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RIA Services templates not showing in Visual Studio 2010?

Last week, the Silverlight 4 beta release included the Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 . This single installer would perform the following (assuming you had either Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Web Developer Express 2010 already installed: Install...(read more)

RIA Services templates not showing in Visual Studio 2010?

Last week, the Silverlight 4 beta release included the Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010. This single installer would perform the following (assuming you had either Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Web Developer Express 2010 already installed:

Install a Visual Studio 2010 service pack (KB976272)
Install Silverlight 4 Windows developer runtime (4.0.1108.0)
Install Silverlight 4 SDK
Install WCF RIA Services (November 2009)

That is all you really needed. But some may have had an experience afterwards of launching VS2010 and *NOT* seeing the WCF RIA Services Class Library or Silverlight Business Application templates:

What is happening here is that likely you already had a version of .NET RIA Services (likely the July 2009 CTP) installed. The Silverlight tools installer silently failed and just kept going.

If you don’t see the WCF RIA Services Templates…

If you don’t see the WCF RIA Services templates, make sure Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2008 are both shutdown and perform the following:

Go to the Add/Remove Programs control panel application and locate .NET RIA Services. Select the item and uninstall it. This will remove the previous July CTP of the artist formerly known as .NET RIA Services.
Re-run the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2010 installer. This will re-install the items and ensure that RIA Services is properly installed
- Optionally you can extract the RIAServices.msi installer by running the tools installer with the /x: switch which will extract the contents.

After performing the above, you should now see the WCF RIA Services templates and should be working fine.

So, what happened? Why no fail log?!

We did say beta right? :-) -- In all seriousness, we wanted to ensure that the WCF RIA Services bits got in the tools installer and knew this little inconvenience might creep up for some. Apologies for the inconvenience. There also exists no logging of the failure to indicate that there was anything wrong and to assist you in knowing the situation.

This is being fixed in a future installer to detect a previous install of RIA Services and alert the user (or we may even force uninstall it…not sure yet).

But wait, RIA Services isn’t working in my Visual Studio 2008 environment now!

That’s right. If you install RIA Services for Silverlight 4/Visual Studio 2010, it isn’t going to work in your Visual Studio 2008 environment. If you want to work on RIA Services with Silverlight 3 and Visual Studio 2008, then you need to stick with the WCF RIA Services for VS2008 version.

Bottom line: RIA Services does not install side-by-side.

All of this information is provided to you on the WCF RIA Services web site. The first section explains the bits you need for each environment.

Hopefully this helps clear some confusion. Yes, I know it is frustrating not getting an error and not seeing things work. We’re working to solve that (doesn’t help you now, I know) in future setups and make sure the release tools installer does the right thing. It’s during these beta periods we can help identify such issues to make sure we fix them before release.

If you have questions on WCF RIA Services, be sure to head to the forums where the team is listening!

Hope this helps!

tags: silverlight, riaservices, ria, xaml, domaindatasource, wcf, wcf ria services, visual studio, vs2010

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution By license.

erlight Cream for November 22, 2009 - 2 -- #739

In this Issue: Chris Klug, Gavin Wignall, Jeff Handley, Brad Abrams(2), Mike Flasko, Karl Shifflett, Jeff Wilcox, Nikhil Kothari, and Colin Blair.

Shoutouts:

John Papa posted the material from his PDC Session: MVVM and Prism Demo for PDC09 Silverlight Session, and while you're at it, here's the video: Video of my Prism and MVVM at PDC

Jeff Weber posted that a New Silverlight 3 Book Uses Farseer Physics

Joe Stegman posted the slide deck for his PDC 2009 Out Of Browser Session

András Velvárt announced My Teched Online talk: “Why Take User Experience Seriously?” is online

Christian Schormann posted his Sample Project from PDC09 Talk - and Many Links on Behaviors and then he posted an Updated PDC Demo Project

Alan Mendelevich announced amCharts Stock Chart for Silverlight Released

From SilverlightCream.com:

Getting started with multi-touch development in Silverlight 3, using Windows 7 and an iPod: Gather together Windows 7, your iPod Touch, and Silverlight 3, and Chris Klug will get you going on Multi-touch.
Optimizing Silverlight with Enable Redraw Regions: Gavin Wignall breaks silence after his long October sequence with a post on Animation and how to optimize your animations.
Building ContosoSales - The RIA Services Keynote Demo: Jeff Handley starts with what you need on your machine and where to get it to build the Ria Service Keynote application: Contoso Sales... oh yeah, and then walks completely through it!
Welcome to WCF RIA Services Beta!: Brad Abrams has a good intro to WCF Ria Services beta on his site... good info about what's included, links to get it, and a call to action.
Simplifying our n-tier development platform: making 3 things 1 thing: Mike Flasko of the ADO.NET Data Services Team Blog posts about the WCF RIA Services and has some Q/A from folks.
Silverlight 3 & 4 Library Sharing with .NET 4.0 Library or WPF: As Karl Shifflett said, if you need any more convincing to go with VS2010 B2 ... you can share your SL3 and 4 library assemblies with .NET 4.0 apps... no really!
Application Library Caching – November 2009 Silverlight Toolkit: Jeff Wilcox explains Application Library caching backed into the latest toolkit... read that as Silverlight 3, and also in the 4B!
RIA Services: Jumpstarting RIA Development: Nikhil Kothari posted a great Silverlight 4B RIA Services run-up... lots of links and good information.
PDC09 Talk: Building Amazing Business Applications with Silverlight 4, RIA Services and Visual Studio 2010: Missed Brad Abrams's PDC presentation on VS2010, RIA Services, and VS2010? He's got all the info up on this blog... walkthru, code, slides... I printed this to PDF to read at work, and it's 33 pages..woohoo!
Undocumented DomainService Wizard change in WCF RIA Services: Colin Blair reports on a DomainService wizard issue that wasn't in the early documentation, but apparently is going to be in the Breaking Changes list soon.

Stay in the 'Light!

10 Steps to Debug Silverlight Out-of-Browser Applications without Attaching

The common technique many developers use to debug Silverlight Out of Browser applications is to attach the debugger to the SLLauncher.exe process. However, there is a another way to debug installed OoB apps. Attaching to the process does not allow you...(read more)

Pythonic : The Good Programmer

What do you mean by “fighting the language”?

Guido: That usually means that they’re trying to continue their habits that worked well with a different language. A lot of the proposals to somehow get rid of explicit self come from people who have recently switched to Python and still haven’t gotten used to it. It becomes an obsession for them. Sometimes they come out with a proposal to change the language; other times they come up with some super-complicated metaclass that somehow makes self implicit. Usually things like that are super-inefficient or don’t actually work in a multithreaded environment or whatever other edge case, or they’re so obsessed about having to type those four characters that they changed the convention from self to s or capital S. People will turn everything into a class, and turn every access into an accessor method, where that is really not a wise thing to do in Python; you’ll just have more verbose code that is harder to debug and runs a lot slower. You know the expression “You can write FORTRAN in any language?” You can write Java in any language, too.

You spent so much time trying to create (preferably) one obvious way to do things. It seems like you’re of the opinion that doing things that way, the Python way, really lets you take advantage of Python.

Guido: I’m not sure that I really spend a lot of time making sure that there’s only one way. The “Zen of Python” is much younger than the language Python, and most defining characteristics of the language were there long before Tim Peters wrote it down as a form of poetry. I don’t think he expected it to be quite as widespread and successful when he wrote it up.

It’s a catchy phrase.

Guido: Tim has a way with words. “There’s only one way to do it” is actually in most cases a white lie. There are many ways to do data structures. You can use tuples and lists.
In many cases, it really doesn’t matter that much whether you use a tuple or a list or sometimes a dictionary. It turns out usually if you look really carefully, one solution is objectively better because it works just as well in a number of situations, and there’s one or two cases where lists just works so much better than tuples when you keep growing them.

That comes more actually from the original ABC philosophy that was trying to be very sparse in the components. ABC actually shared a philosophy with ALGOL-68, which is now one of the deadest languages around, but was very influentia. Certainly where I was at the time during the 80s, it was very influential because Adriaan van Wijngaarden was the big guy from ALGOL 68. He was still teaching classes when I went to college. I did one or two semesters where he was just telling anecdotes from the history of ALGOL 68 if he felt like it. He had been the director of CWI. Someone else was it by the time I joined.

There were many people who had been very close with ALGOL 68. I think Lambert Meertens, the primary author of ABC, was also one of the primary editors of the ALGOL 68 report, which probably means he did a lot of the typesetting, but he may occasionally also have done quite a lot of the thinking and checking. He was clearly influenced by ALGOL 68’s philosophy of providing constructs that can be combined in many different ways to produce all sorts of different data structures or ways of structuring a program.

It was definitely his influence that said, “We have lists or arrays, and they can contain any kind of other thing. They can contain numbers or strings, but they can also contain other arrays and tuples of other things. You can combine all of these things together.” Suddenly you don’t need a separate concept of a multidimensional array because an array of arrays solves that for any dimensionality. That philosophy of taking a few key things that cover different directions of flexibility and allow them to be combined was very much a part of ABC. I borrowed all of that almost without thinking about it very hard.
While Python tries to give the appearance that you can combine things in very flexible ways as long as you don’t try to nest statements inside expressions, there is actually a remarkable number of special cases in the syntax where in some cases a comma means a separation between parameters, and in other cases the comma means the items of a list, and in yet another case it means an implicit tuple.

There are a whole bunch of variations in the syntax where certain operators are not allowed because they would conflict with some surrounding syntax. That is never really a problem because you can always put an extra pair of parentheses around something when it doesn’t work. Because of that the syntax, at least from the parser author’s perspective, has grown quite a bit. Things like list comprehensions and generator expressions are syntactically still not completely unified. In Python 3000, I believe they are. There’s still some subtle semantic differences, but the syntax at least is the same.

Source of Information : Oreilly - Masterminds of Programming

Are Coders Nice?

A few months ago, the team my husband works on was hiring a new developer, and I overheard my husband talking to a friend he was considering recommending for the position. I surprised myself by my gut reaction which was,...

Microsoft PDC09 and Silverlight Round-up

Well, PDC09 is over and it was a blast. What a relief it is to finally be able to show the world what the Silverlight team has been working on since Silverlight 3. Based on the feedback at the conference, people are excited to dig into the new bits and start building solutions.

As a round-up of resources from PDC, I’m putting some of my favorites here.

Video Content

For some of the PDC09 key Silverlight sessions, these are what I recommend:

CL01 – Microsoft Silverlight 4 Overview (Karen Corby)
CL02 – Silverlight 3 Advanced Performance and Profiling (Seema Ramchandani)
CL06 – Networking and Web Services (Yavor Georgiev)
CL07 – Mastering WCF RIA Services (Dinesh Kulkarni)
CL19 – Building Line of Business Applications with Silverlight 4 (David Poll)
CL20 – Improving and Extending the Sandbox with Silverlight 4 (Joe Stegman)
CL21 – Building Line of Business Applications with Silverlight and RIA Services (Brad Abrams)
CL22 – Advanced Topics for Building Large-scale Applications with Silverlight (John Papa)
CL24 – XAML Futures in Microsoft .NET Framework (Rob Relyea)
CL32 – Developing Testable Silverlight Applications (Keith Jones)
CL08 – Custom Behaviors for Advanced Microsoft Silverlight UI Effects (Peter Blois)
CL36 – Deep Dive on Bing maps Silverlight Control (Keith Kinnan)
PR03 – Integrate Microsoft Silverlight with SharePoint 2010 (Paul Stubbs)
FT24 – Building Extensible RIAs with Managed Extensibility Framework (Glenn Block)

These would be my “not miss” ones for Silverlight. To help you get the videos faster, I’ve cooked up a few helpful links:

WMV Podcast RSS Feed (for Zune or other WMV players) – this is the WMV hi-res videos
iTunes/iPod Podcast RSS Feed – this is MP4 format so you can use it for any MP4 player. As of the writing of this post, the MP4 encoding wasn’t done yet, but if you subscribe here you’ll get them when they are.
Windows Media Center playlist – want the 10-foot experience? Here’s a set of playlist files for Windows Media Center. Unzip the folder in your Public Videos folder for Media Center (or wherever you have your video content discoverable). These point to the same hi-res videos that you would watch online.

I hope that helps get the most out of the video content for Silverlight.

Blog Content

There was some great blogging going on in the flurry of PDC and Silverlight 4 announcements as well. Here are some I wanted to ensure you saw:

(shameless plug) My “Guide to Silverlight 4” post with sample code snippets and links to 17 video/code downloads for the top features released in Silverlight 4
David Anson’s Silverlight Toolkit for Silverlight 4
Jeff Wilcox’s walkthrough of the Silverlight Toolkit testing tools
Jeff Wilcox’s post on BusyIndicator more in depth
Jesse Bishop’s Implementing a Context Menu Control for Silverlight 4
Silverlight 4 Security Whitepaper by Nick Kramer
XAML Toolkit CTP by Michael Shim
Silverlight 3 & 4 Library Sharing with WPF by Karl Shifflett
Extensibility Series for WPF/Silverlight design-time by Karl Shifflett (a MUST for control developers)
Silverlight 4 Podcast Pack from Sparkling Client (Erik Mork)
Building ContosoSales (WCF RIA Services sample) by Jeff Handley
Presentation Model in RIA Services by Deepesh Mohnani

These were some of the highlights I wanted to call out.

Learning Resources

In case you missed the links in my guide post to Silverlight 4, there are 17 videos and code downloads that were launched for Silverlight 4. In addition here’s some other resources:

17 videos and code downloads for top features in Silverlight 4 (more to come)
6 Hands-on Labs for Silverlight 4
All about WCF RIA Services and samples

Hopefully this should all get you started. PDC was great. Launching Silverlight 4 beta was awesome and I was able to talk to a lot of folks and get even more feedback for our requested features and what people are thinking about them. Trust me your feedback will make it’s way back to the overall Silverlight team to see how people are using and planning to use the new features!

tags: silverlight, riaservices, ria, pdc09, pdc, wcf, xaml, silverlight toolkit, learn silverlight

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution By license.

Microsoft PDC09 and Silverlight Round-up

Work Flow Optimizations for Short Development Cycle Team

One of the responsibilities of being a technical manager is to optimize work flows and create self sustaining systems for the teams that you manage. One of my teams operates on an extremely short development cycle. They begin coding in...

Silverlight Cream for November 22, 2009 -- #738

In this All Submittal Issue: Andrew Veresov, ITLackey, Damian Schenkelman, René Schulte, Michael Wolf(2), Shawn Wildermuth

Shoutout:

Check out Shawn Wildermuth's schedule and see if you're anywhere near one of his classes because Silverlight Tour Now Includes Silverlight 4!

If you're into games and haven't yet checked out the Silver Games Project, now might be a good time.

Sorry I'm running behind, but B.B.King was in Phoenix last night, and I can't miss him!

From SilverlightCream.com:

Silverlight 3 Validation Workaround: Andrew Veresov provides a SL3 workaround to validation throwing an error during databinding... and another blog to watch. That's what... number 398?
Using RIA Services with the ASP.Net Web Site Project (WSP) template: ITLackey has a great tutorial up for anyone wanting to jump all the way from a WSP Template produced website into .NET RIA Services... yikes!
Prism 2 (Composite Application Guidance for WPF & Silverlight) migrated to Silverlight 4 Beta: Damian Schenkelman's been working with Prism and Silverlight, and hasn't wasted any time moving into SL4B... read his migration issues post.
EdgeCam - Silverlight 4 Webcam & Edge Detection Shader: René Schulte didn't waste any time after SL4B hit to be working up another great post ... this one is a real-time webcam effect!
Silverlight 4 Drag from desktop: Michael Wolf discusses drag and drop in Silverlight 4B, and not just that, but dragging from the desktop... too cool!
Silverlight 4 dials in skype: Michael Wolf also has a post up about Silverlight 4B and Skype... something he worked on while on the plane back from PDC ... can it be as easy as he says? ... give it a shot :)
Data Binding Changes in Silverlight 4: Shawn Wildermuth has a post up on the DataBinding changes to Silverlight 4 ... I'm sure we're all interested in those!

Stay in the 'Light!

Livecycle Data Services 3.0 is out

Livecycle Data Services 3.0 is now available. There’s a free developer edition that you can download and play right away and our new and improved documentation (thanks to Michael Peterson) is here. I’m especially excited about all the new messaging features such as reliable messaging, message throttling, the new LCDS Edge Server, and a new Java [...]

Speaking at 360 Flex in San Jose in March

I will be speaking or rather running a one day course on how to connect the Arduino hardware platform to Flex at 360 Flex in San Jose (March 7th-10th). [More]

Pythonic : The Good Programmer

When do you think Python programmers appreciate more its dynamic nature?

Guido: The language’s dynamic features are often most useful when you are exploring a large problem or solution space and you don’t know your way around yet—you can do a bunch of experiments, each using what you learned from the previous ones, without having too much code that locks you into a particular approach. Here it really helps that you can write very compact code in Python—writing 100 lines of Python to run an experiment once and then starting over is much more efficient than writing a 1,000-line framework for experimentation in Java and then finding out it solves the wrong problem!

From a security point of view, what does Python offer to the programmer?

Guido: That depends on the attacks you’re worried about. Python has automatic memory allocation, so Python programs aren’t prone to certain types of bugs that are common in C and C++ code like buffer overflows or using deallocated memory, which have been the bread and butter of many attacks on Microsoft software. Of course the Python runtime itself is written in C, and indeed vulnerabilities have been found here over the years, and there are intentional escapes from the confines of the Python runtime, like the ctypes module that lets one call arbitrary C code.

Does its dynamic nature help or rather the opposite?

Guido: I don’t think the dynamic nature helps or hurts. One could easily design a dynamic language that has lots of vulnerabilities, or a static language that has none. However having a runtime, or virtual machine as is now the “hip” term, helps by constraining access to the raw underlying machine. This is coincidentally one of the reasons that Python is the first language supported by Google App Engine, the project in which I am currently participating.

How can a Python programmer check and improve his code security?

Guido: I think Python programmers shouldn’t worry much about security, certainly not without having a specific attack model in mind. The most important thing to look for is the same as in all languages: be suspicious of data provided by someone you don’t trust (for a web server, this is every byte of the incoming web request, even the headers). One specific thing to watch out for is regular expressions—it is easy to write a regular expression that runs in exponential time, so web applications that implement searches where the end user types in a regular expression should have some mechanism to limit the running time.

Is there any fundamental concept (general rule, point of view, mindset, principle) that you would suggest to be proficient in developing with Python?

Guido: I would say pragmatism. If you get too hung up about theoretical concepts like data hiding, access control, abstractions, or specifications, you aren’t a real Python programmer, and you end up wasting time fighting the language, instead of using (and enjoying) it; you’re also likely to use it inefficiently. Python is good if you’re an instant gratification junkie like myself. It works well if you enjoy approaches like extreme programming or other agile development methods, although even there I would recommend taking everything in moderation.

Source of Information : Oreilly - Masterminds of Programming

Join the Cynergy Team!

If you’re a Flex developer looking to take your game to the next level, Cynergy would really like to talk to you. We have a ton of interesting projects and are always challenged to push the envelope in both technology and user interface design. Our culture is relaxed yet dynamic offering something for all personalities. Cynergy promotes technical leadership from within and we need people that want be leaders. As the Principal Architect of Cynergy’s Flex/AIR practice, one of my most important responsibilities is working with our Flex developers to enhance their skills. It’s something that I really enjoy and

A MX Framework for Flash/Flex & AIR – Razor Component Framework

Razor Component Framework is born for Flash, Flex and AIR. It amis to be more easy-to-use, lightweight, and fearture-rich alternative. It comes in ActionScript 2 and 3 flavours while maintaining as consistent an API as possible. It is still a beta copy. What you need pay attention is before using any razor control, you must [...]

Importing YouTube comments into your Wordpress blog

So you just embedded a YouTube video in your Wordpress post and people are commenting on it… on YouTube – oops! You probably don't want half your comments on YouTube and the half on your post. Thankfully, there's a plugin for that! Genki Wordpress Plugin The Genki YouTube Comments Wordpress plugin imports YouTube comments into your Wordpress [...]

Debugging Silverlight Out-Of-Browser Applications

I was watching Joe Stegman’s talk at PDC09 about “ Improving and Extending the Silverlight 4 Sandbox ” and I learnt something that I felt I really should have known already and had a bit of a “D’oh!” moment but I’m not too proud to share my ignorance...(read more)

Right Way to Extract Degrafa SWC in Mac OS

Degrafa is a powerful open source graphics framework for Flex. I’m really excited to use it on my current project. But one minor issue I encountered early on is extracting the zipped Degrafa SWC file in Mac OS. When you double click on the zip file, Snow Leopard will extract the SWC from the zip [...]

LiveCycle Data Services (LCDS) 3 Released

LiveCycle Data Services 3.0 is released as part of LiveCycle ES 2 What’s New Model driven development of Flex applications Reliable Messaging Throttling Edge Server Load test harness: Simulate Flex clients in Java Documentation: LiveCycle Data Services ES2 Quick Starts – http://www.adobe.com/go/learn_lcds3_modeling_howto Other documentation – http://help.adobe.com/en_US/livecycle/9.0/lc_ds_list.html Download Developer Version You can Download the trial or a free developer version to get started from this [...]

Speaking at the Adobe DevSummit Chennai & Hyderabad

I’m almost at the end of my first month in India and have met some fantastic people both in Bangalore and here in Pondicherry. Next week Adobe is holding a DevSummit in Chennai and the week after in Hyderabad. I’m very excited to be invited over to talk about one of my favorite Flash Platform [...]

Extensibility Series – WPF & Silverlight Design-Time Code Sharing – Part I

This is the first in series of posts called the “Extensibility Series.” This series will cover writing design-times for WPF & Silverlight custom controls for the WPF & Silverlight Designer for Visual Studio 2010 that target .NET 4.0 and...(read more)

Setting the Y-axis transform position on a Spark BitmapImage control in Flex 4

The following example shows how you can set the Y-axis transform position on a Spark BitmapImage control in Flex 4 by seting the rotationY, transformX, and transformY properties. Full code after the jump. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>  <s:Application name="Spark_BitmapImage_transformY_test" xmlns:fx="http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009" xmlns:s="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark" [...]

Adding a Sprite to the display list in Flex 4

The following example shows how you can add a Sprite to the display object by using the Spark SpriteVisualElement object in Flex 4 and calling the addChild() method. Full code after the jump. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>  <s:Application name="Spark_SpriteVisualElement_addChild_test" xmlns:fx="http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009" xmlns:s="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark" [...]

LCDS 3.0 released

LiveCycle data services 3.0 is finally available. Thanks for everyone who provided us valuable feedback and helped us improve the quality and usefulness of the product. The major changes to this release compared to the previous (lCDS 2.6.1) are: Model driven development of Flex applications – Fiber and the Flash Builder Modelling plugin improves the productivity of [...]

LCDS 3.0 has hit the streets

LiveCycle Data Services ES2 version 3 is now available. Download the free developer edition. LiveCycle Data Services documentation is available online: * Using LiveCycle Data Services HTML PDF * Application Modeling Technology Reference HTML PDF * ActionScript Language Reference HTML * Installing LiveCycle Data Services HTML * Javadoc HTML * Release Notes HTML * Quick Starts HTML

Pythonic : The Good Programmer

What link do you see between the easiness of prototyping offered by Python and the effort needed to build a complete application?

Guido: I never meant Python to be a prototyping language. I don’t believe there should be a clear distinction between prototyping and “production” languages. There are situations where the best way to write a prototype would be to write a little throwaway C hack. There are other situations where a prototype can be created using no “programming” at all—for example, using a spreadsheet or a set of find and grep commands.

The earliest intentions I had for Python were simply for it to be a language to be used in cases where C was overkill and shell scripts became too cumbersome. That covers a lot of prototyping, but it also covers a lot of “business logic” (as it’s come to be called these days) that isn’t particularly greedy in computing resources but requires a lot of code to be written. I would say that most Python code is not written as a prototype but simply to get a job done. In most cases Python is fully up to the job, and there is no need to change much in order to arrive at the final application.

A common process is that a simple application gradually acquires more functionality, and ends up growing tenfold in complexity, and there is never a precise cutover point from prototype to final application. For example, the code review application Mondrian that I started at Google has probably grown tenfold in code size since I first released it, and it is still all written in Python. Of course, there are also examples where Python did eventually get replaced by a faster language—for example, the earliest Google crawler/indexer was (largely) written in Python—but those are the exceptions, not the rule.

How does the immediacy of Python affect the design process?

Guido: This is often how I work, and, at least for me, in general it works out well! Sure, I write a lot of code that I throw away, but it’s much less code than I would have written in any other language, and writing code (without even running it) often helps me tremendously in understanding the details of the problem. Thinking about how to rearrange the code so that it solves the problem in an optimal fashion often helps me think about the problem. Of course, this is not to be used as an excuse to avoid using a whiteboard to sketch out a design or architecture or interaction, or other early design techniques. The trick is to use the right tool for the job. Sometimes that’s a pencil and a napkin—other times it’s an Emacs window and a shell prompt.

Do you think that bottom-up program development is more suited to Python?

Guido: I don’t see bottom-up versus top-down as religious opposites like vi versus Emacs. In any software development process, there are times when you work bottom-up, and other times when you work top-down. Top-down probably means you’re dealing with something that needs to be carefully reviewed and designed before you can start coding, while bottom-up probably means that you are building new abstractions on top of existing ones, for example, creating new APIs. I’m not implying that you should start coding APIs without having some kind of design in mind, but often new APIs follow logically from the available lower-level APIs, and the design work happens while you are actually writing code.

Source of Information : Oreilly - Masterminds of Programming

LiveCycle Data Services ES2 version 3 is now available

According to the Adobe's definition, LiveCycle Data Services ES2 module is a scalable and optimized framework that abstracts the complexity of creating easy-to-use, personalized, and interactive applications. It includes a rich set of features that streamline the development, integration, and deployment of rich Internet applications (RIAs). Adobe LiveCycle Data Services 3 provides significant new capabilities, including the following: - Support for model-driven development of Flash applications, which make application development better, faster, and easier - Secure and scalable connectivity across the DMZ with the Edge Server. - New capabilities for developers to control and measure the quality of service of

Star Trek: The Movie on USB Stick

Today I saw something I'd been hoping to see for some time now: a movie released on USB stick. Specifically, the latest Star Trek movie in a limited-edition USB stick shaped like a Communicator. Unboxing The Precious You can watch my unboxing of it, above, to see that they really did put some care into the packaging. [...]

Silverlight Cream for November 20, 2009 -- #737

In this Issue: Michael Wolf, Colin Blair, John Papa, Ning Zhang, Andy Beaulieu, and Tomasz Janczuk.

Shoutouts:

In case you missed it in the rush the other day, Robby Ingebretsen announced the release of Seesmic for Windows ... that's going on my laptop this weekend!

The Microsoft Expression Blog has a great tutorial upon the use of Panels in Expression Web.

Don't forget, I have all Silverlight 4B articles tagged at WynApse.com, along with lots (>7600 posts) of other stuff :)

From SilverlightCream.com:

Silverlight 4 beta and web cam support: WebCam support ... well... now that SL4B has it, wonder what everyone will be screaming for :) .. Michael Wolf has a post up describing it's use. He has a video on the post that's actually pretty cool showing the user experience.
A guide to new features of WCF RIA Services: Colin Blair has a post up showing the differences you should know in the transition from .NET RIA Services to WCF RIA Services in Silverlight 4.
Enabling Validation in Silverlight 4 with IDataErrorInfo: John Papa has a short article and code up explaining the use of IDataErrorInfo in Silverlight 4.
Silverlight Clipboard API: Find out what Clipboard support in Silverlight 4 really means. Ning Zhang explains what we've got and how to use it. Yikes... lots of moving parts to worry about!
Silverlight 4 Beta, RIA Services... and Beer!: Ready for a long Friday morning Silverlight 4 RIA application tutorial? Andy Beaulieu has a great one up... lots of details and hints... required reading!
Pub/sub sample with WCF net.tcp protocol in Silverlight 4: Tomasz Janczuk continues with discussion of net.tcp and describes the conversion of a previous sample from HTTP Polling Duplex to the new WCF net.tcp protocol.

Stay in the 'Light!

Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 SilverlightCream

The Official jQuery Podcast - Episode 2 - Richard D. Worth

On Wednesday night, Ralph Whitbeck and Elijah Manor recorded this weeks episode of the Official jQuery Podcast with this weeks guest Richard D. Worth, jQuery UI Release Manager. Our next live show will be recorded and streamed Wednesday December 2nd at 10PM EST on uStream with yayQuery co-host Paul Irish. You can also subscribe to the show [...]

Validation in Flex with Hamcrest-AS3

Hamcrest? No, it isn't a fancy sandwich topping. Hamcrest is a framework for creating matchers, allowing matching rules to be defined declaratively (from Wikipedia). Hamcrest has been used by many popular unit testing frameworks including JUnit and FlexUnit 4. Hamcrest-AS3...

Elise Marie Deitte

Elise Marie Deitte was born on November 14th at 5 lbs 3 oz. Mother and baby are doing fine, and dad is very happy.

Thoughts on Paul Graham’s post: “Apple’s Mistake”

I just read Paul Graham's blog post titled Apple's Mistake. If Steve Jobs doesn't read that post and finally take some action on the farce that is the App Store approval process, Apple will have made two mistakes. And you should read it too because it is overflowing with wisdom. It is telling in itself that [...]

Devoxx 09: День за номером 2 - сплошные эмоции

День был насыщен выступлениями IT-гуру каждое из которых было сделано в своём неповторимом стиле.

Послание от Ivar-а Jacobson-а, выдержанное в классическом лютеранском тоне, вызвало у всех участников конференции крик скорби в связи с тем, что IT индустрия до сих пор находится в поиске единой методологии разработки ПО, после чего презентация превратилась в проповедь об инженерных универсалиях, применимых в процессе создания программ. К сожалению разум Главного Лектора Планетария после долгих и в целом безуспешных попыток найти подобную универсальную вещь, сломался, и чтобы хоть как-то сохранить свою значимость в теле хозяина, выдал старый и проверенный результат: все в Шелл.

Далее выступал евангелист Bob Martin, он так отчаянно пытался убедить всех в своей правоте, что даже несколько раз вызвал смешки в зале, хотя его речь была посвящена таким злободневным темам, как "Разработчики против Менеджмента" и "Как выжить в бедовом проекте". Слушая это выступление Главный Лектор постоянно ловил себя на мысли, что выступающий страдает глоссолалией, уверенность в этом особенно возросла, когда Боб дал дельный совет о том, как писать крутой код, в котором тестировщики не смогу найти ни одной ошибки.

День продолжился в стиле Башни Вавилонской, началось всё с замечательного демо по загрузчикам Java классов, но похоже, что подготовка демо завершилась всего за пару минут до начала презентации, поэтому что-то пошло не так, отдадим должное ведущему, у которого оказалось достаточно выдержки, чтобы предложить аудитории отладить и исправить его "сломавшуюся" программу; потом пришёл черёд Stephen-а Chin-а, с его изумительным JavaFX рассказом о потрясающих компонентах, разработанных в рамках проекта JFXtras (мы уже рассказывали вам об одном из них - JavaFX столе, на котором уже размещено более 16 миллионов объектов), после презентации ребята из проекта FEST видели его бегающим между презентационными комнатами, задающим бесконечное число вопросов и раздающим направо и налево подарочные футболки.

Если вдруг вы всё-таки были на конференции, то не могли не заметить тот сюр, который устроили четыре гика в шляпах, танцующих под песни Rick-а Astley, а если заметили, то это значит, что вы участвовали в живой записи выступления команды JavaPosse. Понятное дело, на этой презентации было сказано много добрых слов о Scala, скором выходе Java EE 6 (10-е Декабря уже скоро), безусловно досталось процедурам замыкания, ну зачем вам пересказывать всё, если вы там были? А если не были - дождитесь, пока из записи уберут все нецензурные выражения и выложат в общий доступ: обязательно скачайте - не пожалеете.

И в конце нашего выпуска не можем не отметить зажигательное выступление Stephan-а Janssen-а на конференции Devoxx.

Reminiscing: most influential Internet moments of the decade

The Webby Awards just published a great list of the ten most influential Internet moments of the decade. It’s great to see that they didn’t forget to give props to Flash Player for causing the online video revolution: Online video revolution (2006) In 2006, a perfect storm of faster bandwidth, cheaper camcorders, and the groundbreaking use of [...]

Sharing Blend Workspace Settings

In this post Andy Beaulieu explains how to share Workspace settings across multiple users in Blend.

For example, you may have set up the perfect Workspace for completing a task, and want to share this with other users in your team. While Blend does not support this natively, we can hack around a bit to get a Workspace copied to another machine.

Exploring Silverlight 4: Printing in Silverlight 4

Gill Cleeren is really happy that Silverlight 4 now brings real printing to the table and is impatient to try it.

All printing is done using the PrintDocument class. In it’s PrintPage event, we can specify what content needs to be printed. This can be the entire screen, a control that’s part of the visual tree or even a control that’s generated on the fly. Finally, we use the Print() method to perform the actual printing of the document.

Silverlight 4 Drag From Desktop

In this video Michael Wolf demonstrates how Silverlight 4 supports drag and drop from the desktop to both the web and out of browser.

Whats great too is how similar the process is to WPF, the object properties are exactly the same, the only difference is 1 line in the actual file opening. Thus by sharing a common code, you can leverage this functionality in a full desktop experince as well as a silverlight experience with the exact same code.

Silverlight Bridge - A Silverlight 4 File Manager

Michael Washington and his team have released Silverlight Bridge - a Silverlight 4 file manager.

Silverlight Bridge can run in "Out Of Browser" mode and access the local file system and allow dragging and dropping of files from the local file system to the server.

Silverlight 3 & 4 Library Sharing with .NET 4.0 Library or WPF

Karl Shifflett announces that Silverlight 3 & 4 Library assemblies can now be referenced and used in .NET 4.0 applications.

Your Silverlight Library can’t have any “Silverlight specific” code in it. I have been able to share my own framework code (Ocean) and business entities without any issues.
Now that Silverlight 4 has shipped and IDataErrorInfo has been added this enables entity sharing between Silverlight and WPF much easier since you no longer have to implement this interface youself just to get code compatibility with your business objects.

Wordpress plugin Permalinks Changer

When you want to change your permalinks structure in Wordpress, it's easy way if your are Wordpress semi-advance user. But there are also Wordpress Newbies, which want to change Wordpress permalinks structure as well. I've created small wordpress plugin called Permalinks Changer, which helps you to change you permalinks structure in more friendly way

Congreso de Software Libre 2008 - San Juan (Argentina)

Entre los días 17 y 18 de octubre del 2008 se llevo a cabo en la provincia de San Juan (San Juan, Argentina) el Primer Congreso de Software Libre San Juan 2008. El mismo se realizó en las instalaciones de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales de la Universidad Nacional de San Juan (UNSJ).

Los objetivos del congreso eran:

Concentrar a una selección importante de expertos nacionales en el uso de GNU/Linux y el Software Libre con exposiciones y demostraciones, ofreciendo a todos los participantes una muestra del Software Libre y el Sistema Operativo GNU/Linux, su implementación, características y posibilidades.

Impulsar la formación de proyectos locales y nacionales de Software Libre, contando en las distintas comunidades de expertos, desarrolladores y usuarios que desean intercambiar conocimiento investigación y desarrollo.

Colaborar con los procesos de migración a Software Libre en el sector público y privado, promoviendo a todos los profesionales, llamándolos para que las empresas e instituciones locales consigan en ellos, muy seguramente, las personas capacitadas en el área de Software Libre para los procesos de administración y desarrollo de sistemas.

La organización del congreso estuvo a cargo del grupo Xonda, a quienes les agradezco la invitación, y por sobre todo les agradezco el afecto que me brindaron durante mi estadía en San Juan.

La apertura del congreso estuvo a cargo del Dr. Ing. Benjamin Kuchen (Rector de la Universidad Nacional de San Juan), Ing. Rodolfo Bloch (Decano de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas Físicas y Naturales de la UNSJ), Lic. Manuel Ortega (Director del Departamento de Informática), Lic. Sergio Zapata (Director del Instituto de Informática) y el Sr. Domingo Britos (Presidente del grupo Xonda).

La temática de las charlas fue variada, y se contó con la presencia de más de 300 asistentes:

Plone 3: una navaja suiza para construir portales y extranets - Roberto Allende (Grulic – Menttes).

Administración de redes con herramientas libres - Nelson Rodriguez, Maria Murazzo, Matias Martinez, Cintia Martinez.

Minería de datos con herramientas de software libre - Ariel Gonzalez, Javier Aciar, Sebastian Martinez.

Introducción a OpenSolaris y sus principales características: ZFS, DTrace y Zones - Nicolás Alonso (Sun Microsystems).

Migración hacia Software Libre - Pablo Abad, Silvia Alicia Gomez (ITBA).

Introducción a JavaFX – Nicolás Alonso (Sun Microsystems).

Software libre en el grupo de desarrollo del departamento de informática del ITBA - Pablo Abad, Silvia Alicia Gomez (ITBA).

Desarrollo de aplicaciones móviles con NetBeans - Susana Chavez, Adriana Martín.

Desarrollo web para el iPhone - Daniel Videla (Grupo Xonda).

Principios Básicos sobre Licencias de Software – Fabio Cabrera (Grupo Xonda).

Taller de IPS mas IDS - Mariano Montañez (Cima soluciones).

El software libre y sus aplicaciones en la ingeniería - Andres Lopez.

Virtualización en Gnu/Linux - Cristian Sanchez (Grupo Xonda).

Taller de virtualización en OpenSolaris - Nicolás Alonso (Sun Microsystems).

Pen Testing en redes y aplicaciones web con software libre - Mariano Montañez (Grupo Xonda).

Taller Distro-Xonda - Fabio Cabrera, Domingo Britos (Grupo Xonda).

PHP y aplicaciones web - Guillermo Gelvez y Alejandro Garcia (Grupo Xonda).

Nvu y Komposer - Patricia Britos (Grupo Xonda).

Taller de JavaFX - Nicolás Alonso (Sun Microsystems).

Como dije anteriormente, agradezco enormemente la calidad humana de todos los integrantes del grupo Xonda que me acompañaron durante toda mi estadía en San Juan. Y como siempre agradezco a todos aquellos que hicieron posible este evento y a todas aquellas personas que se acercaron y se hicieron presentes en las diferentes charlas que hubo.

Quiero invitar a toda la comunidad a que si lo desea se unan a OSUM. Especialmente les dejo un enlace al grupo OSUM de la Universidad Nacional de San Juan para que puedan unirse y compartir inquietudes y conocimiento.

De nuevo, muchas gracias a todos los que hicieron posible este evento. Me despido dejándoles un enlace a una galería de imágenes con fotos de las diferentes charlas en las que participe y algunas imágenes del hermoso dique de la ciudad de San Juan.

Encuentra más fotos como ésta en Open Source University Meetup

Congreso de Software Libre 2008 - San Juan (Argentina)

Los objetivos del congreso eran:

Concentrar a una selección importante de expertos nacionales en el uso de GNU/Linux y el Software Libre con exposiciones y demostraciones, ofreciendo a todos los participantes una muestra del Software Libre y el Sistema Operativo GNU/Linux, su implementación, características y posibilidades.

Impulsar la formación de proyectos locales y nacionales de Software Libre, contando en las distintas comunidades de expertos, desarrolladores y usuarios que desean intercambiar conocimiento investigación y desarrollo.

Colaborar con los procesos de migración a Software Libre en el sector público y privado, promoviendo a todos los profesionales, llamándolos para que las empresas e instituciones locales consigan en ellos, muy seguramente, las personas capacitadas en el área de Software Libre para los procesos de administración y desarrollo de sistemas.

La organización del congreso estuvo a cargo del grupo Xonda, a quienes les agradezco la invitación, y por sobre todo les agradezco el afecto que me brindaron durante mi estadía en San Juan.

Plone 3: una navaja suiza para construir portales y extranets - Roberto Allende (Grulic – Menttes).

Administración de redes con herramientas libres - Nelson Rodriguez, Maria Murazzo, Matias Martinez, Cintia Martinez.

Minería de datos con herramientas de software libre - Ariel Gonzalez, Javier Aciar, Sebastian Martinez.

Introducción a OpenSolaris y sus principales características: ZFS, DTrace y Zones - Nicolás Alonso (Sun Microsystems).

Migración hacia Software Libre - Pablo Abad, Silvia Alicia Gomez (ITBA).

Introducción a JavaFX – Nicolás Alonso (Sun Microsystems).

Software libre en el grupo de desarrollo del departamento de informática del ITBA - Pablo Abad, Silvia Alicia Gomez (ITBA).

Desarrollo de aplicaciones móviles con NetBeans - Susana Chavez, Adriana Martín.

Desarrollo web para el iPhone - Daniel Videla (Grupo Xonda).

Principios Básicos sobre Licencias de Software – Fabio Cabrera (Grupo Xonda).

Taller de IPS mas IDS - Mariano Montañez (Cima soluciones).

El software libre y sus aplicaciones en la ingeniería - Andres Lopez.

Virtualización en Gnu/Linux - Cristian Sanchez (Grupo Xonda).

Taller de virtualización en OpenSolaris - Nicolás Alonso (Sun Microsystems).

Pen Testing en redes y aplicaciones web con software libre - Mariano Montañez (Grupo Xonda).

Taller Distro-Xonda - Fabio Cabrera, Domingo Britos (Grupo Xonda).

PHP y aplicaciones web - Guillermo Gelvez y Alejandro Garcia (Grupo Xonda).

Nvu y Komposer - Patricia Britos (Grupo Xonda).

Taller de JavaFX - Nicolás Alonso (Sun Microsystems).

Encuentra más fotos como ésta en Open Source University Meetup

Get Time Tracker Source Code in SproutCore

Bruz Marzolf is writing a series of blog posts implementing a simple time tracking app in various client-side rich web app frameworks. He just finished his example in SproutCore and including some source code.

Here’s what he had to say:

SproutCore provides a higher level abstraction that manages when objects are changed and need to be updated, and when they’re busy and shouldn’t be modified, for instance.

Bruz’ code is a good example of a basic starter app that’s a little more complex than our todos demo. I’m looking forward to his additional entries in this series also.

Silverlight Cream for November 19, 2009 - 2 -- #736

In this Issue: Rob Houweling, Michael Washington, Colin Eberhardt, Laurent Bugnion, Tomasz Janczuk, Jeremy Likness, and Andy Beaulieu.

From SilverlightCream.com:

Silverlight 4 – Using the webcam: Rob Houweling has a tutorial up on using the webcam in Silverlight 4 Beta ... all good stuff, and hmm... I'm not following their new site, so that brings the total up to 397 :)
Silverlight Bridge - A Silverlight 4 File Manager: Access your local file system and drag-and-drop, and OOB in Silverlight? --- wow, check out the work Michael Washington's been up to!
Silverlight 4 beta released leaving Flex behind: Colin Eberhardt goes so far as to say Silverlight has now left Flex behind... check it out and see if you agree... don't ask me, I drank the Kool-Aid :) -- and thanks for the shoutout, Colin!
Silverlight 4 beta released at #PDC09: I held back Laurent Bugnion's post about Silverlight 4 this morning because he discusses what's on many people's mind, and that's "what does this mean for WPF?"
WCF net.tcp protocol in Silverlight 4: Tomasz Janczuk discusses the new WCF service capability in Silverlight 4 Beta using net.tcp
Dynamic Module Loading with Silverlight Navigation using Prism: Jeremy Likness has a post up on Prism and Silverlight, Dynamic Modules, and Navigation. This is a farily involved tutorial, so give yourself time to read.
Silverlight 4 Beta: Implicit Styles: Andy Beaulieu has a post up talking about the new Implicit Styles in Silverlight 4 Beta with code examples and Blend examples.

Stay in the 'Light!

Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 SilverlightCream

So long Engineering, hello User Experience

Today was my last day as Lead Software Engineer at Comcast Interactive Media (CIM), and tomorrow I start my new role as a User Experience Technologist / Principal Application Developer for CIM. Its been an awesome 5 years in engineering but its time to move to newer domains. The decision to move to UX was [...]

Applying Transformations in Your Applications

While developing JavaFX applications, I always feel the great potential of transformational effects.

At the same time, I wonder how they actually work and why we need several classes and variables to perform the same transformation.

Share my experience of studying the essentials of transformations in the new technical article Enhance Your Application by Applying Transformations.

With the code samples provided in this article, you can learn how to employ transformations in your applications and combine them with animation.

Alla Redko
Technical Writer
JavaFX Docs & Training

Google Closure: A New Way of Developing in JavaScript

Every day million people make use of Google products and these products are written mainly using one well known language: JavaScript! What makes this online software stable, fast and responsive is a good use of the language and an excellent system of data compression and asynchronous loading. Today this power is available to everyone, since Google has released its magic tool under Apache 2 license.

Pythonic : The Good Programmer

How do you recognize a good programmer?

Guido: It takes time to recognize a good programmer. For example, it’s really hard to tell good from bad in a one-hour interview. When you work together with someone though, on a variety of problems, it usually becomes pretty clear which are the good ones. I hesitate to give specific criteria—I guess in general the good ones show creativity, learn quickly, and soon start producing code that works and doesn’t need a lot of changes before it’s ready to be checked in. Note that some folks are good at different aspects of programming than others—some folks are good at algorithms and data structures, others are good at large-scale integration, or protocol design, or testing, or API design, or user interfaces, or whatever other aspects of programming exist.

What method would you use to hire programmers?

Guido: Based on my interviewing experience in the past, I don’t think I’d be any good at hiring in the traditional way—my interview skills are nearly nonexistent on both sides of the table! I guess what I’d do would be to use some kind of apprentice system where I’d be working closely with people for quite some time and would eventually get a feeling for their strengths and weaknesses. Sort of the way an open source project works.

Is there any characteristic that becomes fundamental to evaluate if we are looking for great Python programmers?

Guido: I’m afraid you are asking this from the perspective of the typical manager who simply wants to hire a bunch of Python programmers. I really don’t think there’s a simple answer, and in fact I think it’s probably the wrong question. You don’t want to hire Python programmers. You want to hire smart, creative, self-motivated people.

If you check job ads for programmers, nearly all of them include a line about being able
to work in a team. What is your opinion on the role of the team in programming? Do you still see space for the brilliant programmer who can’t work with others?

Guido: I am with the job ads in that one aspect. Brilliant programmers who can’t do teamwork shouldn’t get themselves in the position of being hired into a traditional programming position—it will be a disaster for all involved, and their code will be a nightmare for whoever inherits it. I actually think it’s a distinct lack of brilliance if you can’t do teamwork. Nowadays there are ways to learn how to work with other people, and if you’re really so brilliant you should be able to learn teamwork skills easily—it’s really not as hard as learning how to implement an efficient Fast Fourier Transform, if you set your mind about it.

Being the designer of Python, what advantages do you see when coding with your language compared to another skilled developer using Python?

Guido: I don’t know—at this point the language and VM have been touched by so many people that I’m sometimes surprised at how certain things work in detail myself! If I have an advantage over other developers, it probably has more to do with having used the language longer than anyone than with having written it myself. Over that long period of time, I have had the opportunity to ponder which operations are faster and which are slower—for example, I may be aware more than most users that locals are faster than globals (though others have gone overboard using this, not me!), or that functions and method calls are expensive (more so than in C or Java), or that the fastest data type is a
tuple. When it comes to using the standard library and beyond, I often feel that others have an advantage. For example, I write about one web application every few years, and the technology available changes each time, so I end up writing a “first” web app using a new framework or approach each time. And I still haven’t had the opportunity to do serious XML mangling in Python.

It seems that one of the features of Python is its conciseness. How does this affect the maintainability of the code?

Guido: I’ve heard of research as well as anecdotal evidence indicating that the error rate per number of lines of code is pretty consistent, regardless of the programming language used. So a language like Python where a typical application is just much smaller than, say, the same amount of functionality written in C++ or Java, would make that application much more maintainable. Of course, this is likely going to mean that a single programmer is responsible for more functionality. That’s a separate issue, but it still comes out in favor of Python: more productivity per programmer probably means fewer programmers on a team, which means less communication overhead, which according to The Mythical Man-Month [Frederick P. Brooks; Addison-Wesley Professional] goes up by the square of the team size, if I remember correctly.

Source of Information : Oreilly - Masterminds of Programming

Silverlight Cream for November 19, 2009 -- #735

Silverlight 4 Overview Postings

Every time there's a beta or a release I try a different way to get all the good stuff out. I waited until today, and am scooping up all the overview blog posts, and posting them first in this post. I've got a few submissions I'll get out later today and then I'll start catching up with everyone as the days go on... I've tagged 63 posts so far! -- oh, and I added a "4 Beta" tag on Silverlight Cream, so that's ready to roll

For now, here is the (SL4ß Overview) end-result of looking at 396 blogs at varying times since 5:30 this morning:

Andy Beaulieu has a post up: Silverlight 4 Beta Summary with links out to his and other posts

Adam Kinney reports a Rundown of Silverlight 4 Beta Features and 6 Hands on Labs with lots of goodies

David Anson discusses SL4: Silverlight 4 Beta is out - and the Toolkit has it covered! [Silverlight Toolkit November 2009 release now available for Silverlight 3 and 4!]

Stefan Olson already has a list up of Bugs fixed (or not) in Silverlight 4 Beta

Ning Zhang reports and demonstrates that Silverlight 4 Adds Arabic Support

John Papa has some good information and links: Silverlight 4 Beta Announced at PDC09: Great Learning Material Too!

Chris Anderson posted this one from watching the keynote: PDC09 News

Nikhil Kothari has a great overview of and links to the PDC demos: Silverlight 4 Debuts with Killer Demos at PDC09

Shawn Wildermuth's post I mentioned yesterday in my mad dash to post: Silverlight 4 Beta Announced!

Koen Zwikstra is nothing if not efficient... he's got a Silverlight 4 Beta version of SilverlightSpy up already: Silverlight Spy 3.0.0.5

And if you thought the Expression Blend and Design folks were napping: Download Expression Blend Preview for .NET 4

Tim Heuer's great post of yesterday referenced by *everyone*: Silverlight 4 Beta – A guide to the new features

Andrea Boschin has a post and some sample code up: Silverlight 4.0 beta released

András Velvárt has a good list of what's new: Discovering Silverlight 4 – What is new?

The Silverlight SDK has a couple good posts up. First the obligatorey Silverlight 4 Beta Released! with a ton of links, then Silverlight 4 Beta Bugs

Katrien De Graeve has a good post up with links: Silverlight 4 Beta – Overview of the new features

Stay in the 'Light!

Flex At Dreamforce 2009

This week I’m in San Francisco at Dreamforce – Salesforce.com’s yearly conference. It’s amazing to walk around the expo hall and see how much Flex is being used in enterprise products and services. Like last year I’ve been recording some videos of some of the great enterprise Flex apps here. Also Greg [...]

Devoxx 09: Day 2 Fun

It was a morning of keynotes examining the workings of technology professional, and a contrast of preaching styles.

Ivar Jacobson's Lutheran delivery allowed the audience to share in the nordic dispair of a participating in an industry in still seeking a single development methodology, before raising the collective spirit with a gospel of a universal one to be resurrected from the common elements of all the ones developed to-date. But it was hard for the Janitor's mundane mind to see if there was anything left in this intersection-of-methodologies except for good old fashioned common sense. And will probably Bourne in shell for saying so.

Next up was the evangleical Bob Martin whose exhortive style raised a lot of chuckles, mining such rich seams as: Developer versus Manager, and Project Trainwrecks We've All Survived. At times seeming like he might speak in tongues, the Janitor thought he was, unfortunately, glossolalia-ing over some nice practical advice about how to be more of a professional that produces write well-crafted code in which QA will find no fault.

And the day continued a stylistic Tower of Babel, with an last minute standin presenter of an excellent talk on Java classloaders having the nerves of steel to allow the audience to debug and fix his demo that had gone wrong; Stephen Chin's engaging JavaFX talk on the many excellent components in JFXtras (like the JavaFX table which performed beautifully with 16 million items), and FEST saw him running up and down the stairs asking questions and handing out t-shirts.

The stylistic nightmare that was four geeks in hats dancing to Rick Astley meant you were at the start of the live recording of the JavaPosse. There were predictably big cheers for Scala, Java EE 6's imminent (December 10th) release, mostly cheers for closures, and lots of other fun which you can catch up to when they edit the bad words out and publish it, if you weren't there.

Stephan Janssen really puts on a great show at Devoxx.

Installing ColdFusion 9 on Windows Server 2008 64bit

This blog is slowly turning into a ColdFusion site it seems :-) Blame ColdFusion for that, it's the one application server that I know a bit about and I really like working with.
Today I needed to install CF9 on Windows Server 2008 64bit and I ran into a few issues which forced me to reinstall a few times. I've now managed to install it successfully so here are a two tips that may safe you some hassle if you like me encounter a HTTP Error 404.3 - Not Found.

First off, I was using IIS 7.5. As you may know, you need to install the web server role onto Windows Server 2008 first and it seems that everything labeled IIS6 tools and compatibility tools should be installed as well, so do that first. Then when running the CF installer right click and 'Run as Administrator'. Once I did that it was plain sailing, but not much joy without those two boxes ticked.

Geomurder

Mr. Reed was royally pissed off. The virtual whore house those scrawny-necked geeks had set up at his geocoordinates was a blemish on the otherwise spotless reputation of his fine foods business. Bitches and caviar didn't mix. And Mr. Reed was not about to let anyone jeopardize the success he had scraped together from the [...]

Using Google Analytics With AJAX

A couple months ago I wrote an article on how to use Dojo to create a rich UI for websites. One of the key points of the article was how to support all users -- those with JavaScript enabled and those without. The purpose of this was to enable basic browsers like search engine spiders to go through your site without JavaScript, while enabling the rich interface for your regular users.

RIA Services: Jumpstarting RIA Development

In my post on RIA Services: From Vision to Architecture, a while back (right after MIX09), I mentioned that I like to think of RIA Services as RAD for RIA. At that point we had a very early preview of framework bits with little tools support. A large part of jumpstarting your development actually centers around good tooling. VS2010 brings tooling for RIA Services (now: WCF RIA Services).

Scott Hanselman demonstrated some key features used in building a Contacts application (as shown on the right) during the keynote at PDC09.

The latest version of RIA Services is now available for download. It works on .NET 4 and VS2010 as well. You can also check out a video tutorial on using RIA Services and Visual Studio 2010.

In this post, I want to highlight the range of tooling features that span from the start to getting an application up and running.

[Full post continued here...]

Links for 2009-11-18

The Really Mobile Project » Blog Archive » Shopping at the OVI store… A tale of woe about shopping in the OVI store… “Would you like a Hannah Montana screen-saver with that?” It would be funny if it weren’t true. (via James Governor) (tags: ovi, nokia, ux) Apple's App Store Rejections | Ted Landau's User Friendly Blog | The Mac [...]

links for 2009-11-18

ClickTale Blog » Unfolding the Fold Web designers and usability professionals have debated the topic of web page scrolling since 1994. At the early days of the web, most users were unfamiliar with the concept of scrolling and it was not a natural thing for them to do. As a result, web designers would design web [...]

Silverlight 4 Debuts with Killer Demos at PDC09

Lots of wow from this morning with Silverlight 4 (and RIA Services) taking center stage in the keynote, here at PDC09.
[Full post continued here...]

WCF net.tcp protocol in Silverlight 4 Beta

Support for the WCF net.tcp protocol is the key feature addition in the core of WCF offering in Silverlight 4 Beta.

Read more about the benefits and limitations of the net.tcp protocol in Silverlight 4 to decide if it is a good fit for your application. You can also check out a walk-through of adding net.tcp support to a pub\sub Silverlight application or inspect the code of the sample to get a better idea of what’s involved in creating an end to end solution using net.tcp in Silverlight.

Tomasz Janczuk
Development Manager
WCF Team

Updated Flash Positions at Akamai, US Locations Added

Very brief update on my recent post in regards due the Flash Senior Solutions Architect roles which Akamai is trying to fill. In addition to Munich position they are also looking for candidates to work in New York City and San Mateo, CA. Please refer to the original job ad for the full job description and apply through that if you think you have got what it takes ;-)

Download Expression Blend Preview for .NET 4

Today at PDC, we made a few announcements that would be of interest to you! First, Scott Guthrie announced the availability of the Silverlight 4 Beta . This version of Silverlight contains some cool new features that many of you have asked for, so read...(read more)

The Pythonic Way

Are we moving toward hybrid typing?
Guido: I expect there’s a lot to say for some kind of hybrid. I’ve noticed that most large systems written in a statically typed language actually contain a significant subset that is essentially dynamically typed. For example, GUI widget sets and database APIs for Java often feel like they are fighting the static typing every step of the way, moving most correctness checks to runtime.

A hybrid language with functional and dynamic aspects might be quite interesting. I should add that despite Python’s support for some functional tools like map( ) and lambda, Python does not have a functional-language subset: there is no type inferencing, and no opportunity for parallellization.

Why did you choose to support multiple paradigms?
Guido: I didn’t really; Python supports procedural programming, to some extent, and OO. These two aren’t so different, and Python’s procedural style is still strongly influenced by objects (since the fundamental data types are all objects). Python supports a tiny bit of functional programming—but it doesn’t resemble any real functional language, and it never will. Functional languages are all about doing as much as possible at compile time— the “functional” aspect means that the compiler can optimize things under a very strong guarantee that there are no side effects, unless explicitly declared. Python is about having the simplest, dumbest compiler imaginable, and the official runtime semantics actively discourage cleverness in the compiler like parallelizing loops or turning recursion into loops. Python probably has the reputation of supporting functional programming based on the inclusion of lambda, map, filter, and reduce in the language, but in my eyes these are just syntactic sugar, and not the fundamental building blocks that they are in functional languages. The more fundamental property that Python shares with Lisp (not a functional language either!) is that functions are first-class objects, and can be passed around like any other object. This, combined with nested scopes and a generally Lisp-like approach to function state, makes it possible to easily implement concepts that superficially resemble concepts from functional languages, like currying, map, and reduce. The primitive operations that are necessary to implement those concepts are built in Python, where in functional languages, those concepts are the primitive operations. You can write reduce( ) in a few lines of Python. Not so in a functional language.

When you created the language, did you consider the type of programmers it might have attracted?

Guido: Yes, but I probably didn’t have enough imagination. I was thinking of professional programmers in a Unix or Unix-like environment. Early versions of the Python tutorial used a slogan something like “Python bridges the gap between C and shell programming” because that was where I was myself, and the people immediately around me. It never occurred to me that Python would be a good language to embed in applications until people started asking about that. The fact that it was useful for teaching first principles of programming in a middle school or college setting or for self-teaching was merely a lucky coincidence, enabled by the many ABC features that I kept—ABC was aimed specifically at teaching programming to nonprogrammers.

How do you balance the different needs of a language that should be easy to learn for novices versus a language that should be powerful enough for experienced programmers to do useful things? Is that a false dichotomy?

Guido: Balance is the word. There are some well-known traps to avoid, like stuff that is thought to help novices but annoys experts, and stuff that experts need but confuses novices. There’s plenty enough space in between to keep both sides happy. Another strategy is to have ways for experts to do advanced things that novices will never encounter—for example, the language supports metaclasses, but there’s no reason for novices to know about them.

Source of Information : Oreilly - Masterminds of Programming

New Web Services Features in Silverlight 4 Beta

This morning at PDC ’09 ScottGu just announced the availability of Silverlight 4 Beta. Later on today I am going on to present the latest improvements around networking and web services and I’ll link to the full talk as soon as it is available online. In this post I’ll provide a quick summary of today’s announcements, with more detail to follow.

On the high level, we are announcing an exciting alignment between the different web services stacks in Silverlight. ADO.NET Data Services and .NET RIA Services are being rebranded as WCF Data Services and WCF RIA Services to reflect the fact that both technologies are being built out as programming models on top of WCF. In a way, this is not really major news; to you as a developer, pretty much everything stays the same, and you can continue using your favorite technology, whether it is straight WCF, or WCF RIA Services or WCF Data Services.

RIA Services and Data Services give you productive patterns for specific kinds of services and applications, hiding away some of the complexity of using WCF directly. The power of WCF is still there for you under the covers, if you need to modify some setting to your liking.

Specifically within the core WCF model, Silverlight 4 Beta has support for a brand new binding: NetTcp. This binding lets Silverlight talk to WCF services using a high-performance TCP pipe, using a duplex message pattern. In Silverlight, the binding is built on top of the sockets support that’s already there since Silverlight 2, so we inherit the security requirements of the Silverlight sockets API. More specifically, the service needs to be hosted in a given port range (4502 – 4534) and needs to expose a policy responder on port 943. One more thing to be aware of is that the security support and the streamed programming model for NetTcp available in WCF on the desktop framework are not available in Silverlight 4 Beta.

We’ll have a lot more content for you coming up soon, including the code from my talk today. If you want to get your hands dirty right away, go get the Silverlight 4 Beta, and then try the steps this how-to in our MSDN documentation, which has already been updated and show usage for NetTcp.

More information:

Thanks, and looking forward to your feedback!
Yavor Georgiev
Program Manager, Silverlight

Silverlight 4 Beta – A guide to the new features

At the Microsoft Professional Developer (PDC) conference, Scott Guthrie announced the availability of Silverlight 4 Beta.

WHAT?!

That’s right, we’ve released an early beta of the next version of Silverlight. It’s really amazing to think what the team is accomplishing at the pace they are accomplishing it! Silverlight 3 released just over 3 months ago and here we are with yet another release full of features that our community has been asking for.

This beta release is a developer release. This means that this is a preview mostly for developers to understand the new features and continue to get feedback. No “end-user” runtime is available for this release, nor is a “go-live” license for customers wishing to put their applications into production. If you have questions on this, feel free to leave a comment here.

Enough blabbing, here’s the goods. WARNING: Long post ahead…but filled with information.

Download Silverlight 4 and tools

To be successful in your evaluation of Silverlight 4 you are going to need some tools. Here’s the link dump of everything:

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 or Visual Web Developer Express 2010 Beta 2 (pick one)
Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2010
Expression Blend for .NET 4 Preview – for authoring Silverlight 4 and WPF 4 applications
WCF RIA Services (formerly .NET RIA Services) (NOTE: This is actually included in the SL Tools for Silverlight 4)
Silverlight 4 SDK CHM (offline documentation) – optionally online here as well
Updated Silverlight Toolkit for Silverlight 4
Developer runtimes: Windows and Mac platforms
Silverlight 4 SDK only – not needed if you install the tools above
Silverlight Media Framework – a new, Open Source media player framework for you to use.

These are the full set of tools to help you evaluate Silverlight 4. At a bare minimum for a developer you’ll need/want Visual Studio 2010 and the Silverlight Tools for VS.

NOTE: When you install the Silverlight Tools for VS, you get the Windows developer runtime, the Silverlight 4 SDK and the Visual Studio tools/templates. It is NOT necessary to install the SDK and developer runtimes again if you are using the tools installer. The developer runtimes are provided for you to put on other developer test machines to help test your applications. Additionally, RIA Services is also included in the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2010. If you have a version of RIA Services already installed, you will need to uninstall it.

Go ahead and get the tools starting to download. In the meantime, here’s some other helpful information for you.

Silverlight 4 Resources

There are a few places for you to go to learn some things:

this blog – hey, you are here, you might as well subscribe as well as follow me on Twitter.
Jesse Liberty, John Papa and Adam Kinney blogs, my partners in Silverlight
Silverlight 4 beta and WCF RIA Services forums.
View initial Silverlight 4 learning videos with sample code in C# and Visual Basic.
Walk through some hands-on labs.

You should bookmark and subscribe to the above sites for constant updated Silverlight information.

What’s new in Silverlight 4 – feature review

Okay, now on to the details. Sit back, switch this post to your largest monitor, and grab a drink. This is a long post intentionally to provide you with details to the framework. In each area I’ll be sure to point out if there are existing resources (labs, videos, etc.) for that specific feature and be as concise as I can as to be “to the point” about what it provides, what are the requirements and some sample code, where appropriate. Here we go with the feature dump…

Tooling

With Visual Studio 2010, we finally have our designer surface back for Silverlight! Yes, you have an editable design surface for Silverlight…and actually this isn’t just limited to Silverlight 4…it is available for Silverlight 3. What is great about the Silverlight tools in VS2010 is that the databinding support is pretty rich in the designer surface as well.

Additionally, for WCF RIA Services, we have improved designer/editor support for using DomainSource classes as a Data Source in Visual Studio. Be sure to grab VS2010 for all your development needs. VS2010 allows for multi-targeting of Silverlight 3 and 4 applications.

Video: RIA Services Support in Visual Studio 2010

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Printing API

One of the top-most requested features in Silverlight has been to enable some printing support from the Silverlight application client-side versus always having the developer do things server-side. In Silverlight 4 we’re providing a printing API that we believe to be extensible for the developer and provide you with a simple printing of a visual tree, or a highly extensible model to enable you to create a virtual visual tree to print for the end user directly from Silverlight.

Code sample:

   1: private void PrintAll_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)

   2: {

   3:     // instantiate a new PrintDocument

   4:     PrintDocument docToPrint = new PrintDocument();

5:

   6:     // set a friendly name for display in print queues

   7:     docToPrint.DocumentName = "Entire Screen Sample";

8:

   9:     // wire up any starting code pre-printing (i.e., UI activity display)

  10:     docToPrint.StartPrint += (s, args) =>

  11:         {

  12:             ActivityDisplay.IsActive = true;

  13:         };

14:

  15:     // tell the API what to print

  16:     docToPrint.PrintPage += (s, args) =>

  17:         {

  18:             args.PageVisual = this.StackOfStuff;

  19:         };

20:

  21:     // wire up any clean-up code pre-printing (i.e., UI activity display)

  22:     docToPrint.EndPrint += (s, args) =>

  23:         {

  24:             ActivityDisplay.IsActive = false;

  25:         };

26:

  27:     // execute the print job

  28:     docToPrint.Print();

  29: }

As you can see above, you can wire up pre- and post-print events for any type of preparation and clean-up code. The PrintPage is the important area here where the developer would pass a UIElement to print. This could be something that already exists in the visual tree, or something that is created virtually in-memory and not even added to the visual tree.

Video and Sample Code: Printing API Basics

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Right-click event handling

Do you have an application that has a need for a context-style menu (aka ‘right click’ menus)? Well, in addition to the MouseLeftButtonUp/Down events, we now enable the MouseRightButtonUp/Down events for you to attach to and handle. This enables the developer to take control over what you’d like to do when those events occur. This can be from handling simple commands for gaming (i.e., a right click is a different interaction in the game than the left click) or as well for providing context-style menus for additional functionality within the application.

Sample Code:

   1: public partial class MainPage : UserControl

   2: {

   3:     public MainPage()

   4:     {

   5:         InitializeComponent();

6:

   7:         // wire up the event handlers for the event on a particular UIElement

   8:         ChangingRectangle.MouseRightButtonDown += new MouseButtonEventHandler(RectangleContextDown);

   9:         ChangingRectangle.MouseRightButtonUp += new MouseButtonEventHandler(RectangleContextUp);

  10:     }

11:

  12:     void RectangleContextUp(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs e)

  13:     {

  14:         // create custom context menu control and show it.

  15:         ColorChangeContextMenu contextMenu = new ColorChangeContextMenu(ChangingRectangle);

  16:         contextMenu.Show(e.GetPosition(LayoutRoot));

  17:     }

18:

  19:     void RectangleContextDown(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs e)

  20:     {

  21:         // handle the event so the default context menu is hidden

  22:         e.Handled = true;

  23:     }

  24: }

The sample above shows a snippet from implementing a context menu within the application. The result of the above code looks like this:

As you can see, the event handling is simple and the flexibility exists for you, the developer, to choose what you want to happen functionally and visually when the right-click events occur.

Video and Sample Code: Right-click Mouse Events

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Webcam and micrphone access

Need access to your user’s attached (or integrated) web camera and/or microphone? You got it. With a few simple lines of code you can request permission to your users to leverage their capture devices and then capture both the audio and video.

Sample code for requesting permission:

   1: // request user permission and display the capture

   2: if (CaptureDeviceConfiguration.AllowedDeviceAccess || CaptureDeviceConfiguration.RequestDeviceAccess())

   3: {

   4:     _captureSource.Start();

   5: }

Sample code for capturing the video:

   1: if (_captureSource != null)

   2: {

   3:     _captureSource.Stop(); // stop whatever device may be capturing

4:

   5:     // set the devices for the capture source

   6:     _captureSource.VideoCaptureDevice = (VideoCaptureDevice)VideoSources.SelectedItem;

   7:     _captureSource.AudioCaptureDevice = (AudioCaptureDevice)AudioSources.SelectedItem;

8:

   9:     // create the brush

  10:     VideoBrush vidBrush = new VideoBrush();

  11:     vidBrush.SetSource(_captureSource);

  12:     WebcamCapture.Fill = vidBrush; // paint the brush on the rectangle

13:

  14:     // request user permission and display the capture

  15:     if (CaptureDeviceConfiguration.AllowedDeviceAccess || CaptureDeviceConfiguration.RequestDeviceAccess())

  16:     {

  17:         _captureSource.Start();

  18:     }

  19: }

We also provide a very simple API for enabling “snapshot” images from the webcam:

   1: private void TakeSnapshot_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)

   2: {

   3:     if (_captureSource != null)

   4:     {

   5:         // capture the current frame and add it to our observable collection

   6:         _captureSource.AsyncCaptureImage((snapImage) =>

   7:             {

   8:                 _images.Add(snapImage);

   9:             });

  10:     }

  11: }

I am interested to see how these webcam/microphone features are implemented in the wild by developers!

Video and Sample Code: Webcam and Microphone Support

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Mouse wheel support

In previous versions of Silverlight, you had to rely on some helper classes from either DeepZoom or other sample sites to implement handling the mouse’s scroll wheel functionality on things like ListBox, etc. We’re now providing APIs for you to handle MouseWheel events. You can attach this event handler to other items as well (not just ListBox).

Sample Code:

   1: // wire up the event

   2: myRectangle.MouseWheel += new MouseWheelEventHandler(RectangleZoom);

3:

   4: void RectangleZoom(object sender, MouseWheelEventArgs e)

   5: {

   6:     // do something here like alter the scale

   7:     // MouseWheelEventArgs.Delta gives you an int

   8:     // of the amount changed in the scroll event

   9: }

So as you can see, you can easily wire-up the event handler for the MouseWheel event on a particular element and respond accordingly.

Video and Sample Code: Handling MouseWheel Events

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RichTextArea control

One of the requested features has been to provide an editable text control that enabled rich text editing using common rich text changes like bold, italics, different sizes, etc. Using the RichTextArea, you can now enable these types of editing areas in your application.

Here’s an example of implementing the RichTextArea control:

Video and Sample Code: RichTextArea Control

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ICommand support on ButtonBase and Hyperlink

To help support development patterns like the popular Model-View-ViewModel pattern, support for commanding infrastructures is now provided on ButtonBase and Hyperlink. These exposed properties, Command and CommandParameter enable binding from a View to a ViewModel approach without the need for click event handlers in code behind files. This helps aide the pattern of separation of concerns for the UI and code layers.

Sample Code:

1:

   2:     "ViewModelContext"/>

3:

   4: "{StaticResource ViewModelContext}" Name="LayoutRoot">

   5: "CostThresholdFilter"/>

6:

   7:     Command="{Binding FindMatchingProducts}"

   8:     CommandParameter="{Binding Path=Text, ElementName=CostThresholdFilter}"/>

In this example above, the XAML binds the Button to an event, FindMatchingProducts, from the DataContext (the “ViewModelContext” resource) as well as providing the parameter, CostThresholdFilter, from another UIElement on the page. For those implementing solutions using the MVVM pattern (or other similar patterns), this added support for ICommand is a welcome addition! Get those MVVM framework revisions working :-).

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Clipboard API

Prior to now, having a reliable method for providing contents that can be temporarily held in the machine’s “clipboard” memory area involved an IE-only solution or introducing other platforms into your Silverlight application.

With the addition of the Clipboard API, you can now have a cross-platform mechanism in Silverlight to provide this facility for you.

Sample Code:

   1: Clipboard.SetText("Some text to save in the clipboard area");

This sample above shows setting some simple text to the Clipboard which could then be pasted to the Silverlight application, or to other applications the user is using as this is now in the machine’s clipboard memory.

Video and Sample Code: Accessing the Global Clipboard Programmatically

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Host HTML content using WebBrowser control

When you are working in the web world, you likely are dealing with HTML content in some area. Especially if you are creating content-managed systems, sometimes that content is stored as HTML. Enabling hosting HTML content in Silverlight is now possible by providing a simple WebBrowser control that will enable you to provide string-based HTML contents or navigate to a fully interactive URL.

Sample Code (XAML):

   1: "MyBrowserControl" Width="800" Height="600" />

Sample Code (C#):

   1: MyBrowserControl.NavigateToString("Tim Heuer
");

As an example, here’s a Silverlight application hosting an embedded YouTube Flash video:

Hopefully this will be helpful in developing your Silverlight applications. Additionally, you can also use the HtmlBrush to fill elements using HTML content.

Video and Sample Code: Hosting HTML Content in Silverlight

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Elevated trust applications

One thing users have been asking for is to enable Silverlight out-of-browser (OOB) applications to have more privileges. You can now alter the OOB manifest to request more elevated permissions for your application. Using Visual Studio you can look at the project properties and enable the checkbox to add this request:

The result is that the OOB install dialog now looks a little different and warns the user of these elevated privileges:

See the next sections for things that you can do in OOB mode now while in a trusted application (aka elevated mode). It is important to note that this trusted application request still does not involve installing any additional runtime for the user…it is a part of the Silverlight 4 runtime – no additional download/framework would be required.

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Access local files on user’s machine

In order to read/write data to the user’s machine, you normally have to do it through a mechanism like OpenFileDialog (read) and SaveFileDialog (write). In Silverlight 4 you can now have direct local file access to the users’ "My” folders in their profile. These are things like MyDocuments, MyVideos, MyMusic, etc. On OSX platform these map to the same user-level profile folders like /users/timheuer/Videos.

You use the Environment namespace to get the path locations for the operation you are wishing to do.

Sample Code:

   1: private void EnumerateFiles(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)

   2: {

   3:     // create a collection to hold the file enumeration

   4:     List<string> videosInFolder = new List<string>();

5:

   6:     // using the file api to enumerate

   7:     // use the SpecialFolder API to get the users low trust "My Document" type folders

   8:     var videos = Directory.EnumerateFiles(Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.MyVideos));

9:

  10:     // enumerate the folder

  11:     foreach (var item in videos)

  12:     {

  13:         videosInFolder.Add(item);

  14:     }

15:

  16:     // bind the data

  17:     VideoFileListing.ItemsSource = videosInFolder;

  18: }

This feature requires a trusted application (elevated permissions).

Video and Sample Code: Local File Access

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COM interoperability

Have you had the need to interoperate with device peripherals that only expose a COM interface? What about having your Silverlight application talk with Office applications? Using the ComAutomationFactory API, you can now have your Silverlight application instantiate and interact with COM applications on the Windows client.

Sample Code (interacting with Excel):

   1: // create an instance of excel

   2: dynamic excel = ComAutomationFactory.CreateObject("Excel.Application");

3:

   4: excel.Visible = true;  // make it visible to the user.

5:

   6: // add a workbook to the instance

   7: dynamic workbook = excel.workbooks;

   8: workbook.Add();

9:

  10: dynamic sheet = excel.ActiveSheet; // get the active sheet

This feature requires a trusted application (elevated permissions). Notice that this is done via the dynamic keyword in C# 4.0. One thing to also note that in the tooling you will not get IntelliSense support for your COM created objects. Keep that documentation for that API handy!

Video and Sample Code: COM Object Access in Trusted Applications

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Notification (aka “toast”) API

Ever want your application to provide a notification mechanism to the user? This is often referred to as “toast” where a subtle notification temporarily displays in the user’s screen providing some information provided by the application. Perhaps one of the more common uses of this is in mail applications, like Outlook, where new mail notifications pop-up message notification windows near the system tray in Windows.

By using the NotificationWindow in Silverlight, you can provide a simple or customized notification mechanism for your application.

Sample Code:

   1: private void CustomNotificationButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)

   2: {

   3:     // create the nofitication window API

   4:     NotificationWindow notify = new NotificationWindow();

   5:     notify.Height = 74;

   6:     notify.Width = 329;

7:

   8:     // creating the content to be in the window

   9:     CustomNotification custom = new CustomNotification();

  10:     custom.Header = "Sample Header";

  11:     custom.Text = "Hey this is a better looking notification!";

  12:     custom.Width = notify.Width;

  13:     custom.Height = notify.Height;

14:

  15:     // set the window content

  16:     notify.Content = custom;

17:

  18:     // displaying the notification

  19:     notify.Show(4000);

  20: }

Here’s an example of a styled NotificationWindow content:

Notifications can only be done in Silverlight out-of-browser applications, and are simple to implement in few lines of code.

Video and Sample Code: Notification Window API

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Network authentication in web requests

At times, you may be interacting with 3rd party (or perhaps your own) services that require authentication information to be passed into the service call. This authentication information may be different than the logged-on user’s current information.

We have enabled providing NetworkCredential information via the ClientHttp networking stack that was introduced in Silverlight 3. For example, to pass a username/password (basic auth) to a service call using this method would be something like this:

   1: // NetworkCredential passing is available in ClientHttp networking stack

   2: WebRequest.RegisterPrefix("http://", System.Net.Browser.WebRequestCreator.ClientHttp);

3:

   4: WebClient myService = new WebClient();

   5: myService.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("someusername", "somepassword");

   6: myService.UseDefaultCredentials = false; // must be set to false if providing your own credentials

   7: myService.DownloadStringCompleted += new DownloadStringCompletedEventHandler(OnResultCompleted);

   8: myService.DownloadStringAsync(new Uri(http://somewebsite.com/authenticatedservice));

Note that we first register the prefix to use the ClientHttp networking stack. The second thing to note is that in WebClient, you still must specify UseDefaultCredentials=”false” even though you are providing new credentials. If you don’t, the default credentials will still be used.

Video and Sample Code: Network Authentication in Web Requests

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Cross-domain Networking changes

One of the more significant changes to cross-domain networking comes when you have a trusted application. For services that have a closed cross-domain policy file (via clientaccesspolicy.xml or crossdomain.xml), if your application is a trusted application (elevated permissions), then the requirement for a cross-domain policy file is no longer required.

This only applies to trusted applications.

Video and Sample Code: Network Cross-domain Request in Trusted Application

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Full keyboard access in full screen

If you are developing kiosk applications or other Silverlight applications that run in full-screen mode (IsFullScreen=”true”), you have noticed that only a limited set of keyboard input was enabled. In Silverlight 4 trusted applications, any application in full-screen mode can have full keyboard input for things like TextBox or other input controls.

This only applies to trusted applications.

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TextTrimming

The TextBlock control has a new property called TextTrimming that enables you to use the WordElipse trimming value. When the property is set, any text exceeding the visible limit of the control will be truncated and an ellipsis will be displayed to the user indicating more content.

Sample Code:

   1: <TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Left" VerticalAlignment="Top"

   2:     Text="The quick brown fox jumped over the tall white fence"

   3:     TextTrimming="WordEllipsis" Width="120" />

Sample Output:

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ViewBox control

As items in the Silverlight Toolkit mature in the codebase, these controls move into the core for Silverlight. In this release, ViewBox has reached that level and is now provided in the core. A ViewBox is a container control that aims to help constrain the contents of the ViewBox to a specific size or area and automatically handle scaling, etc.

Video and Sample Code: Using the ViewBox Control

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Bi-directional and complext text, Right-to-left support in controls

If you are writing an application that requires right-to-left (RTL) support in either text and/or controls, a new attribute for UIElement is now provided for you. The FlowDirection attribute can be applied to represent the element in RTL format.

Sample Code:

   1: "Center" VerticalAlignment="Center" x:Name="ControlSamples">

   2:     "LeftToRight" Foreground="White" Text="BiDi and RTL Sample" FontSize="20" Margin="20" />

   3:     "Wrap" Width="600" Height="150">

   4:     "24" Foreground="White" Text="قفز الثعلب البني السريع فوق الكلب الكسول." />

5:

6:

   7:             "قفز الثعلب البني السريع فوق الكلب الكسول." />

   8:             "Option 1" />

   9:             "Option 2" />

  10:             "Option 3" />

  11:             "Option 4" />

12:

13:

14:

This can be applied to a higher level in the visual tree and gets automatically applied to child levels.

Video and Sample Code: BiDi and Right-to-left Support

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Offline DRM for media playback

The next major wave of PlayReady innovation being built into Silverlight focuses on meeting the top media customer ask for the Silverlight DRM client – support for Offline scenarios. The three key business models targeted for this release of the Silverlight DRM client are Rental, Subscription, and Purchase. The Silverlight PlayReady ecosystem has several features that are valuable for these business models.

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H.264 protected content via PlayReady

PlayReady content protection for Silverlight and VC-1 encoded media has already proven to be a reliable and seamless experience to the user. With Silverlight 4, this content protection is extended to H.264 encoded media assets.

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Using Silverlight application as a drop target from your desktop

For some scenarios, you may have wanted to be able to drag a file from your desktop or file explorer on to your Silverlight application. By enabling the AllowDrop attribute on UIElement in this release, you can now accommodate those scenarios.

Sample Code:

   1: public MainPage()

   2: {

   3:     InitializeComponent();

   4:     Loaded += new RoutedEventHandler(MainPage_Loaded);

5:

   6:     // wire up the various Drop events

   7:     InstallButton.Drop += new DragEventHandler(InstallButton_Drop);

   8:     InstallButton.DragOver += new DragEventHandler(InstallButton_DragOver);

   9:     InstallButton.DragEnter += new DragEventHandler(InstallButton_DragEnter);

  10:     InstallButton.DragLeave += new DragEventHandler(InstallButton_DragLeave);

  11: }

12:

13:

  14: void InstallButton_Drop(object sender, DragEventArgs e)

  15: {

  16:     IDataObject foo = e.Data; // do something with data

  17: }

This will be most helpful in file upload applications.

Video and Sample Code: Using Silverlight as a Drop Target

^ back to top

IDataErrorInfo and asynchronous validation

Silverlight adds the IDataErrorInfo interface enables the reporting of validation errors that a user interface can bind to. When an entity implements this interface and the entity is involved in a binding operation, it invokes the indexer to validate the properties. The bound target properties in the UI will receive the error messages and display the validation states if the ValidatesOnDataErrors property is set to true.

IDataErrorInfo is limited to validating on a per property basis. However, Silverlight 4 also adds the INotifyDataErrorInfo interface that allows validation across properties of an entity. It also allows entity objects to enable notification of data errors in the UI. INotifyDataErrorInfo allows developers to provide custom, asynchronous validation support to access server-side validation logic. It exposes a HasErrors property to indicate if there are any errors and has a GetErrors method to retrieve the errors. The ErrorsChanged event is raised when new errors are added. If the binding property ValidatesOnNotifyDataErrors is set to true and the source object implements the interface, the binding engine in Silverlight will listen for the ErrorsChanged event.

Video and Sample Code: Data Validation

^ back to top

DependencyObject Binding

Silverlight introduces the ability to bind properties on a DependencyObject (DO) and not just on FrameworkElements. For example, in Silverlight you can bind the rotation angle of a RotateTransform to a Slider control.

Sample Code:

   1: <Rectangle Width="100" Height="100"

   2:         RenderTransformOrigin="0.5, 0.5" Background="#FF2B6092">

   3:     <Rectangle .RenderTransform>

   4:         <RotateTransform Angle="{Binding ElementName=slider, Path=Value}" />

   5:     Rectangle .RenderTransform>

   6: Rectangle >

   7: <Slider x:Name="slider" Height="20" Margin="0,225,0,55" Minimum="0"

   8:         Maximum="360" />

This is a highly requested data binding enhancement that should be useful to designers and developers.

^ back to top

StringFormat, TargetNullValue, FallbackValue

If you’ve ever done databinding in XAML using simple things like currency, dates, etc. then you have likely created a ValueConverter. While for simple things it is not difficult, it was often a tedious and repetitive task.

StringFormat is now available to you for a simpler solution for XAML databinding and formatting the output.

Sample Code:

   1: <TextBox Text="{Binding Path=PublishedDate, Mode=OneWay, StringFormat='MM-dd-yyyy'}"/>

Additionally, you can also specify Fallback and TargetNull values in your binding syntax:

   1: <TextBox Text="{Binding Path=SomeBindingValue, Mode=TwoWay, FallbackValue=N/A}" />

   2: <TextBox Text="{Binding Path=QuantityOnHand, Mode=TwoWay, TargetNullValue=0}" />

The FallbackValue displays a value when the binding operation is unsuccessful, where the TargetNullValue helps provide a value when the result of the binding value is NULL.

^ back to top

Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)

This release of Silverlight 4 brings support for the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) in the SDK. This is far to important of a topic (and too broad of a topic) to cover in a simple paragraph. Take a look at Glenn Block’s session at PDC (when available) for an in-depth look at this support for MEF in Silverlight.

^ back to top

DataGrid enhancements

DataGrid is a commonly used control for building line-of-business applications. Over time, the DataGrid has continually undergone improvement and this release is no different. Take a look at the video for the improvements in the DataGrid control.

Video and Sample Code: DataGrid Improvements

^ back to top

Fluid user interface support

In order to support more fluid user interface experiences, new states have been added to ItemsControl. These new states: BeforeLoaded, Loaded and Unloaded help animate the transition of contents between states in an ItemsControl and provide a more interactive and “fluid” experience to the user.

^ back to top

Implicit theming for controls

Silverlight 4 introduces new styling features that allow you to create a style as a resource that can be used implicitly by all elements of a target type. This allows application developers to customize the look across multiple instances of a control and modify the appearance of these control instances by changing the implicit style.

Sample Code:

   1: <UserControl.Resources>

   2:     <Style TargetType="Button">

   3:         <Setter Property="Foreground" Value="Red" />

   4:         <Setter Property="FontSize" Value="24" />

   5:     Style>

   6: UserControl.Resources>

Would result in any

33 Powerful Online Photo Editor Make You Life More Interesting

Maybe you are looking for the tools which can help you to edit photos and create some amazing and interesting effect. It is powerful but easy to use. Supply the photo, select the effect, save or print then you can get photo like Magazine cover or personalized dollar and so many… What is important [...]

“Voice Notes”: Record Voice Notes and Persist them in SQLite with AIR 2

As you probably already know, the Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 betas are now available on Adobe Labs. I’ve been playing with the Microphone API in AIR 2 while working on the booth here at Devoxx, and built this small sample application that allows you to record voice notes and store them in the [...]

links for 2009-11-17

WireLust » Blog Archive » AS3 port of JZLib AS3 port of JZLib – A project that uses FZip to decompress zip files in flash. Pretty nice stuff if you need that kind of thing. (tags: zip as3)

Dynamic Bitrate Streaming Demo

I'm finally finding a bit of time (at 10pm) to upload a little video demo that had been sitting on my hard drive for a couple of months. The premise was that I wanted to have a play with the new dynamic bitrate streaming feature in Flash Media Server so I grabbed a trailer from Apple's website, fired up Flash Media Encoder and encoded the District 9 HD clip into 3 bitrates to .f4v format: 400kbps (low bitrate), 800kbps (medium bitrate) and 1.5mbits (high bitrate).
Video quality was not my primary goal here (as you can probably see from the footage), instead I just wanted to see how hard or easy it is to get something like this up and running. Bottom line: not too difficult at all.
I've got a copy of FMS 3.5, a dedicated server (UK based) with a decent bandwidth allowance so I figured why not release this into a the wild?
One thing that you should pay attention to is the actual bitrate switching. If your connection speed is very stable then you may right-click the player and choose to manual switching - let me know if you can tell when the delivered bitrate changes, I bet you can't. And that's the beauty of this technology in a nutshell: seamless switching between bitrates. Pretty neat. Note you can also click the little HD icon/bandwidth bar to bring up a console with stats about the video and playback.

I'm sure some of you will ask for sources, but to be honest there aren't really any to share. I just grabbed the Open Video Player and configured it completely via flashvars, so I have not even got a FLA I could show you. As for the video settings I used - sorry but I can't honestly remember. All I recall is that I downsized the clip a bit so the resolution is not the same as in the original source footage, and no other fancy settings were used. As I said I simply encoded using the Flash Media Encoder.
Enjoy, and let me know what you think.

Using a CFF embedded font with a Halo List control in Flex 4

The following example shows how you can use a CFF/DefineFont4 embedded font with a Halo/MX List control in Flex 4 by setting the textFieldClass style to the new mx.core.UIFTETextField class. Full code after the jump. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>  <s:Application name="Halo_List_textFieldClass_test" xmlns:fx="http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009" xmlns:s="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark" [...]

Flash Player 10.1 hardware acceleration for video and graphics

Get tips to optimize performance of graphic and video content.

Multi-touch and gesture support on the Flash Platform

Take advantage of the multi-touch and gesture capabilities of Adobe Flash Player 10.1 beta and Adobe AIR 2 beta when building applications that interact with devices using touch interactions.

Flash Player 10.1 Beta

The beta of Flash Player 10.1 is available for download via labs.adobe.com. For this beta release, there is only a 32-bit plugin available for Linux (64-bit users will still need to use the previously released alpha version).

Bugs can be reported and tracked here.

Raising the bar… again: FP10.1 & AIR2 betas on Labs

Wohooow… It’s always great to wake up to new toys to play with! Flash Player 10.1 and AIR2.0 are now available on Adobe Labs. This is a very exciting release for Adobe. Not only is it the first time that we sim-ship Flash Player and AIR for all 3 major operating systems (Mac, Windows & Linux), [...]

AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 Betas now Available

Tonight we’ve released the AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 betas on Adobe Labs (direct download links for Flash Player and AIR). This is the first time we’ve simultaneously released the desktop (AIR) and browser (Flash Player) runtimes for all three platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux) at once, which is a great milestone for the Flash [...]

Setting a dynamically loaded background image fill on a Spark Border container in Flex 4

In a previous example, “Setting a background image fill on a Spark Border container in Flex 4″, we saw how you could set a background image fill on a Spark Border container in Flex 4 by setting the backgroundImage style to an embedded image. The following example shows how you can use a dynamically loaded image [...]

Setting a background image fill on a Spark Border container in Flex 4

The following example shows how you can set a background image fill on a Spark Border container in Flex 4 by setting the backgroundImage style. Full code after the jump. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>  <s:Application name="Spark_Border_backgroundImage_test" xmlns:fx="http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009" xmlns:s="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark" [...]

Handy little snippet: System.setClipboard()

Just so I don’t forget this: A little snippet to copy text from a textField to the clipboard. System.setClipboard(myTextFieldInstance.text); Buy me a coffee

Handy little snippet: System.setClipboard()

Just so I don’t forget this: A little snippet to copy text from a textField to the clipboard. System.setClipboard(myTextFieldInstance.text); Buy me a coffee

Funky TAX Calculator

A really long time ago, i created my ‘Funky TAX Calc’ and later on updated it. Now its better than ever What is it? Its a calculator that calculates the amount of tax for you. I was tired of doing all my invoices by hand so I created this. Whats new? Revamped U.I. You can [...]

Funky TAX Calculator

My FlashCampPhilly presentation: Some interesting libraries to consider for your next app

Last Saturday, Philadelphia was host to its first ever FlashCamp event. The event brought together some of the biggest names in Flash and Flex in the neighborhood and beyond (special kudos to Rob Hall for organizing the event from vision to a lot of very hard work). I did have one session at the event [...]

Results from AS3 Development Task Contest #1

I have just completed running all of the performance tests for the ActionScript 3 Development Task Contest #1. The result below are tentative until I have confirmed that the code follows the rules (and spirit) of the contest. If you see any issues with any of the top 5 submissions, please post them in the comments. [...]

Upcoming Titanium 0.8 Webcasts

Save the date for these upcoming webcasts, which will highlight new Titanium 0.8 features that you can use in your mobile and desktop apps. As always, there will be lots of demos and code to go around. Be sure to send the first link to friends who are new to Titanium. Note: audio will be [...]

Working with Layout when DataContexts are Involved

Hi everyone, When using Expression Blend, a common task you probably engage in is working with layout. Tasks I commonly associate with “working with layout” involve moving things around, rearranging the order of elements, ensuring everything flows when...(read more)

SproutCore Is Now on Gemcutter

SproutCore Is Now on Gemcutter:

Gemcutter is the new replacement for RubyForge. It is faster and more reliable, which is great if you just want to install SproutCore and not worry so much about the Ruby.

The sproutcore gem will be published on both Gemcutter and standard RubyGems so you don’t have to change anything.

If you want to try using the Gemcutter service, just follow the instructions on the Gemcutter home page to get going.

Dojo.beer("Antwerpen"), November 17th, Devoxx

Many thanks to Tom Mahieu who organized the next dojo.beer("Antwerpen"), tomorrow November 17th in Antwerpen during the Devoxx.
If you are near the conference, go and join this event and enjoy an evening full of JavaScript, Dojo and much more.

The event starts at 9pm, make sure you bring some of your Dojo work to you can show what you have done.
More information about the event can be found at the LinkedIn events page.

Looking forward to the very first dojo.beer() in Belgium!! Yiha

How to Format text in ComboBox and Set the Row Height in ActionScript

ComboBox is one of the most frequently used component. When I added it into a flash movie via actionscript, I found I can control the format of the text displayed within the box it self, but the textFormat has no effect on the text in the comboBox. Here is what I do. var dpDownMenu:ComboBox [...]

Refactoring Flex 4 applications

Learn how to refactor a simple Flex 4 drawing application with Flash Builder 4 beta.

links for 2009-11-15

SEOmoz | How to Ruin a Web Design – The Design Curve So true. (tags: webdesign web design articles blog tips)

Branding 101 for Developers part 3 of 4 and 4 of 4

Had this post in my draft for a while now but its here to tell you my last installments on branding are published. Check out part three and four. Tell me what you think in the comments. Buy me a coffee

Branding 101 for Developers part 3 of 4 and 4 of 4

Changing the native cursor in FP10

I just found out you can natively change the mouse cursor in Flash. This is handy if you want to have a different cursor when going over specific buttons or other DisplayObjects and don’t want to mess about with attaching clips to your mouse position. For documentation please go here Below is some quick code and an example:

Changing the native cursor in FP10

DevLearn ‘09 Recap – What an Awesome Conference!

I’ve just come home from DevLearn 09. DevLearn is the eLearning Guild’s annual developer conference held in San Jose. This is the second time I have gone there, with this year being the first time I have spoken at the event. It was fantastic fun, holding lots of revelations and surprises. Now, tired but happy, [...]

Where to Submit your RIA Exemplar Challenge Entry

Just a quick note that the email address to which you may submit your JavaFXpert RIA Exemplar Challenge entry has been created. It is:ria-exemplar-challenge [at] javafxpert.com Please visit the original post to see the description and rules for this challenge. Happy designing and developing! Judges Jim Weaver, Jasper Potts, Romain Guy and Stephen Chin

25 Useful Tutorials Show How to Convert PSD to HTML & CSS Step by Step

Now you have mastered the photoshop technique and designed a perfect PSD Files. Maybe you have a little trouble on how to convert you designs to high quality, cross-browser compatible valid XHTML/ CSS. PSD to HTML conversion is an important skill that has been growing in popularity over these years. Here we have listed [...]

Our DevLearn Presentation – Stop Building It From Scratch: Creating Reusable eLearning Components

I’ll have a full recap on the conference later, but for now, here is our presentation deck. Enjoy! Stop Building It From Scratch: Creating Reusable eLearning Components View more presentations from Chad Udell. Additionally, here is the handout we provided to the session attendees to help them determine if an API was right for them: Dev Learn Handout – [...]

Comet Support for IIS

WebSync is a new Comet implementation for IIS.

Approaches to Streaming

A two-part article on streaming based on the approaches taken at Caplin.

Alltop RSS

RIA Services templates not showing in Visual Studio 2010?

RIA Services templates not showing in Visual Studio 2010?

If you don’t see the WCF RIA Services Templates…

So, what happened? Why no fail log?!

But wait, RIA Services isn’t working in my Visual Studio 2008 environment now!

erlight Cream for November 22, 2009 - 2 -- #739

10 Steps to Debug Silverlight Out-of-Browser Applications without Attaching

Pythonic : The Good Programmer

Are Coders Nice?

Microsoft PDC09 and Silverlight Round-up

Video Content

Blog Content

Learning Resources

Microsoft PDC09 and Silverlight Round-up

Work Flow Optimizations for Short Development Cycle Team

Silverlight Cream for November 22, 2009 -- #738

Livecycle Data Services 3.0 is out

Speaking at 360 Flex in San Jose in March

Pythonic : The Good Programmer

Join the Cynergy Team!

A MX Framework for Flash/Flex & AIR – Razor Component Framework

Importing YouTube comments into your Wordpress blog

Debugging Silverlight Out-Of-Browser Applications

Right Way to Extract Degrafa SWC in Mac OS

LiveCycle Data Services (LCDS) 3 Released

Speaking at the Adobe DevSummit Chennai & Hyderabad

Extensibility Series – WPF & Silverlight Design-Time Code Sharing – Part I

Setting the Y-axis transform position on a Spark BitmapImage control in Flex 4

Adding a Sprite to the display list in Flex 4

LCDS 3.0 released

LCDS 3.0 has hit the streets

Pythonic : The Good Programmer

LiveCycle Data Services ES2 version 3 is now available

Star Trek: The Movie on USB Stick

Silverlight Cream for November 20, 2009 -- #737

The Official jQuery Podcast - Episode 2 - Richard D. Worth

Validation in Flex with Hamcrest-AS3

Elise Marie Deitte

Thoughts on Paul Graham’s post: “Apple’s Mistake”

Devoxx 09: День за номером 2 - сплошные эмоции

Reminiscing: most influential Internet moments of the decade

Sharing Blend Workspace Settings

Exploring Silverlight 4: Printing in Silverlight 4

Silverlight 4 Drag From Desktop

Silverlight Bridge - A Silverlight 4 File Manager

Silverlight 3 & 4 Library Sharing with .NET 4.0 Library or WPF

Wordpress plugin Permalinks Changer

Congreso de Software Libre 2008 - San Juan (Argentina)

Congreso de Software Libre 2008 - San Juan (Argentina)

Get Time Tracker Source Code in SproutCore

Silverlight Cream for November 19, 2009 - 2 -- #736

So long Engineering, hello User Experience

Applying Transformations in Your Applications

Google Closure: A New Way of Developing in JavaScript

Pythonic : The Good Programmer

Silverlight Cream for November 19, 2009 -- #735

Flex At Dreamforce 2009

Devoxx 09: Day 2 Fun

Installing ColdFusion 9 on Windows Server 2008 64bit

Geomurder

Using Google Analytics With AJAX

RIA Services: Jumpstarting RIA Development

Links for 2009-11-18

links for 2009-11-18

Silverlight 4 Debuts with Killer Demos at PDC09

WCF net.tcp protocol in Silverlight 4 Beta

Updated Flash Positions at Akamai, US Locations Added

Download Expression Blend Preview for .NET 4

The Pythonic Way

New Web Services Features in Silverlight 4 Beta

Silverlight 4 Beta – A guide to the new features

Download Silverlight 4 and tools

Silverlight 4 Resources

What’s new in Silverlight 4 – feature review

Summary and Feedback

33 Powerful Online Photo Editor Make You Life More Interesting

“Voice Notes”: Record Voice Notes and Persist them in SQLite with AIR 2

links for 2009-11-17

Dynamic Bitrate Streaming Demo