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Virtual Earth Silverlight Control Part 2: Locate Me
It was a post by Nikhil Kothari that inspired me to create a method to report my current location on the Virtual Earth Silverlight control.http://www.nikhilk.net/Silverlight-Locate-Me.aspxWhile I was...
View ArticleGeneric Type Conversion
While working on the Virtual Earth map application, I discovered the need to parse data from a string of characters. So I searched the net and found this answer on stack overflow:...
View ArticleVirtual Earth Silverlight Control Part 3: Locating Best Buy Stores
I was searching the web for sources of Lat/Long data I could mash-up to in a Virtual Earth application and I ran across Best Buy ReMix. The API to collect store location information was easy to use and...
View ArticleBing Maps Silverlight Control Part 4: Drawing Circles To Scale
When you add scaled geometry to the Virtual Earth application you need to remember 2 things:1) The earth is not flat, so your math needs to account for the curvature of the earth.2) The Virtual Earth...
View ArticleVirtual Earth Rebranded to Bing Maps
We've been doing a series of posts on Silverlight 3 and Virtual Earth. Microsoft has recently rebranded Virtual Earth, renaming it "Bing Maps". Read about their thinking...
View ArticleBing Maps Silverlight Control Part 5: Calculating Distance
My dad was the first person to show me how to measure distances on a map using a pair of dividers and the scale printed on the map key. There is a much better way to do this using the Bing Maps...
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Learning RIA Services: It's Great to be a Silverlight Developer
I have built WCF integrations to SQL Server as part of building Silverlight applications. Having created the basic elements of a CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) using WCF (see Tim Heuer's blog on...
View ArticleThe Designer's Perspective: Working with Silverlight and Expression Blend
Deb: For too long now, I've been sitting on the sidelines, content to edit Steve's posts. But it's time to start representing the designer's viewpoint when it comes to using Silverlight 3 and...
View ArticleAutosizing of Grids, Canvasses and StackPanels
Deb: Moving from a relatively static environment, like Photoshop, to a dynamic environment like Silverlight/Blend, requires learning about autosizing and how visuals will behave when the browser is...
View ArticleConverting SketchFlow to Production
Deb: I was really excited to start working with Blend 3 with SketchFlow! I had seen videos from MIX 09 demoing SketchFlow and was disappointed it wasn't in the first release of Blend 3. Finally I was...
View ArticleM-V-VM Product Configuration
Deb and I have created many solutions that support sales or engineering efforts. Each application is a little different, driven by the unique aspects of the product we are selling/designing. We have...
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What I Learned from PDC - An Overview
I attended MIX07, PDC07, MIX08, PDC08, and MIX09 online, so I have been following the Microsoft technical narrative for the last 3 years. I attended PDC09 live. One of my goals was to organize the...
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What I Learned from PDC - Thick, Thin and Rich Clients
These three paradigms of application deployment try to optimize between application reach and application experience.Thick ClientsThick clients have easy access to client resources (file system, local...
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What I Learned from PDC - Service Oriented Architecture
Mapping Functionality into Abstract Software ComponentsEach of the presentations at PDC are designed to discuss some aspect of Microsoft’s packaged technology: ASP.NET, SQL Server, Silverlight, Entity...
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What I Learned from PDC - Client Technologies
Client TechnologiesThere are many different client side technologies in the Microsoft ecosystem, and each has evolved to meet niche markets and end user needs, including video game, business apps,...
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What I Learned from PDC - Domain Technologies
The domain is the brain or personality of the application and is usually built with the help of a Subject Matter Expert (SME).I like to think of the domain as having the real knowledge of the...
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What I Learned from PDC - Domain Technologies (continued)
Controller Model: All the commanding and navigation instructions are implemented at this level. Think of this layer as reacting to menu clicks, hyperlinks or changes of URL address. The controller is...
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What I Learned from PDC - Server Technologies
The server is a provider of a set of services to support the client and the domain. The server is hosted on a machine that could be anywhere on the internet or on the same machine as the client. There...
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What I Learned at PDC - .NET Platform and Extensions
In the late 90’s, the general consensus was that the Microsoft programming model was losing ground to JAVA. At that time, every product that Microsoft offered was COM(Component Object Model) based....
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What I Learned at PDC - .NET Platform and Extensions (continued)
Composition Manager (MEF) and Construction Manager (Prism)The Microsoft Patterns and Practices team have built software libraries to help large teams develop large applications. It turns out that these...
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What I Learned at PDC - Microsoft Tools
Visual Studio 2010 (VS210) is the latest version of the software development platform. It is also the first version to be written entirely in .NET managed code. It also uses MEF to manage extensibility...
View ArticleKnow Your Parents and Grandparents
In programming Silverlight I have come across situations where a control or framework element needs to access information on its parent. The code to get information off your direct parent is simple:...
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Another Way to Think about Code Reuse
Anyone who practices Object Oriented Programming has a lot of different ways to reuse code. The most common way is to use inheritance, but recently I have been reusing code in an unconventional way....
View ArticleNCAA Brackets in Silverlight
The developers at a company we were working with put out a challenge -- can you write software to pick the brackets in the NCAA basketball tournament? The answer is you can and 6 of us did. Our...
View ArticleGeneric Property Merge Using Reflection
I have found this generic merge method to be very useful. Before you cut and paste it into you Silverlight application, let me explain why I created it.publicvirtualbool MergeValues(object oSource,...
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