Martin Parry's Community Server

Just a quick plea. I’ve re-hosted my website with a new hoster so if you spot problems with the site please let me know as I’ll have no doubt forgotten to switch something on or off. Thanks. Normal service should now resume :-)...(read more)

Warning – bit of a sketchy post this one so apply a pinch of salt, just an idea I’ve been toying with… One of the things that I find a bit mind boggling about Silverlight 4 is the new support for pluggable navigation. I wrote about it a little here but there are a better series of posts on it over here on David Poll’s excellent site . The basic idea is that Silverlight 3 introduced the the Frame control. You tell the Frame control ( via its Source property or via its Navigate method ) to navigat... [read more]

I wanted to do a call out for the Client development day that we’re running as part of the UK TechDays event. This is a FREE event that’s running all day in London on the 15th April and it’s targeted at developers who are interested in hearing about client development with .NET Framework V4.0 and for Windows 7. The agenda on the website doesn’t quite do it justice in that we’ve managed to get some really fantastic speakers for this day; Specifically, there’s 2 full sessions of walking through fe... [read more]

I posted about the DeploymentCatalog in the new MEF preview the other day and I got a question or two along the lines of “show me an actual example rather than snippets” and so I thought I’d walk through a simple example here. Let’s say that I want to build a Silverlight application that has a need for a photograph to be provided by a user and I don’t really care how this photograph is captured. It might be captured from the webcam, it might be captured from the file system or drag-drop or anyth... [read more]

Jesse Liberty ( the Silverlight Geek ) is doing a UK and Ireland Tour talking about Silverlight and calling at; Bristol, London, Cambridge, Leeds, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Belfast and Dublin You can find details on Jesse’s blog . His visit to London is being brought under the banner of the TechDays event and he is being hosted by the Silverlight User Group – you can find the details of that on Michelle’s blog up here – it’ll form meeting 12 of the Silverlight User Group and will happen in ... [read more]

Some links that I made use of today in reading about the new IntelliTrace ( or “historical debugger” ) in Visual Studio 2010… Habib ’s articles; An in depth look at the Historical Debugger in Visual Studio 2010 (Part I) An in depth look at the Historical Debugger in Visual Studio 2010 (Part II) An in depth look at the Historical Debugger in Visual Studio 2010 (Part III) An in depth look at the Historical Debugger in Visual Studio 2010 (Part IV) An in depth look at the Historical Debugger in Visu... [read more]

Ooh, check out those graphics :-) We’re putting on a week of free ( free, free, free ) technical events in London in the week of April 12th to 16th. There are two events every day with one focused towards the “IT Professional” and the other focused towards the developer. There’s also fringe events organised by the community that I’m hoping will expand out in more detail ( like the main days themselves ) over the coming days/weeks. The developer days line up looks like this; I’ve had a small hand... [read more]

I was pretty excited to see that there’s a new drop of MEF up on CodePlex – if you’re a reader here then you’ll know that MEF will ship with Silverlight 4 and with .NET Framework 4.0 ( it’s already in the beta/RC bits in both cases ) and there are versions on CodePlex targeting Silverlight 3 and .NET Framework V3.5 Sp1. The phrase that I like to use to describe MEF is that it is a; framework for composing applications out of a set of loosely coupled parts that are discovered and can evolve at ru... [read more]

I’m doing a half-day “bootcamp” session with John Papa at MIX 10 and wanted to publicise that again here – if you’re already signed up for MIX then you can still revisit the pre-conference workshop registration and register for our session. If you’re not registered for MIX then registration is still open ( and reduced by $200 ) so that you can still grab a flight and come and get the detail on the Windows Phone developer story ( amongst many other things ) in person. Hope to see you there :-)...... [read more]

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I hadn’t really thought properly about implicit styles in Silverlight 4 although I wrote a little about it back here and it’s something that WPF always had ( if I remember correctly ). The bit that I hadn’t really thought about was how you could set up a set of implicit styles for all your controls, throw them into separate resource dictionaries and then just load one style or the other at runtime and push it into the MergedDictionaries property of your application’s ResourceDictionary . It’s fa... [read more]

I’ve been putting together a session around networking in Silverlight and I wanted to get a little more re-use out of the work that I’d put into it so I thought I could quickly turn some of it into screencasts that go onto Channel 9. In Silverlight, applications are browser-initiated and ( usually ) have limited access to the local machine so being able to work on the network is key; whether that be ( as the picture suggests ) going to the site that the application came from ( the “site of origi... [read more]

Tomek has a fantastic post over here about the netTCP binding in Silverlight 4. I’m linking it so that I never lose it! :-)...(read more)

Just a quick plug for a talk I gave last week at the London Silverlight User Group on the Managed Extensibility Framework in Silverlight 4. Ian Smith kindly recorded this with great skill and speed and has the video available if you click the picture below; The Silverlight User Group is growing really quickly – I’d say about 100 people turned up on the night which is all the room could take so I guess bigger venues are going to be called for in the future and it’s great to see so many people bui... [read more]

I was reading Tim’s post over here with the same title as this one where he was suggesting that Microsoft may be underselling Visual Studio 2010. I suspect that the problem is that VS 2010 is huge and there’s a lot of material out there but some of it looks to be published in small fonts and isn’t perhaps as navigable or discoverable as it might be. I thought I’d highlight a few resources around VS 2010. In terms of What’s New in VS2010, there’s a decent MSDN topic here; What’s New in Visual Stu... [read more]

In my head, I see Silverlight 4 applications as either running; In Browser Out of Browser Out of Browser and Trusted Out of Browser and Trusted and in the presence of COM interop ( i.e. on Windows ) and you might write functionality that only works in certain of those contexts – e.g.; HTML display only works out of browser. You can only read the contents of “My Documents” when out of browser and elevated You can only run any COM interop code when in the presence of COM interop and I thought that... [read more]

Just a quick advert for something that I thought I’d already publicised but now I’m “not so sure” as I can’t find it on my site :-) I’ll be giving a talk about the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) in Silverlight down at the Silverlight User Group in London on Wednesday evening this week. This happens in the Microsoft office and you can find the details & registration by clicking the image below to jump over toe Mark’s blog which details the agenda including a session on Bing Maps from J... [read more]

I’m excited as it’s looking pretty likely that I’ll be able to get to my first ever MIX conference – MIX10 in March, Las Vegas. The current plan is that I’m going to pitch in and deliver the Silverlight Bootcamp;   with “Mr Silverlight TV” himself, John Papa . I’m looking forward to it – hope to catch you out at MIX if you’re heading out there. The way the agenda’s shaping up, I think I’ll be lucky in that my first MIX will hopefully be the best MIX so far :-)...(read more)

I’ve been to lots of conferences or meetings where people (Microsoft or not) are delivering technical sessions relating to Microsoft technology. I’ve also spoken at lots of those things as well. A recurring problem is getting feedback. Sometimes it’s a long paper-based form to fill in. Sometimes it’s a website or a terminal where you tick boxes to provide your view on the sessions you’ve seen. Sometimes it seems that the organiser has gone to great lengths to make it so difficult for you to prov... [read more]

There’s an ad over on MSN UK for the new “Mass Effect 2” game and it’s very distinctive as it’s done in Silverlight and has some really cool aspects to it such as making use of Smooth Streaming and DeepZoom. It’s not often ( well, ever ) that I’ve linked to an ad before or suggested that someone watch one but I think this is really worth a look at to see the sort of quality that you can get from Silverlight in an ad like this. It’s also worth going full screen with it and experimenting with the ... [read more]

I was reading Tim’s post over here on “Silverlight 4 with COM can do anything – on Windows” which referenced Justin’s amazingly detailed post with a bunch of COM interop examples from Silverlight 4 . A Silverlight 4 beta application that has been explicitly installed as trusted by the user can create COM objects if they have a registered ProgId and if they implement IDispatch. As anyone who’s been around Windows for a while and especially anyone who wrote scripting code like ASP pages will know,... [read more]

Back in the old days, I used to do a lot more in-person talks/sessions for developers and one of the things that myself and colleagues would discuss is whether a topic was well developed enough to warrant a; What Is? session or a; What’s New With? session. That is – was the technology new enough that people still needed to start from scratch or was it well enough advanced that you bore most people by explaining the core concepts yet again by doing what I’ve heard described as a; “ First the Eart... [read more]

I was looking for an example of how Silverlight content is drawn with vectors that I could use in a slide-deck and it occurred to me to look at Bing Maps . I think the Bing Maps beta is pretty stunning and I was searching my blog for where I’d made reference to the beta and I realised that I don’t think that I have made reference to it; I must have just dreamt it. Or, more likely, dropped it onto Twitter. Anyway, if you haven’t seen the Bing Maps beta with Silverlight & PhotoSynth and all th... [read more]

One of the things that seems hard-baked into MEF if you watch the Silverlight 4 and MEF screencasts that I’ve made is that MEF relies on attributes. It’s common to see an example such as this skeleton class; public class PluginManager { public PluginManager() { PartInitializer.SatisfyImports(this); } [ImportMany] public IEnumerable<IPlugin> Plugins { get; set; } } which is using an ImportMany attribute so if it happens to be composed with these 2 types below; [Export(typeof(IPlugin))] publ... [read more]

I was reviewing the traffic figures that my hoster ( http://www.webhost4life.com ) gives me for this blog site and I thought I’d share. This is how 2009 ended; So around ~30M hits to around ~15M pages and just under 1TB of data shifted across the network. Those are much bigger numbers than I’d have expected so a big “thanks!” to people who subscribe and read the feed and/or stumble across these pages from a web search. I’ve no idea how accurate the individual numbers are as I’ve never looked ver... [read more]