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silverlight - Google News
Published Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:06:00 GMT
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Published Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:36:33 GMT
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Published Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:31:42 GMT
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Published Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:55:27 GMT
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Published Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:26:19 GMT
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Published Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:06:45 GMT
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Published Wed, 27 Aug 2008 10:28:20 GMT
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Published Fri, 22 Aug 2008 21:09:05 GMT
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Published Fri, 22 Aug 2008 20:24:43 GMT
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Published Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:14:23 GMT
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Author: |
David Hanson |
Created: |
Wed, 02 Jan 2008 20:28:49 GMT |
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All things .net, wpf, XAML, C#, Workflow Foundation and many more. |
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WPF: Extending the Page & UserControl base classes |
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By David Hanson on
Mon, 25 Feb 2008 22:50:15 GMT
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When working with different .NET technologies it is often good practice to extend a number of bases classes for your own requirements. There are couple of benefits for doing this.
- The derived classes provide a layer of protection/abstraction from the core framework so that changes can be managed more effectively.
- The derived classes provide the ability for you to extend base behaviour and share that throughout your application.
- You can increase testability.
Generally, when starting a new development, I like to do some of this infrastructure work upfront, this saves me a lot of refactoring down the line when I realise I need to extend a base class. Following this approach is particularly useful when working with .NET UI technologies such as WinForms, ASP.NET and WPF which implement a number of base classes upon which the majority of UI components are based.
Below is an example of the standard WinForms model whereby each Form is derived from System.Windows.Forms.Form versus the model I implement when I intend to extend the base Form class.
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Windows.Forms;
namespace Extended.Base.Example
{
public class FormEx: Form
{
}
Our StandardForm implementation
using System;
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WPF Ribbonbar and more coming in 2008! |
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By David Hanson on
Thu, 21 Feb 2008 12:32:42 GMT
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Scott Gu has shed some light on some of the changes coming to WPF this year. Notably, Scott inidcates that there will be new contols for WPF, one of which is a new a "Ribbon" control. I have thought that for a while that Microsoft needed to get this control to market as the Office 2007 styling has become quite popular.
There are a number of vendors that do offer a WPF ribbon these are shown below.
Also it seems more graphic intensive features such as shadowing etc are being pushed onto the graphics hardware increasing performance. V.cool!
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Silverlight 2.0! Cant wait! |
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By David Hanson on
Mon, 18 Feb 2008 13:44:39 GMT
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I have just finished listening to Scott Gu's comments on Silverlight 2.0. From what he is saying 2.0 should finally offer the level of functionality to truly make Silverlight a compelling option.
Just to summarise....Silverlight 2.0 will get the following.
- Large suite of controls for developing LOB style applications
- Databinding support
- Styling and control templating
- Flowlayout support
- WCF Communications stack support
Good news!
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Alt.NET Seattle |
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By David Hanson on
Fri, 15 Feb 2008 10:24:49 GMT
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Having attended the Alt.net UK conference a few weeks ago I am disappointed by the fact that I cannot make the US event. There's going to be some great people there and the chance to discuss topics with them would have been great.
I am making sense of my decision using the following. 
- Its expensive to head over to the US just for a conference.
- I am getting married this year and need to save some money.
- The "Mrs" gets jealous and thinks its a holiday.
- There will be other events.
With that I rest my case.
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Random muttering: Visualising Test Coverage |
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By David Hanson on
Mon, 18 Feb 2008 19:56:16 GMT
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Ok, this one will is going to sound a little odd but bare with me. The other day I received a call from a friend who I used to work with. He’s now moved on to a new company and is responsible for managing a team of developers who have been focused on developing internal systems.
Upon starting with the company, the IT director had expressed his concerns that the development teams were generally gun ho about configuration management and that on many occasions critical systems had been down for extended periods. Basically, my friends role is to get a grip with these kind of issues and improve the overall quality and professionalism of the team.
He told me that the systems had been written in .net 1.1 and very little progress had been in terms of migrating them to 2.0 and definately no 3.5. Another key issue he had identified was that the application had absolutely no code coverage and therefore developers were unaware of what impact their changes could have to the behaviour of the applications. I think more to the point, as we discussed the environment, it became apparent that the majority of developers had very little understanding TDD and the benefits it can bring to your project.
Given the environment, my friend and I discussed a number of options that he could take forward in terms of educating the team in the ways of TDD and primarily some way of obtaining some level of test coverage of the application code. It was the later thread that sparked an interesting conversation about conceptualising a test and how you can get increase coverage from a small number of tests. He had explained that the architecture was fairly standard with a complex model that uses fine-grained interfaces for business entities wrapped up with a coarse-grained interface that is exposed to the UI.
Discussing the split between UI code and service/business code it seemed there was approximately 30/70 split. Therefore, we both felt the best place to start would be at the service contract layer. The service contract provides a single point of access into a complex system. This is a very key point, what it essentially means is that by using the service contract and multiple data scenarios we can cover large portions of code within the complex model. To help developers visualise this concept, we talked through a few analogies that would fit. Below are 3 visualisations of this.
Lightning Forks
Ants nest paths
Tree root system
As you can see, each of these images can be used to visualise the many branches of code that could possibly be taken from the top down entry point. Exploring these different paths takes a multitude of data scenarios. Each data scenario being passed into the top level entry point results in decisions being made on that data at each ...
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NHibernate and Tight Coupling |
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By David Hanson on
Thu, 07 Feb 2008 13:13:20 GMT
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So, I'm half way through the week and had a chance to reflect on all the information I absorbed at the UK Alt.net conference last weekend. There were 4 sessions I attended during the day and the 3rd session was titled “NHibernate, Linq and ORM”. Out of all the sessions I attended, this was probably the largest. The majority of attendees of this session were NHibernate advocates. For me, when it comes to NHibernate the jury is still out, the following article describes one of the reasons why.
Just to give you some background, I have been using NHibernate in-depth on a project for the last 9 months. I am no expert in the field but no novice either. Before using and ORM tool, I would write stored procedures in order to access crud functions of the database. Actually, “writing stored procedures” is overstretching, I would use codegen tools, run them over the database and plug my code into the resulting assembly. This was cool for a number of reasons, firstly the output assembly would show any changes or conflicts in code at compile time, and secondly it defined an explicit contract with my data store. I’m big on scaffolding in code (I know its not 100% TDD) but it provides a great way to visualise your overall code architecture.
When I started working on the project, I had very little exposure to ORM tools. I had read blog posts & articles but had never really cut my teeth on the technology. I would say that in the .net world, NHibernate is probably the no 1 ORM tool available. NHibernate is a port of the java implementation Hibernate which has been popular for many years.
The thinking behind ORM tools is that they “become the database” and that you really don’t need to waste time writing SQL anymore. I have to say, the moment I started reading about ORM tools I felt a little uneasy. SQL is a language I am very comfortable with, more to the point it has been specifically developed in order to query data in a mathematical and consistent way. The idea of not touching SQL and focusing purely in code seemed a little frightening to me. Trying to put my fears aside, I joined the project and jumped two feet into NHibernate.
Now during the last 9 months I can honestly say that the NHibernate learning curve can be a little erratic. Initially the model seems simple with a mapping file connecting your entities to the database. But as you continue, issues such as inheritance, polymorphism & lazy loading all start to impact your productivity. Now let me make it clear, all those issues can be solved with NHibernate in an elegant way, however finding that way takes time. One of the biggest problems I faced was an issue with entities that did not require to be saved. See the model below.
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Visual Studio Xmas tree settings |
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By David Hanson on
Fri, 08 Feb 2008 15:55:53 GMT
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Most developers spend the majority of their day with their head stuck inside visual studio, I’m no different, so as a result I like to customize my editor so that I am as comfortable as possible. Its in this area i’m a little old fashioned. I can’t stand the default white colour settings that visual studio offers, therefore I spend quite some time tuning them so they meet my needs. Below is an example my code windows in visual studio. I really like these settings and I feel it makes the code far more readable and items such as strings, numbers, operators, keywords and regions are all specifically coded.
Many of my colleagues have commented that my settings make my code window look like a Christmas tree. So if your feeling like you want to be a little festive then you can grab them here.
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Alt.Net UK Conference |
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By David Hanson on
Thu, 07 Feb 2008 10:57:52 GMT
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As some of you may know..... and some may not, I have been working with Conchango on a project for the last 9 months. The conchango guys are great to work with, so when they asked if I wanted to attend the Alt.Net conference this weekend (as they were hosting it), I was chuffed as originally I had thought I had missed the registrations.
The conference was broken up over two days. Friday was a meet and greet session in the evening, everyone gets the opportunity to propose a session that they would like covered on the Saturday. I was really impressed with the topics that were up for discussion, my two offerings were "Declarative Programming & Testability" and "Why use ORM".
After filling the whiteboard with post it notes, I was amazed to see just how many where were related to testing and general quality of development. Having defined a rough agenda for the Saturday, everyone headed off to the Bankside bar where we could get to know each other. I couldn't stay too long as getting home takes an hour and half and had been at work all day I was a little shattered.
Over the next week I will be updating you about the sessions I attended and some of the key conclusions I came to. Generally though, I thought the conference was a great success. I got to meet some fantastic people and validate my ideas against others... oh and play a little table football. Many thanks must go to Ian Cooper, Alan Dean and Ben Hall for great organisation.
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Visual Studio Ribbon Bar |
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By David Hanson on
Thu, 07 Feb 2008 10:56:59 GMT
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Last night I awoke around 3am in a state of panic. What you ask could be making me worry? The answer is simple.....
Visual Studio implementing the Ribbon Bar
Lucky for me it was just a dream..........it was wasn't it?
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Is BizTalk as a product dead? |
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By David Hanson on
Thu, 07 Feb 2008 10:56:34 GMT
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Last weekend I was at a wedding fair with my fiancée looking at the last remaining big things we need to get sorted for our wedding in August. While there, I ran into my brother in-law (to be) who is also getting married. As he works at my old company we naturally ended up talking shop. During this time the girls were browsed for fairy dust or something. (I think it’s fair to say we aren't really there by choice. :-))
So during our discussion he told me about his boss asking him to get some Microsoft certs and he had a choice between BizTalk and SharePoint. At the time I said get the SharePoint certs as they are far more likely to get you a job in the future as SharePoint is generally more popular in the enterprise. After that I moved on and forgot about things.... until today.
As I was going for a walk during my lunch time I started to think about Microsoft’s current strategy for BizTalk and how there seems to be this awkward situation now that windows workflow has arrived. Having worked with both WF and BizTalk it is clear where the difference are between the products. I have listed these below.
1.) BizTalk is the enterprise solution and can scale (albeit costly), workflow is not currently seen this way.
2.) BizTalk comes with a set of adaptors/accelerators for EAI, workflow has WCF, but custom formats such as EDI are not backed in.
3.) BizTalk provides sophisticated BAM. Some work has been carried out to allow Workflows to integrate with BizTalk’s BAM but this can be considered just an integration point with BizTalk.
4.) BizTalk comes with productivity tool like the mapper. XSLT is still a rare skill and the mapper is not available for WF.
5.) BizTalk has a sophisticated rules engine. Workflow does not.
6.) BizTalk comes with Health and Activity monitoring.
Although there are many additional enterprise features that BizTalk has offer over WF, there is one issue and that needs to be addressed. That is, that Microsoft now has two retail workflow/orchestration engines.
Having two workflow engine technologies is just not right, and Microsoft has recognised that. As a result WF is due to be integrated into future versions of the BizTalk product. However doing so raises a number of questions around the value of BizTalk as a product on its own right. If WF provides the core orchestrations (which is really the selling point of BizTalk) then surely the other features of BizTalk are just extension to WF?
Sa ...
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