Posts by Jeff Prosise

One of the unique features that Silverlight brings to the browser platform is the ability for you to write multithreaded apps. You can use Thread.Start, ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem, and other mechanisms to execute code on another thread, and you can use the same thread-synchronization primitives that you’re already familiar with from the “big” .NET Framework to synchronize…

One of the areas of Silverlight that not much has been written about yet is the factoring of applications. Applications don’t have to be packaged in one big XAP file; Silverlight presents numerous options for dividing code and resources among multiple assemblies, packaging resources inside or outside the XAP file in one file or multiple…

A while back I blogged about a technique for allowing two Silverlight control instances to communicate. It involved having one of the controls call out from C# into a simple JavaScript bridge, and then having the bridge call into the other control by calling from JavaScript into C#. It was a practical use for the…

I’ve been working crazy hours updating my Silverlight course for version 2 and expanding it with lots of new material. With the PDC coming up in less than a week, I’ve also been working on some cool tips and tricks demonstrating some of the lesser-known but potentially useful features of Silverlight 2. Each day leading up to the…

I wanted to build a demo for the Silverlight precon at the PDC showing off Silverlight 2’s support for duplex WCF services. I considered various themes for the demo, including stock tickers, sports scores, and weather data. But what I ultimately decided on is an unflattering statement about the state of our country: a national…

I’ve been away from the blog for a while enduring several straight weeks of travel, two of them overseas. Now I’m back home readying for the PDC by porting Silverlight samples to RC0 and writing new ones. If you’re coming to the PDC, I would love to see you at the Silverlight precon. We’re going…

It may be the dog days of summer, but things are hopping here at Wintellect. We just finished another successful Devscovery Redmond, where attendees soaked in lots of Silverlight love and also made a run on the Microsoft company store. If you’ve never attended a Devscovery in Redmond, it’s worth the price of admission just…

If you’re interested in writing custom controls for Silverlight but need a step-by-step tutorial to get you started, check out my latest column in MSDN Magazine: Craft Custom Controls for Silverlight 2. I had a load of fun writing this one and wrote it because there is so precious little information out there about Silverlight…

Charles Petzold tagged me and challenged me to answer the following questions as part of a software development meme that’s going around. How old were you when you first started programming?I had a couple of programming courses in college, but I didn’t really start programming until I got out of school and bought my first computer…

Jeff Atwood wrote a great blog post about why Microsoft can’t use open source in their products. Jon Galloway wrote a complementary post providing some specifics from a Microsoft insider explaining why Microsoft can’t use open source. One of Jon’s salient points is as follows: Let’s say Microsoft took my advice and shipped Paint.NET as…