wintellect-blogs|Dec 16, 2009

Silverlight 4’s New Local File System Support

In my last blog post, I wrote about Silverlight 4 applications that run outside the browser with elevated permissions and their ability to leverage COM automation servers on the host PC. Another privilege that applications with elevated permissions—also known as “trusted apps”—enjoy is the ability to access parts of the local file system without prompting the…
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Blogs|Dec 16, 2009

Dispatching in Silverlight

Anyone who has been building Silverlight and/or WPF applications for some time understands that there is a single UI thread that has special access requirements if you are going to be updating elements. In other words, if I spin off a new thread, I cannot arbitrarily impact the UI unless I get back to the…
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Blogs|Dec 14, 2009

Silverlight 4’s New COM Automation Support

One of Silverlight 4’s most compelling new features is support for out-of-browser applications with elevated permissions. An app running with elevated permissions can perform actions that a normal sandboxed application can not. For example, it can access the local file system, and on Windows boxes, it can interact with COM automation servers. This latter feature—also…
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Blogs|Dec 12, 2009

Getting Rid of the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator Tray Crapware

This weekend I purchased a Samsung N110 netbook and slapped Windows 7 on that thing as fast as I could. The install was beautiful and recognized all the devices on the machine. Giving Windows Update a whirl, I see there are updates for the LAN hardware and the Intel Mobile Graphics 945 Express Chipset so…
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Blogs|Dec 11, 2009

Unit Tests for ViewModels AND Views in Silverlight

Over the past few posts I’ve been exploring models for modularized Silverlight applications that follow the MVVM pattern (using Prism/CAL). In this post, I’d like to cover unit testing, and writing appropriate tests not just for the view model, but the view itself. Before we continue, I’m going to assume you’ve read: Dynamic Module Loading…
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Blogs|Dec 9, 2009

Simplifying Asynchronous Calls in Silverlight using Action

This post explores a way to encapsulate web service calls from Silverlight in a way that is easy to use and understand. As anyone who works with Silverlight knows, Silverlight forces web service calls to be asynchronous. There is a good reason for this, which I won’t get into with this post. What I would…
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wintellect-blogs|Dec 8, 2009

MVVM Composition in Silverlight 3 with Prism

This post explores how to manage multiple view models across modules in a Prism-based Silverlight application. One powerful feature of Prism is the ability to dynamically load modules. This allows reduction of the XAP file size, as well as encourages a smaller memory footprint as certain modules are not brought into the application until they…
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Blogs|Dec 6, 2009

How I Use OneNote

When I posted Tools We Use, there were several comments, as well as many emails asking me how I used OneNote for debugging and development. Yes, I was the one who wrote “The greatest piece of software ever written. I’ve done more debugging and development with OneNote than anything else.” Having been a proponent for…
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Blogs|Dec 5, 2009

Host WCF as Windows Service without Installing

I am working on a project that involves a centralized UI that then coordinates with agents to send out instructions. The agents will be WCF endpoints and to ease deployment/minimize the install footprint, they will install as windows services with a nice installer rather than hanging onto an IIS webspace directly. In this post I…
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Blogs|Dec 2, 2009

Silverlight MEF: Custom ExportProvider for Attached XAML Exports

I’ve been enjoying learning more about the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) and exploring various ways to integrate it with applications. After toying with MEF on Silverlight for awhile, I began to wonder about using it to export/import UI pieces or even define data elements in XAML. After a tweet to @gblock confirmed there was not…
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wintellect-blogs|Nov 30, 2009

Tools We Use

Inside Wintellect, we’ve been having a big email chain about all the tools all the technical folks use. Of course, we all use Visual Studio, TFS, and have read Hanselman’s phenomenal Tools List, but our question was what are the tools each of us used on a daily basis to solve real world problems and…
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wintellect-blogs|Nov 30, 2009

Silverlight 4’s New Commanding Support

One of the exciting new features in the Silverlight 4 beta is a pair of properties added to the ButtonBase and Hyperlink classes named Command and CommandParameter. These properties represent the first real support in Silverlight for commanding, which is primarily beneficial to to Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) applications. MVVM has long been popular among WPF developers…
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