Blogs|Dec 4, 2010

Old School Silverlight Effects

This weekend I was working a little bit on my personal web site (rewriting it again, to use some better themes and my Jounce framework) and decided it would be fun to tinker with some old school effects. I decided to focus on two specific things: a transparent three-dimensional cube, and a plasma effect. You…
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Blogs|Dec 3, 2010

Quick Tip: Right-click VS 2010 Command and Admin Command Prompt

It seems that I’ve become very familiar with this command: xsd /c /l:cs schema.xml If you’re not familiar with it, this allows you to parse a schema into a strongly typed class, which then allows you to deserialize an XML document to that type. Pretty nifty, but it requires being in a “Visual Studio 2010…
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Blogs|Dec 2, 2010

From Silver to Gold in One Release: Silverlight 5

Silverlight 5 is coming! According to the keynote from Scott Guthrie, it will be here in beta by Spring 2011 and in release by end of year 2011. Today’s Silverlight Firestarter event included a keynote speech by Scott Guthrie, announcing the features that are slated for the next release. Because I went into great detail…
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Blogs|Nov 29, 2010

Silverlight and WCF Service Consumption: Event vs. APM

I’ve blogged several times about how I like to handle services in Silverlight. For two key posts, take a look at: Abstracting Service Calls in Silverlight 3 (works well for 4, too) Simplifying Asynchronous Calls in Silverlight using Action In this post we’ll explore the difference between using the actual contract for a WCF service…
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Blogs|Nov 17, 2010

Code Signing Certificates – The Three Year Update

A little short of three years ago, I wrote a blog entry, “Code Signing – It’s Cheaper and Easier than you Thought.” In there I talked about buying my three year certificate from TUCOW’s author web site (who’s a reseller of Comodo certificates) for $195 USD and how to integrate code signing into your build.…
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Blogs|Oct 29, 2010

So What’s the Fuss about Silverlight?

Perception is said to be reality and there has been a lot of speculation recently about where Silverlight is going and what Microsoft’s position is. One of the reasons for this is the emphasis on HTML5 at the recent PDC conference. Unfortunately, that has led to talk and fear about the “doom and demise” of…
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Blogs|Sep 27, 2010

Logical Call Context: Flowing Data across Threads, AppDomains, and Processes

Many developers are familiar with Thread Local Storage (TLS) as a mechanism allowing you to associate a piece of data with a thread. I usually discourage people from using TLS because I recommend architecting applications to perform their operations using thread pool threads. TLS doesn’t work with the thread pool because different thread pool threads…
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Blogs|Sep 27, 2010

MEF in the Wild: A Retrospective

After having worked on several major projects that integrated the Managed Extensibility Framework, I thought it might be beneficial to share a retrospective on how it was used what value it provided. These are all ways MEF helped my team build modular Silverlight applications. Unlike my earlier post that covered 10 Reasons to use the…
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Blogs|Sep 23, 2010

Intro to MVVM: Slides and Sample Code

Thanks to everyone who joined me last night for my presentation about Model-View-ViewModel for the Atlanta Silverlight Meetup group. I enjoyed it and appreciate you sticking through the heat (pardon the pun). As promised, I’ve uploaded both the slide deck and the code that I demonstrated for you to work with. Click here to download…
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Blogs|Sep 22, 2010

Integrating your Application’s Threading Model with the Asynchronous Programming Model

In version 2.0 of the .NET Framework, Microsoft introduced the System.Threading. SynchronizationContext class. Simply stated, a SynchronizationContext-derived object connects an application model to its threading model. The FCL defines several classes derived from SynchronizationContext, but usually you will not deal directly with these classes; in fact, many of them are not publicly exposed or documented.…
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Blogs|Sep 16, 2010

Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools RTM, etc.

With all due respect to Steve Martin, “The new phone tools are here!  The new phone tools are here!” Following up on my recent presentations introducing development for Windows Phone 7 with Silverlight, the release of the RTM version of the Windows Phone 7 to the public today was announced today, along with a couple…
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Blogs|Sep 15, 2010

Best Practices for Themes in Modular Silverlight Applications

When building large Silverlight applications, it makes sense to build sets of styles that can be shared across the application. Many examples on the web illustrate placing these in the App.xaml file and then you are off to the races. Unfortunately, when you are building modular applications, it’s not that simple. The dependent modules still…
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