Blogs|Aug 20, 2011

Tablet Development with Microsoft Silverlight

On August 6th I gave a presentation for ReMix South about tablet development with Silverlight. It was a fun presentation to give. I presented using a Motion Computing CL900 to demonstrate the difference between standard applications and ones that are touch-optimized. I also spoke quite a bit about why Silverlight was the strategic choice for…
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wintellect-blogs|Aug 15, 2011

Silverlight 5 Incompatibility: Play by the Rules

I’ve been using the Silverlight 5 beta for some time now with no issues, so it was a surprise when I came across a project that did not work. It was definitely a backwards compatibility issue because it would run fine in Silverlight 4, but once installed the version 5 runtime, no luck. I started…
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Blogs|Aug 12, 2011

Using Attribute Validation in Silverlight with WCF RIA Services Example

I’m not a big fan of attribute-based validation because I find there are often complex requirements that involve asynchronous operations that often break the attribute model. I prefer more fluent validation using rules that can be shared between the client and server and can handle asynchronous scenarios. For those times when I do have to…
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Blogs|Jul 29, 2011

Reflection, Lambda, and Expression Magic

Sometimes I love how a little reflection can work magic. In this case I was building what I’ll call a “non-intrusive” validation system. The project contains entities that are generated by templates, and it would be extremely difficult to crack open those templates to put in a lot of custom validation code. So I decided…
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wintellect-blogs|Jul 13, 2011

Consumerization of IT and Silverlight Line of Business

Yesterday I had the opportunity to present a demo at the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Los Angeles. The session was called “Profiting from the Consumerization of IT with Windows Devices and Windows 7 Enterprise.” The focus was on how consumer-driven trends impact the enterprise and ways to work with, rather than against, that trend…
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wintellect-blogs|Jul 5, 2011

Worldwide Partner Conference and Silverlight

I’ve seen a lot of speculation around the future of Silverlight and how it compares to HTML5 lately. If you’ve followed my posts and tweets you’ll find that I still believe Silverlight is strong in the line of business area and in fact my company Wintellect is still doing quite a bit with it. The…
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wintellect-blogs|Jul 1, 2011

Quick Tip: Fixing those Stubborn References

I am working on a project that uses a mixed set of assemblies. Some are in the .NET Framework 3.5, and others are in version 4.0. The project is being converted to use the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF). In order for the parts to play nicely together, all projects must use the same version of…
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Blogs|Jun 27, 2011

Using the Task Parallel Library (TPL) for Events

The parallel tasks library was introduced with the .NET Framework 4.0 and is designed to simplify parallelism and concurrency. The API is very straightforward and usually involves passing in an Action to execute. Things get a little more interesting when you are dealing with asynchronous models such as events. While the TPL has explicit wrappers…
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Blogs|Jun 9, 2011

Telerik, Windows Phone 7, Sterling, and Free Licenses

You’ve heard plenty about the Sterling database engine on this blog. I recently released version 1.5 which extended the reach of the database and added several feature requests. My article on Sterling for Isolated Storage on Windows Phone 7 was also recently published in MSDN Magazine. The phone has made this a very popular engine…
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Blogs|Jun 7, 2011

Microsoft’s Silverlight Elevator Pitch

You have heard of an elevator pitch, right? It’s that quick, 30-second pitch that starts with a hook, goes on to the how, what and why and closes with a strong call to action. It’s the perfect way to quickly provide the value proposition for something you’re trying to sell, condensed into an easy, fast…
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database-development|Jun 5, 2011

The Sterling NoSQL Database in a Mango World

I was at the MIX 2011 event. There was an “Open Source Fest” before the event and I came to showcase the Sterling NoSQL Database project that I run (and code most of, although there have been numerous enhancements and patches now added by a growing team of fantastic supporters). I was happy to speak…
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