, and enter:

devenv /resetskippkgs

Problem solved.  Apparently a good one to try whenever you lose formatting or Intellisense features.

Fibonacci PowerShell Example

He presents a Fibonacci example and demonstrates multiple assignment for variables.

In this PowerShell example, the second line sets the variables a and b to 0 and 1. Then again in the sixth line. Notice that the expression ($a+$b) is evaluated and then assigned.

Function Fibonacci($n=10) {
    $a, $b = 0, 1            

    while($b -lt $n) {
        $b
        $a, $b = $b, ($a+$b)
    }
}                

Fibonacci 20

A month back a live webcast took place titled ‘Transcending the client experience’ that focused primarily on the use of RIA in financial services and particularly within Morgan Stanley’s Matrix. A recording of the webcast is now available. I offer a small summary of some of the highlights here.

RIA offers a zero footprint in terms of installation effort and supports real time data presentation through simple yet rich user interfaces. It is bringing the business closer to its clients and is more than just technology in that it is solving real world business problems.

The progressive trends are as follows. There is a front-end shift in that applications are now more driven by user experience and design than previously, can represent large amounts of varied and real time data more coherently and concisely and are increasingly beginning to approximate thick clients in that they are stateful and taking on more of the responsibilities of the server side.

Going forward opportunity is seen in adding threading support and mobile device support to Flex and also in migrating the vast amount of legacy applications currently existing to RIA technology. Morgan Stanley’s Matrix received special recognition throughout being one of the largest production Flex applications in the world, if not the largest, at more than six hundred thousand lines of code developed in the timeframe of a year.

[ Recording of the "Transcending the Client Experience webcast", organised by Adobe and Finextra. Participants in this hour and a quarter long session discuss how developers at financial firms use rich Internet application technologies to integrate real-time data, with the delivery of audio, video, reports and rich interactive charts to trading applications.]

[Panel participants: Hishaam Mufti-Bey (Matrix founder and global director at Morgan Stanley), Stephane Malrait (Global Head of eCommerce at Societe Generale), Mark Greenaway (Adobe), Trevor LaFleche (Senior Analyst at Financial Insights). Moderator: Vivake Gupta, Managing Director, Lab49.]

Hence, I needed to develop against SL2 developer runtime. It proved to be a difficult task to find it.

But thanks to Matt Davey and Tim Heuer, here is a link where you can download SL2 developer runtime http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=92598

I recently helped a colleague out with an article on Flex vs. Silverlight in the Enterprise.  Both of us have a strong .NET background, and have more recently been heavily involved on a massive enterprise-scale Flex application.  Although I still stand by the original article, I realise it’s impossible to accurately and fairly detail each platforms’ strengths and weaknesses in one post.

So, I plan to start a bit of a series – comparing different user experiences as created with Silverlight and Flex, and hopefully reaching a conclusion on the benefits of each platform, based upon developer experience/efficiency, and of course how the end result meets the original client requirements.

Each post will focus on a technical area that you may find within any enterprise RIA.  Example areas could be video streaming, datagrid customisation, push messaging, theming/skinning, just to name a few.

It’s as much for my own benefit as anyone else’s – in order to deliver the best client experience, you HAVE to know what the best tools or platform are for any given situation!

Looks like 22nd July is the day for the UK – why are we always behind the US?

Offtopic:

• WCF Duplex Bindings With Silverlight
• SocketShifter
• Sobees – Silverlight 3 Social Network Aggregator
• nibbles – sketchy stuff

]]> http://mdavey.wordpress.com/2009/07/17/uk-silverlight-launch-22-july/feed 0 http://mdavey.wordpress.com/2009/07/17/silverlight-4-requested-features/ http://mdavey.wordpress.com/2009/07/17/silverlight-4-requested-features/#comments Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:55:56 +0000 Matt http://mdavey.wordpress.com/?p=1919 ]]>

A brief poll across my colleagues generated the following list. Hopefully Microsoft will deliver

• TruncateToFit on TextBlock (as per Flex)
• The ImplicitStyleManager in the toolkit is pretty rubbish, especially for itemsControls where it doesn’t apply the theme to newly added items in the itemsSource and is generally a bit flaky and hard to use and understand even when using ApplyMode.Auto and the performance tended to be very poor using around 50% CPU.
• ReaderWriterLock or ReaderWriterLockSlim
• Lack of markup extensions: x:Type, x:Null, x:Static – Let’s say you have a DependencyProperty of typeof(Type). At the moment the only way to set its value in XAML is by creating a bespoke TypeConverter class. Very painful and introduces many breaks with WPF
• XmlnsDefinition – fix the using statement problem in the generation of the .g.cs file
• DependencyPropertyKey – Allow creation of readonly properties as per WPF
• Programmatic Clipboard support
• Custom Drawing on a Control – as in wpf being able to override the OnRender method and draw to the DrawingContext.
• Triggers
• More binding options (relative source)
• Built-in mouse support
• Drag drop support
• More informative binding error notifications – i like knowing what property is missing on what object but i would like to know which view has the error
• More linq stuff (Enumerable extensions, hash set etc)
• Some of the TPL primitives
• Routed events (properly)
• Themes
• Commands
• OnRender virtual method and DrawingContext etc.
• VisualBrush
• RoutedEvents don’t work as they do in WPF as far as I can tell, mainly because you don’t have a way to specify that you want to see handled events which is very annoying in certain situations, e.g. Drag drop
• LayoutTransform would also be a welcome addition instead of just a renderTransform.
• Stop swallowing mouse events.. I don’t care if the event has been handled or not I need catch the MouseLeftButtonDown event at all times through proper event routing. Also stop sealing methods and classes, e.g. Canvas is sealed and MeasureOverride is sealed event though the documentation says “Classes can override this method to define their own measure pass behavior.”

]]> http://mdavey.wordpress.com/2009/07/17/silverlight-4-requested-features/feed 0 http://mdavey.wordpress.com/2009/07/17/flexing-your-net-3-5-skillset/ http://mdavey.wordpress.com/2009/07/17/flexing-your-net-3-5-skillset/#comments Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:52:49 +0000 Matt http://mdavey.wordpress.com/?p=1925 ]]>

.NET Developer’s Journal has an article (written Lab49) on Flex.

“Conclusion:As Silverlight and WPF mature and gain mainstream acceptance, Flex and Flash will undoubtedly be forced to evolve in a direction where they can stay competitive. It’s likely that there will be further feature swapping and parallels between the two. If you do find yourself in a position where you or your team will need to work on a Flex application, don’t feel that you will be throwing away what you know and starting from scratch. Rest assured that you will be in the best possible place to pick up the new framework as well as anyone, and can continue to build on the .NET infrastructure and support that you already have”.

Flex has the lead over Silverlight in terms of browser plug-in penetration. In terms of features Silverlight 3 is released but Flex 4 will follow soon, and until the Silverlight 4 release probably have a richer feature set. Further, Microsoft has somewhat of an interesting battle on the RIA server side when comparing RIA Services vs Adobe LCDS.

]]> http://mdavey.wordpress.com/2009/07/17/flexing-your-net-3-5-skillset/feed 0 http://www.charlierobbins.com//articles/2009/07/13/robust-reusable-drag-drop-behavior-in-silverlight-3/ http://www.charlierobbins.com//articles/2009/07/13/robust-reusable-drag-drop-behavior-in-silverlight-3/#comments Mon, 13 Jul 2009 23:12:26 +0000 Charlie Robbins http://www.charlierobbins.com//articles/2009/07/13/robust-reusable-drag-drop-behavior-in-silverlight-3/

• Posted by Charlie Robbins

Finextra covers the Silverlight 3 launch from the dealing room.

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