Blogs|Sep 20, 2011

Windows 8 Start Menu Toggle

Since getting my hands on Windows 8 this past week, I (like many others) have really grappled with the constant accidental returning to the metro tiles every time I try to search for something in the new neutered Start Menu that appears in the Developer’s Preview of Windows 8.  To say I hate that would…
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Blogs|Sep 6, 2011

Data Contracts and Behaviors over the Wire

One feature I employ often in Silverlight projects is the ability to share a model between the client and the server. When you expose a model using a WCF service, you can consume it on the Silverlight side and indicate you want to reuse types in a referenced assembly, rather than having the proxy types…
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Blogs|Sep 1, 2011

Silverlight 5 RC – Using the Task Parallel Library (TPL)

One enhancement that quietly slipped into the Silverlight 5 RC is the inclusion of Tasks. This is not the full-blown Task Parallel Library (TPL) to my knowledge (as it lacks the Parallel class and extensions) but it does provide Task, its related factories, and the functionality to chain and monitor tasks. The purpose of the…
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Blogs|Sep 1, 2011

Silverlight 5 RC Released – Using PInvoke

It’s exciting to see the progress of Silverlight 5 toward the final release that has been slated towards the end of the year. Today, the Silverlight Team announced the release of the Silverlight 5 Release Candidate. While it does not yet have a go-live license, it integrates many new features that were not available with…
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Blogs|Aug 29, 2011

Windows 7 Hang with FireWire 800 Drive Fix

Recently I bought a smoking fast external SSD enclosures from Other World Computing. My plan was to use the FireWire 800 connection to the drive so I can get the best portable speed possible. Alas, on all my machines as soon as I tried to do anything on the drive, Windows 7 hangs completely. That’s…
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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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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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Blogs|Jul 26, 2011

Where’s my DataContext?

Every now and then a question comes up concerning a missing DataContext.  The questions usually center around a ViewModel being set to a View properly, but then developer can not bind some command or property to a FrameworkElement.  And typically the FrameworkElement in question is nested within an ItemsControl’s ItemTemplate or other similar structure. First…
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Azure and Cloud Computing|Jul 25, 2011

How to Scale a jQuery Mobile Site for iOS

I was recently working on a jQuery Mobile application and everything looked great on my 21” touch monitor on several browsers, but when I deployed to the server and then hit the page on my iPhone, I ran into a few issues that I needed to work through in order to make the site what…
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