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• Silverlight Cream for June 10, 2010 -- #879

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Emiel Jongerius, Nokola, Christian Schormann, Tim Heuer, David Poll, Mike Snow(-2-), John Papa, and Charles Petzold. Shoutout: Viktor Larsson has a frank look at WP7 based on information from MIX10 and what was said this week in his post: Licking Windows Phone 7... yeah licking, not liking :) .. my guess is even that didn't allow him to keep it! If you haven't already noticed, the CodeProject reader's choice awards are out this week and Telerik won for their RadColorPicker and RadCalendar for Silverlight Telerik also needs congratulations for winning Telerik wins “Best of TechEd” award in the “Components and Middleware” category... check out that trophy... Steven Forte has a picture up of the Telerikers after getting the award. Koen Zwikstra has a new release of Silverlight Spy up that supports the latest release: Silverlight Spy 3.0.0.12 From SilverlightCream.com: Localization of XAML files in Silverlight Emiel Jongerius is back with another post, this time discussing Localizing XAM files... external links and source included. Coolest Silverlight Sound Library for Games I've Seen Yet Nokola talks up a Sound Library for Silverlight 4 Games ... and has links to a great demo, plus the source. SketchFlow: Firing Actions when a Storyboard is Complete Christian Schormann responded to some Twitter questions and demonstrates using the StoryboardCompleted trigger with a Navigate action. Hosting cross-domain Silverlight applications (XAP) Tim Heuer responds to a question from a reader and demonstrates how to host a XAP from a domain other than the one you're working on. Taking Microsoft Silverlight 4 Applications Beyond the Browser (TechEd WEB313) David Poll has all his material up from his TechEd presentation earlier this week on Silverlight OOB... and he covered some pretty extensive material ... check it out! Silverlight Tip of the Day #29 – Configuring Service Reference to Back to LocalHost Mike Snow has a couple new tips up... this first one is quick, but very useful... how to switch your service reference back to localhost without pulling out your hair. Silverlight Tip of the Day #30 – Sending Email from Silverlight In Mike Snow's latest tip, he shows how to send email from your Silverlight app... using a WCF service... and a step-by-step set of instructions. Creating Rich Interactions Using Blend 4: Transition Effects, Fluid Layout and Layout States (Silverlight TV #32) John Papa has Silverlight TV #32 up, and he's talking with Kenny Young of the Expression Blend team while Kenny uses some built-om effects and also creates some impressive examples from scratch -- code included. Simulating Touch Inertia on Windows Phone 7 Charles Petzold has a post up on simulating inertia on WP7... demos in WPF and then moves into WP7... math, source, and external links. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• C# Domain-Driven Design Sample Released

  - by Artur Trosin

  In the post I want to declare that NDDD Sample application(s) is released and share the work with you. You can access it here: http://code.google.com/p/ndddsample. NDDDSample from functionality perspective matches DDDSample 1.1.0 which is based Java and on joint effort by Eric Evans' company Domain Language and the Swedish software consulting company Citerus. But because NDDDSample is based on .NET technologies those two implementations could not be matched directly. However concepts, practices, values, patterns, especially DDD, are cross-language and cross-platform :). Implementation of .NET version of the application was an interesting journey because now as .NET developer I better understand the differences positive and negative between these two platforms. Even there are those differences they can be overtaken, in many cases it was not so hard to match a java libs\framework with .NET during the implementation. Here is a list of technology stack: 1. .net 3.5 - framework 2. VS.NET 2008 - IDE 3. ASP.NET MVC2.0 - for administration and tracking UI 4. WCF - communication mechanism 5. NHibernate - ORM 6. Rhino Commons - Nhibernate session management, base classes for in memory unit tests 7. SqlLite - database 8. Windsor - inversion of control container 9. Windsor WCF facility - for better integration with NHibernate 10. MvcContrib - and in particular its Castle WindsorControllerFactory in order to enable IoC for controllers 11. WPF - for incident logging application 12. Moq - mocking lib used for unit tests 13. NUnit - unit testing framework 14. Log4net - logging framework 15. Cloud based on Azure SDK These are not the latest technologies, tools and libs for the moment but if there are someone thinks that it would be useful to migrate the sample to latest current technologies and versions please comment. Cloud version of the application is based on Azure emulated environment provided by the SDK, so it hasn't been tested on ‘real' Azure scenario (we just do not have access to it). Thanks to participants, Eugen Gorgan who was involved directly in development, Ruslan Rusu and Victor Lungu spend their free time to discuss .NET specific decisions, Eugen Navitaniuc helped with Java related questions. Also, big thank to Cornel Cretu, he designed a nice logo and helped with some browser incompatibility issues. Any review and feedback are welcome! Thank you, Artur Trosin

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• Silverlight Cream for April 26, 2010 -- #848

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Viktor Larsson, Mike Snow(-2-), Jeff Brand, Marlon Grech(-2-, -3-), Jonathan van de Veen, Phil Middlemiss. Shoutout: Justin Angel wants everyone to know he is Joining the Vertigo Team!... congratulations, Justin! From SilverlightCream.com: Learning Silverlight – Advanced Color Animations Viktor Larsson is demonstrating small pieces of Silverlight he's picked upon in the course of his work project. This first one is on ColorAnimations using KeyFrames Silverlight Tip of the Day #4 – Enabling Out of Browser Applications Mike Snow has Tip #4 up and it's all about OOB... from what you have to do to what your user sees, including how to check to see if you're running OOB... source project included. Silverlight Tip of the Day #5 – Debugging Out of Browser Applications Following a fine tradition he started with his first series, Mike Snow is putting out more than one Tip per day :) ... Number 5 is up and is all about debugging OOB apps. Simplifying Page Transitions in Windows Phone 7 Silverlight Applications Jeff Brand has a WP7 post up discussing Page Transitions. He first discusses the most common brute-force method, then moves into the TransitioningContentControl from the Toolkit. An introduction to MEFedMVVM – PART 1 Marlon Grech, Peter O’Hanlon, and Glenn Block worked together to produce an MEF and MVVM library that works for WPF and Silverlight and allows Design-time goodness and a loosely-coupled bridge between the View and ViewModel ... and it's on CodePlex ... they're also looking for comments/additions, so check it out. Leveraging MEFedMVVM ExportViewModel – MEFedMVVM Part 2 In Part 2, Marlon Grech demonstrates using MEFedMVVM and shows off some of the basics such as Importing services, Design-Time data and DataContextAware ViewModels IContextAware services to bridge the gap between the View and the ViewModel – MEFedMVVM Part 3 Marlon Grech's 3rd post about MEFedMVVM is about IContextAwareService -- bridging the gap betwen the View and ViewModel -- a service that knows about it's context. Building a Web Setup that configures your Silverlight application Jonathan van de Veen has a post up at SilverlightShow on using a Web Setup Project to configure your Silverlight when things startup... if you're not familiar with doing this... take note! A Chrome and Glass Theme - Part 4 Phil Middlemiss has part 4 of his great tutorial series up on creating a theme in Expression Blend ... this time tackling the listbox. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Silverlight Cream for March 14, 2011 -- #1060

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Lazar Nikolov, Rudi Grobler, WindowsPhoneGeek, Jesse Liberty, Pete Brown, Jessica Foster, Chris Rouw, Andy Beaulieu, and Colin Eberhardt. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "A Silverlight Resizable TextBlock (and other resizable things)" Colin Eberhardt WP7: "Retrofitting the Trial API" Jessica Foster Shoutouts: Rudi Grobler has a post up that's not Silverlight, but it's cool stuff you may be interested in: WPF Themes now available on NuGet From SilverlightCream.com: Simulating rain in Silverlight Lazar Nikolov has a cool tutorial up at SilverlightShow... Simulating rain. Nice demo near to top, and source code plus a very nice tutorial on the entire process. Making the ApplicationBar bindable Rudi Grobler has a couple new posts up... first this one on making the WP7 AppBar bindable... he's created 2 simple wrappers that make it possible to bind to a method... with source as usual! All about Splash Screens in WP7 – Creating animated Splash Screen WindowsPhoneGeek's latest is about splash screens in WP7, but he goes one better with animated splash screens. Lots of good information including closing points in more of a FAQ-style listing. Testing Network Availability Jesse Liberty's latest is on testing for network availability in your WP7 app. This should be required reading for anyone building a WP7 app, since you never know when the network is going to be there or not. Lighting up on Windows 7 with Native Extensions for Microsoft Silverlight Pete Brown's latest post is about the Native Extensions for Microsoft Silverlight or NESL library. Pete describes what NESL is, a link to the library, installing it, and tons more information. If you wanna know or try NESL... this looks like the place to start. Retrofitting the Trial API Jessica Foster paused on the way to shipping her WP7 app to add in the trial API code. Check out what she went through to complete that task, as she explains the steps and directions she took. Good description, links, and code. WP7 Insights #2: Creating a Splash Screen in WP7 In the 2nd post in his series on WP7 development, Chris Rouw is discussing a WP7 splash screen. He gives some good external links for references then gets right into discussing his code. Air Hockey for Windows Phone 7 Andy Beaulieu shares a tutorial he wrote for the Expression Toolbox site, using the Physics Helper Library and Farseer Physics Engine -- an Air Hockey game for WP7. A Silverlight Resizable TextBlock (and other resizable things) I think Michael Washington had the best comment about Colin Eberhardt's latest outing: "Another WOW example" ... drop this in the pretty darn cool category: an attached behavior that uses a Thumb control within a popup to adorn any UI element to allow the user to resize it! Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Mounting a Microsoft Azure CloudDrive in a VMRole

  - by SeanBarlow

  Mounting a Drive in a VMRole is a little more complicated then a web or worker.  The Web and Worker roles offer OnStart and OnStop events, which you can use to mount or unmount your drives. The VMRole does not have these same events so you have to provide another way for the drives to be mounted or unmounted. The problem I have run into is what if you have multiple drives and you only want to mount certain drives. How do you let your user mount the drive. I am not going to go into details on what kind of GUI to present to the user. I have done this in a simple WPF application as well as a console application. We are going to need to get the storage account details. One thing to note when you are mounting cloud drives you cannot use https and have to use http. We force the use of http by using false when we create the CloudStorageAccount.   StorageCredentialsAccountAndKey credentials = new StorageCredentialsAccountAndKey("AccountName", "AccountKey"); CloudStorageAccount storageAccount = new CloudStorageAccount(credentials, false);   Next we need to get a reference to the container.   var blobClient = storageAccount.CreateCloudBlobClient(); var container = blobClient.GetContainerReference("ContainerName");   Now we need to get a list of the drives in the container   var drives = container.ListBlobs();   Now that we have a list of the drives in the container we can let the user choose which drive they want to mount. I am just selecting the 1st drive in the list for the example and getting the Uri of the drive.   var driveUri = drives.First().Uri;   Now that we have the Uri we need to get the reference to the drive. var drive = new CloudDrive(driveUri, storageAccount.Credentials);   Now all that is left is to mount the drive.   var driveLetter = drive.Mount(0, DriveMountOptions.None);   To unmount the drive all you have to do is call unmount on the drive. drive.Unmount();   You do need to make sure you unount the drives when you are done with them. I have run into issues with the drives being locked until the VMRole is rebooted. I have also managed to have a drive be permanently locked and I was forced to delete it and upload it again. I have been unable to reproduce the permanent lock but I am still trying. The CloudDrive class provides a handy method to retrieve all the mounted drives in the Role. foreach (var drive in CloudDrive.GetMountedDrives()) {          var mountedDrive = Account.CreateCloudDrive(drive.Value.PathAndQuery);          mountedDrive.Unmount(); }

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• How to sort a ListView control by a column in Visual C#

  - by bconlon

  Microsoft provide an article of the same name (previously published as Q319401) and it shows a nice class 'ListViewColumnSorter ' for sorting a standard ListView when the user clicks the column header. This is very useful for String values, however for Numeric or DateTime data it gives odd results. E.g. 100 would come before 99 in an ascending sort as the string compare sees 1 < 9. So my challenge was to allow other types to be sorted. This turned out to be fairly simple as I just needed to create an inner class in ListViewColumnSorter which extends the .Net CaseInsensitiveComparer class, and then use this as the ObjectCompare member's type. Note: Ideally we would be able to use IComparer as the member's type, but the Compare method is not virtual in CaseInsensitiveComparer , so we have to create an exact type: public class ListViewColumnSorter : IComparer {     private CaseInsensitiveComparer ObjectCompare;     private MyComparer ObjectCompare;     ... rest of Microsofts class implementation... } Here is my private inner comparer class, note the 'new int Compare' as Compare is not virtual, and also note we pass the values to the base compare as the correct type (e.g. Decimal, DateTime) so they compare correctly: private class MyComparer : CaseInsensitiveComparer {     public new int Compare(object x, object y)     {         try         {             string s1 = x.ToString();             string s2 = y.ToString();               // check for a numeric column             decimal n1, n2 = 0;             if (Decimal.TryParse(s1, out n1) && Decimal.TryParse(s2, out n2))                 return base.Compare(n1, n2);             else             {                 // check for a date column                 DateTime d1, d2;                 if (DateTime.TryParse(s1, out d1) && DateTime.TryParse(s2, out d2))                     return base.Compare(d1, d2);             }         }         catch (ArgumentException) { }           // just use base string compare         return base.Compare(x, y);     } } You could extend this for other types, even custom classes as long as they support ICompare. Microsoft also have another article How to: Sort a GridView Column When a Header Is Clicked that shows this for WPF, which looks conceptually very similar. I need to test it out to see if it handles non-string types. #

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• Silverlight Cream for December 08, 2010 -- #1005

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Peter Kuhn, David Anson, Jesse Liberty, Mike Taulty(-2-, -3-), Kunal Chowdhury, Jeremy Likness, Martin Krüger, Beth Massi(-2-, -3-)/ Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Rebuilding the PDC 2010 Silverlight Application (Part 1)" Mike Taulty WP7: "WP7: Glossy text block custom control" Martin Krüger Lightswitch: "How to Create a Screen with Multiple Search Parameters in LightSwitch" Beth Massi From SilverlightCream.com: Requirements of and pitfalls in Windows Phone 7 serialization Peter Kuhn discusses Data Contract Serializer issuses on WP7 and how to work around them. Managed implementation of CRC32 and MD5 algorithms updated; new release of ComputeFileHashes for Silverlight, WPF, and the command-line! David Anson ties up some loose ends from a prior post on hash functions, and updates his CRC32 and MD5 algorithms. Windows Phone From Scratch #9 – Visual State Jesse Liberty's latest Windows Phone from Scratch tutorial up... and is on the Visual State... he extends a Button and codes up the State Transitions. Rebuilding the PDC 2010 Silverlight Application (Part 1) Mike Taulty has taken the time to rebuild the PDC2010 Silverlight App that folks wanted the source for... and he's taking multiple posts to explain the heck out of it. This first one is mostly infrastructure. Rebuilding the PDC 2010 Silverlight Application (Part 2) In the 2nd post of the series, Mike Taulty is handling the In/Out of Browser business because he eventually is going to be going OOB. Rebuilding the PDC 2010 Silverlight Application (Part 3) Part 3 finds Mike Taulty delving into WCF Data Services and getting some data on the screen. Paginating Records in Silverlight DataGrid using PagedCollectionView Kunal Chowdhury continues with his investigation of the PagedCollectionView with this post on Pagination of your data. Old School Silverlight Effects If you haven't seen Jeremy Likness' 'Old School' Effects page yet, go just for the entertainment... you'll find yourself hanging around for the code :) WP7: Glossy text block custom control Martin Krüger's latest post is a very cool custom control for WP7 that displays Glossy text... it ain't Metro, but it looks pretty nice... some of it almost like etched text. How to Create a Screen with Multiple Search Parameters in LightSwitch Looks like Beth Massi got a few Lightswitch posts in while I wasn't looking. First up is this one on a multiple-parameter search screen. Adding Static Images and Logos to LightSwitch Applications In the 2nd post, Beth Massi shows how to add your own static images and logos to Lightswitch apps... in response to reader questions. Getting the Most out of LightSwitch Summary Properties In her latest post, Beth Massi explains what Summary Properties are in Lightswitch and how to use them to get the best results for your users. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Connect to QuickBooks from PowerBuilder using RSSBus ADO.NET Data Provider

  - by dataintegration

  The RSSBus ADO.NET providers are easy-to-use, standards based controls that can be used from any platform or development technology that supports Microsoft .NET, including Sybase PowerBuilder. In this article we show how to use the RSSBus ADO.NET Provider for QuickBooks in PowerBuilder. A similar approach can be used from PowerBuilder with other RSSBus ADO.NET Data Providers to access data from Salesforce, SharePoint, Dynamics CRM, Google, OData, etc. In this article we will show how to create a basic PowerBuilder application that performs CRUD operations using the RSSBus ADO.NET Provider for QuickBooks. Step 1: Open PowerBuilder and create a new WPF Window Application solution. Step 2: Add all the Visual Controls needed for the connection properties. Step 3: Add the DataGrid control from the .NET controls. Step 4:Configure the columns of the DataGrid control as shown below. The column bindings will depend on the table. <DataGrid AutoGenerateColumns="False" Margin="13,249,12,14" Name="datagrid1" TabIndex="70" ItemsSource="{Binding}"> <DataGrid.Columns> <DataGridTextColumn x:Name="idColumn" Binding="{Binding Path=ID}" Header="ID" Width="SizeToHeader" /> <DataGridTextColumn x:Name="nameColumn" Binding="{Binding Path=Name}" Header="Name" Width="SizeToHeader" /> ... </DataGrid.Columns> </DataGrid> Step 5:Add a reference to the RSSBus ADO.NET Provider for QuickBooks assembly. Step 6:Optional: Set the QBXML Version to 6. Some of the tables in QuickBooks require a later version of QuickBooks to support updates and deletes. Please check the help for details. Connect the DataGrid: Once the visual elements have been configured, developers can use standard ADO.NET objects like Connection, Command, and DataAdapter to populate a DataTable with the results of a SQL query: System.Data.RSSBus.QuickBooks.QuickBooksConnection conn conn = create System.Data.RSSBus.QuickBooks.QuickBooksConnection(connectionString) System.Data.RSSBus.QuickBooks.QuickBooksCommand comm comm = create System.Data.RSSBus.QuickBooks.QuickBooksCommand(command, conn) System.Data.DataTable table table = create System.Data.DataTable System.Data.RSSBus.QuickBooks.QuickBooksDataAdapter dataAdapter dataAdapter = create System.Data.RSSBus.QuickBooks.QuickBooksDataAdapter(comm) dataAdapter.Fill(table) datagrid1.ItemsSource=table.DefaultView The code above can be used to bind data from any query (set this in command), to the DataGrid. The DataGrid should have the same columns as those returned from the SELECT statement. PowerBuilder Sample Project The included sample project includes the steps outlined in this article. You will also need the QuickBooks ADO.NET Data Provider to make the connection. You can download a free trial here.

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• 302: this blog will be closed

  - by preishuber

  After nearly 7 years I will discontinue blogging on this site. My resources are limited. You can reach my German blog which is used to support my customers. Looking back to a long an interesting journey ASP.NET by ScottGu That was the reason to attend this site and support Microsoft as much as I can. For that I was honored as ASP.NET MVP- thanks again. Meet Scoot several times. Great guy! Forums I have left NNTP forums a few years ago and now Microsoft closed it- It was my idea ;-) AJAX Was the wrong way- JQuery won the game IIS7 That is really a great plattform and the IIS team rules. I am sad that is so silent around that topic. ASP.NET after 2.0 Is no longer my world. I love ASP.NET and ASP.NET Server controls. I hate the discussion about how to follow the holy rules of MVC. Microsoft have dropped the goal to bring ASP.NET to #1 and accepted PHP is it. Facebook & Twittering Microblogging takes over a part of the blogging business. Shorter faster cheaper- or as SteveB mentioned - do more with less. Google Google is taking over the web. I am using Bing every time as I can but Google have more options. Sorry Microsoft you will loose that game. Apple That is not the biggest problem of Microsoft. the Ixxx takes over a small part but big money of the market, but the customers are not strongly linked. New wave new hype- Game over Apple. Silverlight My new home. I can reuse a lot of my skills and love the possibilitys. Silverligth will passing WPF-and strike Flash Windows phone 7 Also my skills fit. I just will use it for fun. I am not really satisfied about what I have heard from MIX. Guys from Redmond, I am sad to say you have been the best Smartphone OS and lost everything. The ADO vNext Story That will be the next mystic point. WCF, REST, JSON, ATOM and now OData. Nothing about SQL commands. LINQ, ORM is also not the final solution for multilayered disconnected async scenarios. Personally I prefere the OData idea and dislike the Swiss Army Knife (German Eierlegende Wollmilchsau) WCF. I am still in INETA Speakers board and I am glad to come to your user group. In all other cases you can hire me over ppedv AG. Good by and have good live.

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• Why I Love Microsoft Development

  - by Brian Lanham

  I've been writing software for a while and recently had an opportunity to broaden my horizons and start developing for iOS. We decided to leverage, as much as possible, our existing skills and use MonoTouch and MonoDevelop by Novell.    For those of you who do not know, Mono is a .NET port originally designed for Linux but adapted for other platforms as well. MonoTouch is a port specifically for building iOS applications using the .NET framework. MonoDroid is a port (in CTP-esque release) for Android.   A MISSING COMPONENT - VISUAL DESIGNER   MonoDevelop lacks one very significant component compared with other tools I am using: NO VISUAL DESIGNER. Instead of using an integrated visual designer, MonoDevelop shells to the Mac OS "Interface Builder".  Since MonoDevelop lets me have a "Visual Studio-esque" feel *and* I get to use C#, AND it's FREE, I am gladly willing to overlook this.  In fact, it's not even a question.  Free?  Sure, I'll take it with no Visual Designer.   In my experiences I've grown from UNIX and DOS to .NET development through many steps. Java/JSP/Servlets; Windows; Web; etc. I've been doing .NET for quite a few years and I guess I just got "comfortable" with the tools.   WHY AM I NOT GETTING IT?   Interface Builder (IB) is amazingly confusing for me. I had the opportunity to speak at the Northern VA Code Camp on 12/11/2010. My presentation was "Getting Started with iOS Development using MonoTouch and C#".    At the visual design part of the presentation, I asked one of the 3 or 4 Mac developers in the room about my confusion with the IB. I don't understand why the "Classes" list includes objects. I don't understand what "File's Owner" is. And, most importantly, WHAT THE HECK IS AN OUTLET AND WHY IS IT NECESSARY?!?!?"   His response to these question (especially Outlets): "They did it wrong."   I'm accustom to a visual designer that creates variables for graphical widgets for me. Not IB. Instead, I have to create "Outlets" manually. I still do not understand why and, the explanation from a seasoned Mac developer is that it's wrong. (He received nods of confirmation from the other Mac devs in the room.)   I LOVE MS DEV   I love development for Microsoft platforms using Microsoft development tools. I love Windows 7. I love Visual Studio 2010. I love SQL Server. Azure, Entity Framework, Active Directory, Office, WCF/WF/WPF, etc. are all designed with integration in mind. They are also all designed with developers in mind.   Steve Ballmer recently ranted "It's the developers!" That's why it is relatively quick to build apps using MS tools. Clearly, MS knows that while we usually enjoy building technology solutions, we are here to make money. And we need tools that accelerate our time to market without compromising the power and quality of our solutions.   So, yeah, I am sucking up I guess. But I love Microsoft Development. Thank you, Microsoft, for providing the plethora of great development tools.    P.S. (but please slow down a bit…I'm having trouble keeping up!)

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• My program at #MIX10

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  Getting ready to fly to Vegas and MIX10 is really an exciting time! It is also a very busy time, because we are working on a few projects that will be shown on stage, I have my presentation to prepare, and of course as always the book… though these days it has been a bit on the back burner to be honest ;) I arrive in Vegas on Sunday evening around 10PM, so I won’t be able to make it to the traditional IdentityMine dinner this year. I am sure it will be fun nonetheless! My session: Understanding the MVVM pattern http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/EX14 My session is scheduled on the first day, which is awesome, so I am crossing my fingers and hoping that the MIX team doesn’t change it at the last minute… The session will take place on Monday, the 15th of March, 2PM, Room Lagoon F Important: remember that the USA are moving to Summer time on Sunday, so don’t forget to adjust your watches!! Ask the Experts On Monday evening, I will attend the Ask the Experts event, which is taking place between 5Pm and 6:30PM in the main meal hall. This will be a great occasion to grab a beer and talk about code. The Commons MIX has a great place called the Commons, a great location to chill between sessions, and meet tons of interesting people. I love the Commons and plan to spend a lot of time there to meet as many people as I can. Parties I was invited to a few parties, and will do my best to avoid conflicts :) I plan to be at the following events: Silverlight Mixers on Monday evening Insiders MIX party on Tuesday Silverlight partner happy hour on Tuesday too This is a lot of fun, but at the same time we all know that the best value of a conference is to meet people face to face. This is just the right occasion.  And on Thursday… On Thursday I will be attending a Silverlight event at the Luxor. It will be a very busy day, perfect way to end the conference. I fly back home on Friday morning, but due to a long stop in Washington DC (where I intend to go downtown and take pictures… except if the weather is bad, in which case I will probably go to the museum of flight), I will reach home only on Sunday. Getting hold of me The best way to reach me during MIX is to send me a message on Twitter. I will regularly tweet my location at the conference, so make sure to come and meet me. I am eager to make new friends, to talk about the fantastic jobs we did in WPF and Silverlight over the past year and hear your war stories! http://www.twitter.com/lbugnion   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• Exit Infragistics, Enter Telerik

  - by Anthony Trudeau

  Today I made the purchase of the Premium Collection of components from Telerik.  This follows an evaluation I’ve been doing to replace the Infragistics components we currently use for Windows Forms, ASP.NET MVC, and WPF. It was not a formal evaluation.  I had already decided to move the company away from Infragistics.  That decision was mostly born out of frustration with support over using the Infragistics components in my first production MVC application. One such issue was a simple scenario where you have a model that has a scalar property that can be one value out of a list.  The built-in combobox does this, but I was told by Infragistics support that they didn’t support it – and it took them several emails and days of waiting between responses to determine that.  I implemented this in Telerik in a minute not including the several minutes it took me to get a rudimentary understanding for the component and its API. Here’s the code using the built-in combobox:@Html.DropDownListFor(x => x.VendorId, new SelectList(ViewBag.Vendors, "VendorId", "VendorName", Model.VendorId), "Select Id") Here’s the code using the Telerik combobox:@(Html.Telerik().ComboBoxFor(model => model.VendorId) .AutoFill(true) .BindTo(new SelectList(ViewBag.Vendors, "VendorId", "VendorName", Model.VendorId)) )   I chose Telerik over other competitors based on the professional appearance of their website, and how easy it was to find information.  I’d like to say I had time to evaluate other Infragistics competitors.  Due to time constraints I had to make an initial decision based on superficial, but still important things. I picked Telerik with the plan to only look further at other companies if my evaluation didn’t meet my expectations.  Luckily they did, because I didn’t relish the thought of carving out more time to evaluate another set of components. Overall my experience with Telerik has been superior to Infragistics in every way.  The installation was easy using their control panel installer application.  Getting up to speed has been easy.  And the communication from Telerik has met my expectations.  And we’ll continue to be good as long as I don’t start getting email messages from a sales rep saying that they want to talk to me about training and consulting – I’m looking at you Infragistics.

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• In a multidisciplinary team, how much should each member's skills overlap?

  - by spade78

  I've been working in embedded software development for this small startup and our team is pretty small: about 3-4 people. We're responsible for all engineering which involves an RF device controlled by an embedded microcontroller that connects to a PC host which runs some sort of data collection and analysis software. I have come to develop these two guidelines when I work with my colleagues: Define a clear separation of responsibilities and make sure each person's contribution to the final product doesn't overlap. Don't assume your colleagues know everything about their responsibilities. I assume there is some sort of technology that I will need to be competent at to properly interface with the work of my colleagues. The first point is pretty easy for us. I do firmware, one guy does the RF, another does the PC software, and the last does the DSP work. Nothing overlaps in terms of two people's work being mixed into the final product. For that to happen, one guy has to hand off work to another guy who will vet it and integrate it himself. The second point is the heart of my question. I've learned the hard way not to trust the knowledge of my colleagues absolutley no matter how many years experience they claim to have. At least not until they've demonstrated it to me a couple of times. So given that whenever I develop a piece of firmware, if it interfaces with some technology that I don't know then I'll try to learn it and develop a piece of test code that helps me understand what they're doing. That way if my piece of the product comes into conflict with another piece then I have some knowledge about possible causes. For example, the PC guy has started implementing his GUI's in .NET WPF (C#) and using LibUSBdotNET for USB access. So I've been learning C# and the .NET USB library that he uses and I build a little console app to help me understand how that USB library works. Now all this takes extra time and energy but I feel it's justified as it gives me a foothold to confront integration problems. Also I like learning this new stuff so I don't mind. On the other hand I can see how this can turn into a time synch for work that won't make it into the final product and may never turn into a problem. So how much experience/skills overlap do you expect in your teammates relative to your own skills? Does this issue go away as the teams get bigger and more diverse?

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• It's Here! Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET 4.0 Ship

  Today Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET 4.0. I've been using the RC version of Visual Studio 2010 quite a bit for the past couple of months and have really grown to like it. It has a host of features and enhancements that improve developer productivity, from improved IntelliSense to better multiple monitor support. Plus there's something about the user experience that, to me, makes it feel better than Visual Studio 2008. I don't know if it's the new blue color motif or what, but the IDE seems more modern looking and more responsive to my mouse movements and other input. Anyway, if you've not yet downloaded Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET 4.0, why not? As with previous versions of Visual Studio there's a free Express Edition and VS2010 and ASP.NET 4.0 runs side-by-side with earlier versions of Visual Studio and ASP.NET. And with Visual Studio 2010's multi-targeting you can even use VS2010 as your development editor for ASP.NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 3.5 web applications. (Although be forewarned if you have multiple developers working on the application that the project files in VS2010 and earlier versions of Visual Studio differ.) This week's article on 4Guys explores my favorite new features of Visual Studio 2010. Here's an excerpt: The Visual Studio 2010 user experience is noticeably different than with previous versions. Some of the changes are cosmetic - gone is the decades-old red and orange color scheme, having been replaced with blues and purples - while others are more substantial. For instance, the Visual Studio 2010 shell was rewritten from the ground up to use Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). In addition to an updated user experience, Visual Studio introduces an array of new features designed to improve developer productivity. There are new tools for searching for files, types, and class members; it's now easier than ever to use IntelliSense; the Toolbox can be searched using the keyboard; and you can use a single editor - Visual Studio 2010 - to work on. This article explores some of the new features in Visual Studio 2010. It is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but rather highlights those features that I, as an ASP.NET developer, find most useful in my line of work. Read on to learn more! And, in closing, here are some helpful VS2010 and ASP.NET 4.0 links: One click installation for ASP.NET 4.0, Visual Web Developer 2010, .NET Framework 4.0, and ASP.NET MVC 2 Eight Quick Hit videos showing some of the cool new VS2010 features VS2010 and ASP.NET 4.0 Release Announcement with some great info/links from none other than Scott Guthrie Happy Programming!Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• In a multidisciplicary team, how much should each member's skills overlap?

  - by spade78

  I've been working in embedded software development for this small startup and our team is pretty small: about 3-4 people. We're responsible for all engineering which involves an RF device controlled by an embedded microcontroller that connects to a PC host which runs some sort of data collection and analysis software. I have come to develop these two guidelines when I work with my colleagues: Define a clear separation of responsibilities and make sure each person's contribution to the final product doesn't overlap. Don't assume your colleagues know everything about their responsibilities. I assume there is some sort of technology that I will need to be competent at to properly interface with the work of my colleagues. The first point is pretty easy for us. I do firmware, one guy does the RF, another does the PC software, and the last does the DSP work. Nothing overlaps in terms of two people's work being mixed into the final product. For that to happen, one guy has to hand off work to another guy who will vet it and integrate it himself. The second point is the heart of my question. I've learned the hard way not to trust the knowledge of my colleagues absolutley no matter how many years experience they claim to have. At least not until they've demonstrated it to me a couple of times. So given that whenever I develop a piece of firmware, if it interfaces with some technology that I don't know then I'll try to learn it and develop a piece of test code that helps me understand what they're doing. That way if my piece of the product comes into conflict with another piece then I have some knowledge about possible causes. For example, the PC guy has started implementing his GUI's in .NET WPF (C#) and using LibUSBdotNET for USB access. So I've been learning C# and the .NET USB library that he uses and I build a little console app to help me understand how that USB library works. Now all this takes extra time and energy but I feel it's justified as it gives me a foothold to confront integration problems. Also I like learning this new stuff so I don't mind. On the other hand I can see how this can turn into a time synch for work that won't make it into the final product and may never turn into a problem. So how much experience/skills overlap do you expect in your teammates relative to your own skills? Does this issue go away as the teams get bigger and more diverse?

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• C# Dev - I've tried Lisps, but I don't get it.

  - by Jonathan Mitchem

  After a few months of learning about and playing with lisps, both CL and a bit of Clojure, I'm still not seeing a compelling reason to write anything in it instead of C#. I would really like some compelling reasons, or for someone to point out that I'm missing something really big. The strengths of a Lisp (per my research): Compact, expressive notation - More so than C#, yes... but I seem to be able to express those ideas in C# too. Implicit support for functional programming - C# with LINQ extension methods: mapcar = .Select( lambda ) mapcan = .Select( lambda ).Aggregate( (a,b) = a.Union(b) ) car/first = .First() cdr/rest = .Skip(1) .... etc. Lambda and higher-order function support - C# has this, and the syntax is arguably simpler: "(lambda (x) ( body ))" versus "x = ( body )" "#(" with "%", "%1", "%2" is nice in Clojure Method dispatch separated from the objects - C# has this through extension methods Multimethod dispatch - C# does not have this natively, but I could implement it as a function call in a few hours Code is Data (and Macros) - Maybe I haven't "gotten" macros, but I haven't seen a single example where the idea of a macro couldn't be implemented as a function; it doesn't change the "language", but I'm not sure that's a strength DSLs - Can only do it through function composition... but it works Untyped "exploratory" programming - for structs/classes, C#'s autoproperties and "object" work quite well, and you can easily escalate into stronger typing as you go along Runs on non-Windows hardware - Yeah, so? Outside of college, I've only known one person who doesn't run Windows at home, or at least a VM of Windows on *nix/Mac. (Then again, maybe this is more important than I thought and I've just been brainwashed...) The REPL for bottom-up design - Ok, I admit this is really really nice, and I miss it in C#. Things I'm missing in a Lisp (due to a mix of C#, .NET, Visual Studio, Resharper): Namespaces. Even with static methods, I like to tie them to a "class" to categorize their context (Clojure seems to have this, CL doesn't seem to.) Great compile and design-time support the type system allows me to determine "correctness" of the datastructures I pass around anything misspelled is underlined realtime; I don't have to wait until runtime to know code improvements (such as using an FP approach instead of an imperative one) are autosuggested GUI development tools: WinForms and WPF (I know Clojure has access to the Java GUI libraries, but they're entirely foreign to me.) GUI Debugging tools: breakpoints, step-in, step-over, value inspectors (text, xml, custom), watches, debug-by-thread, conditional breakpoints, call-stack window with the ability to jump to the code at any level in the stack (To be fair, my stint with Emacs+Slime seemed to provide some of this, but I'm partial to the VS GUI-driven approach) I really like the hype surrounding Lisps and I gave it a chance. But is there anything I can do in a Lisp that I can't do as well in C#? It might be a bit more verbose in C#, but I also have autocomplete. What am I missing? Why should I use Clojure/CL?

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• What layer to introduce human readable error messages?

  - by MrLane

  One of the things that I have never been happy with on any project I have worked on over the years and have really not been able to resolve myself is exactly at what tier in an application should human readable error information be retrieved for display to a user. A common approach that has worked well has been to return strongly typed/concrete "result objects" from the methods on the public surface of the business tier/API. A method on the interface may be: public ClearUserAccountsResult ClearUserAccounts(ClearUserAccountsParam param); And the result class implementation: public class ClearUserAccountsResult : IResult { public readonly List<Account> ClearedAccounts{get; set;} public readonly bool Success {get; set;} // Implements IResult public readonly string Message{get; set;} // Implements IResult, human readable // Constructor implemented here to set readonly properties... } This works great when the API needs to be exposed over WCF as the result object can be serialized. Again this is only done on the public surface of the API/business tier. The error message can also be looked up from the database, which means it can be changed and localized. However, it has always been suspect to me, this idea of returning human readable information from the business tier like this, partly because what constitutes the public surface of the API may change over time...and it may be the case that the API will need to be reused by other API components in the future that do not need the human readable string messages (and looking them up from a database would be an expensive waste). I am thinking a better approach is to keep the business objects free from such result objects and keep them simple and then retrieve human readable error strings somewhere closer to the UI layer or only in the UI itself, but I have two problems here: 1) The UI may be a remote client (Winforms/WPF/Silverlight) or an ASP.NET web application hosted on another server. In these cases the UI will have to fetch the error strings from the server. 2) Often there are multiple legitimate modes of failure. If the business tier becomes so vague and generic in the way it returns errors there may not be enough information exposed publicly to tell what the error actually was: i.e: if a method has 3 modes of legitimate failure but returns a boolean to indicate failure, you cannot work out what the appropriate message to display to the user should be. I have thought about using failure enums as a substitute, they can indicate a specific error that can be tested for and coded against. This is sometimes useful within the business tier itself as a way of passing via method returns the specifics of a failure rather than just a boolean, but it is not so good for serialization scenarios. Is there a well worn pattern for this? What do people think? Thanks.

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• Workflow 4.5 is Awesome, cant wait for 5.0!

  - by JoshReuben

  About 2 years ago I wrote a blog post describing what I would like to see in Workflow vnext: http://geekswithblogs.net/JoshReuben/archive/2010/08/25/workflow-4.0---not-there-yet.aspx At the time WF 4.0 was a little rough around the edges – the State Machine was on codeplex and people were simulating state machines with Flowcharts. Last year I built a near- realtime machine management system using WF 4.0.1 – its managing the internal operations of this device: http://landanano.com/products/commercial   Well WF 4.5 has come a long way – many of my gripes have been addressed: C# expressions - no more VB 'AndAlso' clauses state machine awesomeness - can query current state many designer improvements - Document Outline is so much more succinct than Designer! Separate WCF Service Contract interfaces and ability to generate activities from contract operations ability to rehydrate to updated flow definitions via DynamicUpdateMap and WorkflowIdentity you can read about the new features here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh305677(VS.110).aspx   2013 could be the year of Workflow evangelism for .NET, as it comes together as the DSL language. Eg on Azure it could be used to graphically orchestrate between WebRoles, WorkerRoles and AppFabric Queues and the ServiceBus – that would be grand.   Here’s a list of things I’d like to see in Workflow 5.0: Stronger Parallelism support for true multithreaded workflows . A Workflow executes on a single thread – wouldn’t it be great if we had the ability to model TPL DataFlow? Parallel is not really parallel, just allows AsyncCodeActivity.     support for recursion an ExpressionTree activity with an editor design surface a math activity pack return of application level protocol (3.51 WF services) – automatically expose a state machine as a WCF service with bookmark Receive activities generated from OperationContract automatically placed in state transition triggers. A new HTML5 ActivityDesigner control – support with different CSS3  skinnable hooks,  remote connectivity (had to roll my own) A data flow view – crucial to understanding the big picture Ability to refactor a Sequence to custom activity in a separate .xaml file – like Expression Blend does for UserControl state machine global error handling - if all states goto an error state, you quickly get visual spagetti. Now you could nest a state machine, but what if you want an application level protocol whereby each state exposes certain WCF ops. DSL RAD editing - Make the Document Outline into a DSL editor for adding activities  – For WF to really succeed as a higher level of abstraction, It needs to be more productive than raw coding - drag & drop on the designer is currently too slow compared to just typing code. Extensible Wizard API - for pluggable WF editor experience other execution models beyond Sequence, Flowchart & StateMachine: SSIS, Behavior Trees,  Wolfram Model tool – surprise us! improvements to Designer debugging API - SourceLocation is tied to XAML file line number and char position, and ModelService access seems convoluted - why not leverage WPF LogicalTreeHelper / VisualTreeHelper ? Workflow Team , keep on rocking!

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• Size doesn't matter

  - by ssoolsma

  Whenever I start a new project I *always* break up my code in different projects. Also known as n-tier solution. The scale of  the project doesn't matter, but make sure that each project is responsible for himself (or herself if you prefer). I make sure that i ....At least thought about how the project should work on the toilet or in a project team meeting.Have a solution directory and create my projects within. I like to name my project (and it's folders by the namespaces). For instance: When i'm creating a piece of (web)software called: ChuckNorris, i always include the software name in my projects. Start off with designing the DataAccess project. I name it: ChuckNorris.DataAccess which lets me easily identify the project incase the project scales alot.Build the classes which represent the database structure. Don't stop working on a class untill it's finished for now. Also, don't over-do the methods. Build stuff only when it's needed, and not think: "Hm, that would be cool to have". Cause most of the time you end up with unused code, and we don't want that.Build a unittest project and make sure you create the folder inside the project that it's testing. So, create the ChuckNorris.DataAccess.UnitTest project inside the folder of the dataaccess project. I would suggest using the nUnit testframework.Incase you though, hm i skip unittest: Don't! Just build it - it will safe you alot of time later onNow, read 5 again. Build that bloody unittest. Don't skip. (i cant emphasize this enough)Now, every class in the dataaccess project is responsible for itself. They don't rely on each other. This is where we use the BusinessLogic project for. Start creating the ChuckNorris.BusinessLogic project. (not inside the data-access project ofcourse, but withing the ChuckNorris folder.Combine stuff from data-access. This usual involves alot of copying the data-access classes and feels silly at first. (we'll get to that later on)Now you come up to a point of creating a service project. You might not always see why to use it, but see it as a way to expose your businesslogic to any application (including your own). Sometimes i use it as a so-called "Factory". Every call goes through this factory, so that's the only thing i'm exposing to any program, and make sure that those methods are the only ones that I allow you to invoke.Build any UI (website, phoneapp, forms application, silverlight, wpf or whatever) and reference it to you service project. Fall in love (cough) with this approach.It's possible that it doesn't seem to make much sense, and very incomplete. Well, that last part is correct. Next post will go in to detail of setting up your Data-Access project and use the entity framework.

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• Career advice: stay with PHP or start a new career in something else ( .Net?)

  - by Christian P

  I'm planning on moving to NY in 6-12 months tops, so I'm forced to find a new job. When I'm planing to start my life in another city it's also probably a good time to think about career changes. I've found a lot of different opinions about PHP vs .Net vs Java and this is not topic here. I don't want to start a new fight about which language is better. Knowing programming language is not the most important thing for being a software developer. To be a really good developer you need to know OOP, design patterns, testing... and language is just a tool to make things happen. So back to my question. I have mixed experience in IT - 1 year as an IT support guy (Windows administration and support), around 2 years of experience in embedded programming (VB.Net 2005) and for the last 2 years I'm working with PHP/MySQL. I have worked with Magento web shop, assisted in some projects in Symfony, modified few Drupal sites. My main concerns are following: Do I continue to improve my skills in PHP e.g. to start learning some major PHP framework like Zend, Symfony maybe get some PHP certification. Or do I start learning .NET or Java. I'm more familiar to .NET so I'll probably choose it if choice falls between .NET and Java ( or you could convince me to choose Java :). Career-wise, I don't know what is the best choice. Learning new framework and language is more time consuming then improving my existing skills in PHP. But with .NET you have a lot of possibilities (Windows 7 Phone development, Silverlight, WPF) and possibly bigger chances to find better jobs. PHP jobs are less payed then .NET, at least, according to my researches (correct me if I'm wrong). But if I start now with .NET I'm just a beginner and my salary will be low. I need at least 2+ years of experience in some language to even try to find some job that is paying higher than $50-60k in NY. My main goal in next 2-3 years is to try to find a job in a $60-80k category. Don't get me wrong, I'm not just chasing money, but money is an important factor when you're trying to start a family. I'm 27 years old and I feel that there isn't a lot of room for wrong decisions regarding my career, so any advice will be very welcome. Update Thank you all for spending time to help me with my problem. All of the answers and comments have been very helpful. I have decided to stick with PHP but also to learn C# and Silverlight 4. We'll see where the life will take me.

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• How do you take into account usability and user requirements for your application?

  - by voroninp

  Our team supports BackOffice application: a mix of WinForm and WPF windows. (about 80 including dialogs). Really a kind of a Swiss Army Knife. It is used by developers, tech writers, security developers, testers. The requirements for new features come quite often and sometimes we play Wizard of Oz to decide which GUI our users like the most. And it usually happens (I admit it can be just my subjective interpretation of the reality) that one tiny detail giving the flavor of good usability to our app requires a lot of time. This time is being spent on 'fighting' with GUI framework making it act like we need. And it very difficult to make estimations for this type of tasks (at least for me and most members of our team). Scrum poker is not a help either. Management often considers this usability perfectionism to be a waste of time. On the other hand an accumulated affect of features where each has some little usability flaw frustrates users. But the same users want frequent releases and instant bug fixes. Hence, no way to get the positive feedback: there is always somebody who is snuffy. I constantly feel myself as competing with ourselves: more features - more bugs/tasks/architecture. We are trying to outrun the cart we are pushing. New technologies arrive and some of them can potentially help to improve the design or decrease task implementation time but these technologies require learning, prototyping and so on. Well, that was a story. And now is the question: How do you balance between time pressure, product quality, users and management satisfaction? When and how do you decide to leave the problem with not a perfect but to some extent acceptable solution, how often do you make these decisions? How do you do with your own satisfaction? What are your priorities? P.S. Please keep in mind, we are a BackOffice team, we have neither dedicated technical writer nor GUI designer. The tester have joined us recently. We've much work to do and much freedom concerning 'how'. I like it because it fosters creativity but I don't want to become too nerdy perfectionist.

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• How do I create and conveniently search through Libraries in Windows 8?

  - by mtone

  In Windows 7, I took the habit of putting most of my frequently accessed disk areas as Libraries - there were about a dozen. Typing a word in the Start menu would then give me a summary of matches by Library. For example, searching for "WPF" would tell me that I've got some results in the Books library, in the Coding library and a few other PDFs in the Downloads library, one of which I could then expand to see all results within. In Windows 8, that functionality appears to be gone. The Search function in the Charms Bar lists tons of results by type (Documents, Pictures, et cetera) but not by Library. This is practically useless since Documents contains hundreds of .txt and .cs files, a few of which might be Books or Downloads. The only option I found is to go into Explorer and use the search bar in the Library section. However, there again, all search results are mixed together, and I can't seem to find a way to know which Library each result came from (in the Details view, I didn't find a Library column I could add). So, if I want to know which Library contains stuff about a given topic, I have to search the Libraries one by one. Very inconvenient. Is Microsoft slowly deprecating libraries? Any tips? How else can I search through libraries?

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• How do I get .NET to garbage collect aggressively?

  - by mmr

  I have an application that is used in image processing, and I find myself typically allocating arrays in the 4000x4000 ushort size, as well as the occasional float and the like. Currently, the .NET framework tends to crash in this app apparently randomly, almost always with an out of memory error. 32mb is not a huge declaration, but if .NET is fragmenting memory, then it's very possible that such large continuous allocations aren't behaving as expected. Is there a way to tell the garbage collector to be more aggressive, or to defrag memory (if that's the problem)? I realize that there's the GC.Collect and GC.WaitForPendingFinalizers calls, and I've sprinkled them pretty liberally through my code, but I'm still getting the errors. It may be because I'm calling dll routines that use native code a lot, but I'm not sure. I've gone over that C++ code, and make sure that any memory I declare I delete, but still I get these C# crashes, so I'm pretty sure it's not there. I wonder if the C++ calls could be interfering with the GC, making it leave behind memory because it once interacted with a native call-- is that possible? If so, can I turn that functionality off? EDIT: Here is some very specific code that will cause the crash. According to this SO question, I do not need to be disposing of the BitmapSource objects here. Here is the naive version, no GC.Collects in it. It generally crashes on iteration 4 to 10 of the undo procedure. This code replaces the constructor in a blank WPF project, since I'm using WPF. I do the wackiness with the bitmapsource because of the limitations I explained in my answer to @dthorpe below as well as the requirements listed in this SO question. public partial class Window1 : Window { public Window1() { InitializeComponent(); //Attempts to create an OOM crash //to do so, mimic minute croppings of an 'image' (ushort array), and then undoing the crops int theRows = 4000, currRows; int theColumns = 4000, currCols; int theMaxChange = 30; int i; List<ushort[]> theList = new List<ushort[]>();//the list of images in the undo/redo stack byte[] displayBuffer = null;//the buffer used as a bitmap source BitmapSource theSource = null; for (i = 0; i < theMaxChange; i++) { currRows = theRows - i; currCols = theColumns - i; theList.Add(new ushort[(theRows - i) * (theColumns - i)]); displayBuffer = new byte[theList[i].Length]; theSource = BitmapSource.Create(currCols, currRows, 96, 96, PixelFormats.Gray8, null, displayBuffer, (currCols * PixelFormats.Gray8.BitsPerPixel + 7) / 8); System.Console.WriteLine("Got to change " + i.ToString()); System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(100); } //should get here. If not, then theMaxChange is too large. //Now, go back up the undo stack. for (i = theMaxChange - 1; i >= 0; i--) { displayBuffer = new byte[theList[i].Length]; theSource = BitmapSource.Create((theColumns - i), (theRows - i), 96, 96, PixelFormats.Gray8, null, displayBuffer, ((theColumns - i) * PixelFormats.Gray8.BitsPerPixel + 7) / 8); System.Console.WriteLine("Got to undo change " + i.ToString()); System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(100); } } } Now, if I'm explicit in calling the garbage collector, I have to wrap the entire code in an outer loop to cause the OOM crash. For me, this tends to happen around x = 50 or so: public partial class Window1 : Window { public Window1() { InitializeComponent(); //Attempts to create an OOM crash //to do so, mimic minute croppings of an 'image' (ushort array), and then undoing the crops for (int x = 0; x < 1000; x++){ int theRows = 4000, currRows; int theColumns = 4000, currCols; int theMaxChange = 30; int i; List<ushort[]> theList = new List<ushort[]>();//the list of images in the undo/redo stack byte[] displayBuffer = null;//the buffer used as a bitmap source BitmapSource theSource = null; for (i = 0; i < theMaxChange; i++) { currRows = theRows - i; currCols = theColumns - i; theList.Add(new ushort[(theRows - i) * (theColumns - i)]); displayBuffer = new byte[theList[i].Length]; theSource = BitmapSource.Create(currCols, currRows, 96, 96, PixelFormats.Gray8, null, displayBuffer, (currCols * PixelFormats.Gray8.BitsPerPixel + 7) / 8); } //should get here. If not, then theMaxChange is too large. //Now, go back up the undo stack. for (i = theMaxChange - 1; i >= 0; i--) { displayBuffer = new byte[theList[i].Length]; theSource = BitmapSource.Create((theColumns - i), (theRows - i), 96, 96, PixelFormats.Gray8, null, displayBuffer, ((theColumns - i) * PixelFormats.Gray8.BitsPerPixel + 7) / 8); GC.WaitForPendingFinalizers();//force gc to collect, because we're in scenario 2, lots of large random changes GC.Collect(); } System.Console.WriteLine("Got to changelist " + x.ToString()); System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(100); } } } If I'm mishandling memory in either scenario, if there's something I should spot with a profiler, let me know. That's a pretty simple routine there. Unfortunately, it looks like @Kevin's answer is right-- this is a bug in .NET and how .NET handles objects larger than 85k. This situation strikes me as exceedingly strange; could Powerpoint be rewritten in .NET with this kind of limitation, or any of the other Office suite applications? 85k does not seem to me to be a whole lot of space, and I'd also think that any program that uses so-called 'large' allocations frequently would become unstable within a matter of days to weeks when using .NET. EDIT: It looks like Kevin is right, this is a limitation of .NET's GC. For those who don't want to follow the entire thread, .NET has four GC heaps: gen0, gen1, gen2, and LOH (Large Object Heap). Everything that's 85k or smaller goes on one of the first three heaps, depending on creation time (moved from gen0 to gen1 to gen2, etc). Objects larger than 85k get placed on the LOH. The LOH is never compacted, so eventually, allocations of the type I'm doing will eventually cause an OOM error as objects get scattered about that memory space. We've found that moving to .NET 4.0 does help the problem somewhat, delaying the exception, but not preventing it. To be honest, this feels a bit like the 640k barrier-- 85k ought to be enough for any user application (to paraphrase this video of a discussion of the GC in .NET). For the record, Java does not exhibit this behavior with its GC.

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• Microsoft silverlight 5.0 features for developers

  - by Jalpesh P. Vadgama

  Recently on Silverlight 5.0 firestarter event ScottGu has announced road map for Silverlight 5.0. There will be lots of features that will be there in silverlight 5.0 but here are few glimpses of Silverlight 5.0 Features. Improved Data binding support and Better support for MVVM: One of the greatest strength of Silverlight is its data binding. Microsoft is going to enhanced data binding by providing more ability to debug it. Developer will able to debug the binding expression and other stuff in Siverlight 5.0. Its also going to provide Ancestor Relative source binding which will allow property to bind with container control. MVVM pattern support will also be enhanced. Performance and Speed Enhancement: Now silverlight 5.0 will have support for 64bit browser support. So now you can use that silverlight application on 64 bit platform also. There is no need to take extra care for it.It will also have faster startup time and greater support for hardware acceleration. It will also provide end to end support for hard acceleration features of IE 9. More support for Out Of Browser Application: With Siverlight 4.0 Microsoft has announced new features called out of browser application and it has amazed lots of developer because now possibilities are unlimited with it. Now in silverlight 5.0 Out Of Browser application will have ability to Create Manage child windows just like windows forms or WPF Application. So you can fill power of desktop application with your out of browser application. Testing Support with Visual Studio 2010: Microsoft is going to add automated UI Testing support with Visual Studio 2010 with silverlight 5.0. So now we can test UI of Silverlight much faster. Better Support for RIA Services: RIA Services allows us to create N-tier application with silverlight via creating proxy classes on client and server both side. Now it will more features like complex type support, Custom type support for MVVM(Model View View Model) pattern. WCF Enhancements: There are lots of enhancement with WCF but key enhancement will WSTrust support. Text and Printing Support: Silverlight 5.0 will support vector base graphics. It will also support multicolumn text flow and linked text containers. It will full open type support,Postscript vector enhancement. Improved Power Enhancement: This will prevent screensaver from activating while you are watching videos on silverlight. Silverlight 5.0 is going add that smartness so it can determine while you are going to watch video and while you are not going watch videos. Better support for graphics: Silverlight 5.0 will provide in-depth support for 3D API. Now 3D rendering support is more enhancement in silverlight and 3D graphics can be rendered easily. You can find more details on following links and also don’t forgot to view silverlight firestarter keynot video of scottgu. http://www.silverlight.net/news/events/firestarter-labs/ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/katriend/archive/2010/12/06/silverlight-5-features-firestarter-keynote-and-sessions-resources.aspx http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/12/02/announcing-silverlight-5.aspx http://www.silverlight.net/news/events/firestarter/ http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/future/ Hope this will help you. Stay tuned!!!.

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• Silverlight Cream for April 29, 2010 -- #851

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Carlos Figueira(-2-), Subodh Pushpak, Gergely Orosz, John Papa, Mike Snow(-2-), Rishi, Tim Heuer, Stefan Olson, and David Anson. Shoutouts: Josh Holmes blogged about a cool app the City of Miami has up: Miami 311: Built on Windows Azure Gergely Orosz reports on the state of a bug he found pre SL4: Silverlight 4 still displays large elements incorrectly Laura Foy and Charlie Kindel discuss WP7 on Channel 9: Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools Refresh Announced Charlie Kindel has an announcement, good instructions, and what's new notes on the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Refresh! Tim Heuer mentioned the workaround for this in his post (below), but I thought you might like to read Brandon Watson's debrief of what it's all about: Signed Assemblies Bug in the Windows Phone Tools CTP Refresh Laurent Bugnion posted about interrelations between versions of Blend and WP7 code... read it closely: Be careful when installing the Blend Windows Phone 7 Add-In From SilverlightCream.com: Consuming REST/POX services in Silverlight 4 Carlos Figueira has a pair of posts up about consuming services in Silverlight 4. This first one is about consuming REST/POX services. He provides a Service Contract that can be used with either and the full project code is available as well. Consuming REST/JSON services in Silverlight 4 In the second post, Carlos Figueira provides the code to allow WCF and Silverlight 4 to consume strongly-typed REST/JSON... and again, all the code is available. Silverlight and WCF caching Subodh Pushpak has a post up discussing caching in WCF, and has code demonstrating turning caching on at run-time. Detecting Silverlight Version Installed Gergely Orosz said it right when he said "Detecting the Silverlight version installed on a client machine isn’t entirely straightforward." ... and after reading this post, if you take the link to his ScottLogic blog, you'll get a full break-out of how it's done. Silverlight TV 22: Tim Heuer on Extending the SMF It's Thursday, and that means Silverlight TV! ... this week, John Papa has on Tim Heuer who has always been out there pushing media... and he's talking about SMF or Silverlight Media Framework for the uninitiated, and also extending it. Silverlight Tip of the Day #7 – Localized Resources Mike Snow has Tip Number 7 up and it's about localization... good end-to-end discussion and demonstration. Just thought I should use that to prove to my daughter that the tatoo she had put on the back of her neck actually reads "Eat More Broccoli" :) Silverlight Tip of the Day #8 – Detecting Alt, Shift, Control, Window & Apple Keys Combinations I just realized Mike Snow's site logo reads "Silverlight Tips of the Day" (bolding mine) ... that answers why I'm seeing more than one -- sorry Mike, couldn't pass it up :) ... Mike's second tip today and number 8 in the series is on detecting all the mouse button and ctl/alt/shift combinations in Silverlight. nRoute: More Wholesomeness, with SL 4 and .NET 4.0 Rishi has a post up announcing a new nRoute release for Silverlight 4 and .NET 4.0 He's tweaked the code to take advantages of enhancements in the new platforms, so check it out. Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools April 2010 Refresh Booya... Tim Heuer announced the release of the next drop in the WP7 tools ... dang wish I was at home today :) ... be sure to read the post for info such as the notes about Authenticode Assemblies and the release notes. Updates to Silverlight Multi-binding support Stefan Olson points up a SL4 change to Multi-binding support that he had previously blogged about. He shows the previous non-working example, and what you have to do to make it work now. Using XAML to create a custom wallpaper image for your mobile device David Anson has a solution for those pesky lost devices, and let me go on the record right now saying if anyone finds a WP7 phone laying around, just call me, it's mine :) [think that'd work??] ... ok, David's solution is a WPF app "MobileDeviceHomeScreenMaker" that you get the info set and it produces a png you then put on your device. But seriously about that lost phone... Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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