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NDA. Non-disclosure. Hush documents.
Not many people like them. In the technology world they are a necessary evil. Personally I don’t think that way. I think NDA’s are generally a good thing. It’s enabling legalese to let two parties participate in information exchange when they don’t want the rest of the world to know about them. NDA is a general term, of course, and the wording in any non-disclosure agreement is subject to the two parties involved. Heck it could say “We’re going to show you everything and you agree only to not talk about feature X…everything else is fair game.” ...
If you are working with Silverlight and data you most likely are going to leverage data binding at some point and run into some needs to format the data in the XAML. Luckily this can be done using value converters, which have been available for WPF since it’s inception as well. Let’s explore what I’m talking about using a common formatting need: dates. Consider this list box output binding: 1: <ListBox x:Name="FeedList">
2: <ListBox.ItemTemplate>
...
I’ve been working a lot more from my home office lately and it was getting increasingly challenging during this summer with both kids at home. Okay, let’s be honest, my wife was probably more the distraction :-). When we built our home 4 years ago we were both working from home and built an office specifically for the both of us. 3 dedicated power circuits to the room, hard-wired ethernet to that room x 4, wireless printing, split desks, tile floor, etc., etc. – everything I wanted in my office for convenience. Fast-forward 4 years. Add 2 kids. Add...
This week I had the privilege of attending and helping with some Silverlight in casual games presentations at the XNA Gamefest conference happening in Seattle. I say helping because the real game experts were there. Two Silverlight presentations were given. One by Bill Reiss/Joel Neubeck and the other by Mike Snow. Between the two sessions we covered concepts in Silverlight game development as well as a walk-through of starting out to create a simple game. I consider these guys to be the foremost experts on the topic given their experience in creating games like Dr. Popper, Stack Attack, Zero...
One of the things that makes Silverlight 2 great is the ability to create a very flexible framework application that others can use and can be embeddable with some dynamic properties. This is the method used in the SL2 Video Player to provide a completely dynamic player that is portable. How? Using the initParams property of the plugin. There are a few ways you can do this. I’ve just uploaded a video demonstrating three of them: Creating App Resources Passing into the root visual constructor...
In IIS7 you can do very simple testing for SSL related site hosting. It literally is like a 2 click process: Enter a name for the cert and done, you now have SSL on your box. Of course this is a self-issued/signed certificate so it will do you know good in the real world, but for most of the developer world it will work fine. There may be those times, however, where things may not be quite working right and you want to eliminate the self-signed cert form the equation to make sure it isn’t the issue....
Now that the Silverlight 2 Video Player is available from Codeplex, I wanted to make it a template for Expression Encoder. I’ll attempt to articulate the steps below. It’s actually pretty trivial. In fact in the current incarnation, you have to throw some extra stuff in there you may not need :-). Step 1 – Creating the template folder While I’ve covered this in previous posts and this is also well documented in the Encoder SDK documentation. First you’ll navigate to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Expression\Encoder 2\Templates\en and you’ll see the existing template folders. The folders do not represent...
After posting my sample implementation of accessing Amazon Simple Storage Solution (S3) via Silverlight, I reflected quickly and also chatted with some AWS engineers. Cross-domain Policy One thing that you should never do is just deploy a global clientaccesspolicy.xml file blindly. Often times in samples, we (I) do this. I need to be better about this guidance to be honest, so I’ll start here. As an example, for the S3 cross domain policy file, we really should add some additional attributes to it to make it more secure. Since we know it is a SOAP service, we can...
Gary Krakow has gone insane. I was going to say he’s an idiot, but I’ll leave that up to Cali. In his latest article on TheStreet.com, he writes (regarding the iPhone and battery life): In our tests, iPhone batteries really can't handle the extra drain of Microsoft Exchange mail. Blame it mostly on Microsoft. Microsoft's mobile email software is a pig. It always has been a battery hog. Everyone who has ever lived with a Microsoft Mobile phone knows that battery life stinks if you constantly "push" email to your device....
I’m a little pissed right now. Today I had a long drive downtown and on the way home I was planning on charging my iPhone (since battery life sucks bad) as well as listen to some of the tunes. I upgraded my car system last year to support iPod connectors and put a dock in my car attached to my OEM stereo. It was a project I was pretty proud I was able to do myself :-). You can read and see about it here and here. At the time I did this I was asked why I didn’t use...
Well now that the iPhone 3G (and actually more specifically the 2.0 software) are out, I promised myself I’d take another look, especially given that the claims of “for the Enterprise” were there (which really meant ‘we added ActiveSync’). I had been holding on to some gift cards to subsidize this gadget investigation and so alas, I am testing the iPhone 3G for my use.
Now because the device itself isn’t really much different (physically the changes are subtle) I’m not really commenting on the “iPhone” itself but rather on the claims of what 2.0 software brought to the device. The...
Two new videos were just posted on the Silverlight learning section. Embedding Custom Fonts in Silverlight 2 This video demonstrates the supported method for embedding your custom font files into your Silverlight applications and how you might use them in your application as well as how to provide fallback fonts for your application. OpenFileDialog and File Upload in Silverlight 2 Two for one. Check out the OpenFileDialog control and how you might even use it with UI-less Silverlight applications. Also, look at OpenFileDialog in conjunction with uploading files via Silverlight 2 applications. Make sure to...
I’ve got a thought lately and curious if I’m thinking crazy. You see, probably the most asked questions I get are around working with services within Silverlight. Although I’ve got some helpful (at least I think they’re helpful) posts on the subject: Silverlight, 404 and some tool help Updates for Beta 2 Working with Syndicated Data Calling WCF/ASMX Services Calling REST Services Cross-domain policy files ...
Among my other passions besides technology is food. Truth be told I only have cable television so I can get the Food network. Seriously…my TiVo proves it. My wife has always said that if I had my druthers I’d have my own restaurant and attempt to be a chef…and she’s probably right. In fact I’m going to add that to my rolling 5 year plan: own a dive shop in Cancun and have a BBQ cafe as a part of it. I recently was turned on to this site Get Your Grill On which is a blog of...
I had been a customer of T-Mobile for 10 years (through a few company changes) and only recently changed to AT&T about a year ago. As a general assertion, I’ve been happy. I like the 3G speeds and the coverage in my house is far better than T-Mobile, which was the ultimate driver as someone who works primarily from a home office.
That being said, I think I’m agreeing with what a friend said when the first iPhone launched. He said (paraphrasing of course) If the iPhone has any shortcomings it won’t be because of the device or Apple, it will...
I ran into an interesting situation last week…the desire to access some of my Amazon S3 services from within a Silverlight application.
Amazon Simple Storage Solution (S3) is a pay service provided Amazon for object storage ‘in the cloud.’ Although there is no UI tool provided by Amazon to navigate your account in S3, a SOAP and REST API are available for developers to integrate S3 information into their applications or other uses. You can view more information about Amazon S3 on their site.
What is S3?
Since S3 is a pretty flexible service, it can be used for many different things including...
I’m hoping this post will help explain a few things with regard to Silverlight detection scripts that some sites may be using. This is related to the silverlight.js Javascript file that was deployed with a lot of Silverlight 1.0 applications/sites and is also available as a part of the Silverlight 2 SDK tools.
What the heck is this Silverlight.js you speak of?
Simply put, Silverlight.js is a helper file which enables Web sites to create advanced Silverlight installation and instantiation experiences. It was a resource file that was initially shipped along side several templates and helper projects to aid in the detection...
I’m a fan of David Pogue. I like his podcast as he covers some cool gadgets and service in a bit of a no-nonsense way. I saw his site today and saw his ‘pledge’ followed by my eye glancing at what I consider ads. Evidently David doesn’t consider self promotion of goods and sale words like ‘half-price’ or product placement words advertising. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution By license.