April 2008 Entries
I'll be speaking at PDANUG on May 13th, 2008 on creating Templatable Silverlight Controls. Go register now! Creating reusable controls is an important aspect of productive software development. When you can supplement this reusability with customizability, you have the power to rapidly deliver seamless and compelling user experiences in your products. Silverlight offers both of these through the use of custom templatable controls. In this presentation, we will take a short journey through the process of building a custom control using Silverlight. See you there!
The development experience in Visual Studio 2008 beats the experience in any previous release hands-down. However, the addition of JavaScript debugging has caused me a slight issue. While debugging solutions that contain JavaScript, you may have noticed that a additional tree node that pops up in the Solution Explorer called Script Documents. This node represents all of the current JavaScript sources for the current request.
This is a great feature, but if you have lots of JavaScript, it can really damage your productivity, especially if you aren't working on the JavaScript code at the moment. You see, if you...
A question was recently asked in the forums about logging client-side Silverlight exceptions on the server-side? Of course, my first guess would be to create code that would trap exceptions and call out to a web service for logging purposes. But why do that when someone has already done all the work for you? Daniel Vaughan has developed Clog (Client Logging) a customizable logging system for Silverlight. You can read all of the details about Clog in his article on CodeProject. Enjoy!
For those of you that follow my blog and care enough to follow me on Twitter, my user name is pbrooks. I've been trying my best to post at regular intervals. See you on Twitter!
There seem to be a lot of strong opinions about the absence of Synchronous Web Service calls in the Beta 1 release of Silverlight 2, so I thought I would try and condense the points brought forward by the two opposing forces into an easily digestible format. Camp 1: Synchronous Web Service calls are missing and rightly so! Synchronous calls will block the web browser's UI thread, rendering the browser unresponsive. Microsoft did this to prevent developers from....<<insert self-mutilation saying here>>. Microsoft did this to protect Silverlight platform from...
It's 4:30am and I'm on my way to the Heroes Happen Here event in Charlotte, NC. Normally PDANUG is held on the 2nd Tuesday but with the scheduling conflict, we have moved the April PDANUG event to Tuesday, April 29th, 2008. Chris Reeder will kick of the event with a presentation on a few new SQL Server 2008 features, Chris Craft will follow with an introduction to a few IIS7 features, and I will be presenting on the new features of Visual Studio 2008. It should be a great event. Please be sure to register from the site so we...
In Silverlight, it seems that most of the time, you need to reach into the hosting page from the managed world, but what if you want to reach into the managed world from the hosting page? In other words, what if you want to subscribe to a managed event from JavaScript? Let's look at an example. Suppose we have a button in our Silverlight application for which we want our web page to respond. XAML: 1: <Button x:Name="Button1" Height="35" Width="120" Content="Do...