DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by ajdotnet

RIA with Silverlight - The Business Perspective

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 12:09:52 GMT

If you are a corporate developer and like Silverlight, have you sold it to your management yet? If not, this post may give you some ideas. It looks into Silverlight not from the point of view of the developer, but that of business people, operations, and IT management - all usually subsumed under the term ROI.

HTML5 - The Limits

Sat, 12 Mar 2011 16:01:46 GMT

While the previous post in this series was about the chances and benefits of HTML5, there are also some exaggerated expectations that HTML5 cannot fulfill. Mainly this concerns the term "RIA", and the effect HTML5 will have in this area.

HTML5 - New Standard for Web Applications

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 18:23:21 GMT

A lot of people talk about HTML5, but there are also a lot of misconceptions - and misguided expectations - about HTML5. This post looks into what HTML5 really is, and what impact it might have.

Visual Studio Async CTP - An Analysis

Sat, 25 Dec 2010 16:07:41 GMT

During the last PDC Microsoft announced a next innovation: Async C# Reception within the community so far has been very positive. However, if this is really such a compelling feature, it should be quite easy to present a bunch of examples in which it pays off. Instead, what I found was a bunch of examples that made me wonder. Therefore I decided to put it to some Litmus tests.

Silverlight. What if?

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 16:50:14 GMT

Just imagine. What would happen if Microsoft actually had changed their strategy? What if Silverlight was really dead on the client, and "only" the development platform for WP7?

The Cost of String.Split

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 18:20:40 GMT

For a any given string as input String.Split returns something more than that as result - and on top of that it needs twice as much memory temporarily! The article dives into the details and offers a more efficient replacement.

CommunicationException: NotFound

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 14:27:29 GMT

CommunicationException: NotFound - that is the one exception that bugs every Silverlight developer sooner or later. There are two main issues: 1.It doesn't tell you anything and the slew of possible reasons makes it unnecessarily hard to diagnose the root cause. 2.It prevents legitimate handling of business errors in a WCF/SOAP conformant way.

A Pesky Little Silverlight Problem: The Presumptuous Scrollbar

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 12:00:22 GMT

I have my Silverlight application sitting on an .aspx page, occupying all real estate. I work a while. And suddenly there is this scrollbar appearing on the right side...

Silverlight and Integrated Authentication

Sun, 08 Aug 2010 09:50:51 GMT

Using integrated authentication with Silverlight should be simple. However the differences between Cassini (Visual Studio Web Development Server) and IIS in combination with some WCF configuration pitfalls cause a slew of pitfalls...

Replacing Events by Callbacks

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 12:11:39 GMT

My last post laid out how the employment of events has changed recently. This post gives a practical example to get the idea, and a better understanding of the consequences in code.

Employment of Events is changing...

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 13:32:25 GMT

Until recently I used to see events mainly from the event consumer side. Recently however this has been changing, as Silverlight, asynchrounous, and parallel processing introduced new features, demands, and patterns.

Some thoughts on Event-Based Components

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 17:19:51 GMT

This article shows Event-Based Components in contrast to typical Interface-Based Components as some kind of programming style to achieve high composability and testability without interfaces (and my thoughts about that).

The Future (of) UI

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 14:07:36 GMT

User interfaces are changing. Touch, multitouch, gestures (Minority Report like control), ... On the other hand all these predictions focus on the cool new stuff and ignore conventional demands.

Calling Amazon - Part 2

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 17:36:40 GMT

This second post implements the call to Amazon from the Silverlight client. It realizes a book search and addresses paging.

Calling Amazon - Part 1

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 16:24:31 GMT

Amazon is a good example for calling foreign services from Silverlight clients. This first post is about the architectural and infrastructure aspects.

Will Windows Azure succeed?

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 12:45:35 GMT

This posts describes why I'm afraid that Windows Azure could become a non-starter. It shows the "fixed" costs for a little sample application, takes competitors into account and describes why hobbyists matter. It takes a look into history and explains why Microsoft could learn from the fail of OS/2...

Understanding Validation in Silverlight

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 13:00:11 GMT

This article attempts to explain how validation in Silverlight works (beyond validation code in property setters). It draws some conclusions on what's possible and the ramifications. And it peeks at the changes with SL4.

Comparison: DbC and TDD - Part 3

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 15:12:09 GMT

Here is the third blog post in my little series on comparison of TDD and DbC which examines the key characteristics, commonalities and differences of DbC and TDD. The aspects of the current blog post are universality, expressiveness and checking correctness.

Silverlight Bits&Pieces: The First Steps with Visual State Manager

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 15:38:18 GMT

Visual State Manager is powerful, but getting started using it is quite a challenge. This post attempts to provide some advice to get over the initial hassles.

Silverlight Bits&Pieces: Derived Custom Controls

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 12:42:59 GMT

An introduction to building custom controls with their own default template.

Silverlight Bits&Pieces: Controls Basics

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 14:43:10 GMT

Yet another introduction to the Silverliht controls system: The combination of class, style, and template, glued together by dependency properties.

MVVM needs (re)definition

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 12:48:09 GMT

MVVM is the predominant pattern for Silverlinght applications. Yet it has a very fragile theoretical foundation: It is usually presented as special case of the Presentation Model Pattern, yet in practice the Supervising Controller Pattern is generally used with Silverlight -- and called MVVM anyway.

Silverlight Bits&Pieces - Part 9: A MessageBox replacement

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 17:46:45 GMT

Silverlight uses system message boxes, that are quite dull. This article employs Application Extension Services and a service provider approach to replace these message boxes with self-styled replacements -- without affecting the calling code.

Silverlight Bits&Pieces - Part 8: Application Extensions

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 09:28:03 GMT

This post takes Silverlig 3 "Application Extension Services" one step ahead and adds a service provider pattern.

Silverlight Bits&Pieces - Part 7: Application Permissions

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:06:15 GMT

Part 7 of the series looks into application permissions on the Silverlight client.