Mike Taulty's Blog

Silverlight 4, MEF and the DeploymentCatalog ( again :-) )

mtaulty — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:31:21 GMT

The Silverlight 4 beta came with a version of MEF that had 3 catalogs – namely AssemblyCatalog, TypeCatalog and AggregateCatalog . They’re pretty easy to understand and I made a screencast on the topic here . The Silverlight 4 preview toolkit came with a PackageCatalog that is really useful as it works with another class Package to download separate XAP files and expose their exported components to MEF. The new MEF drop on codeplex has an evolution of those classes called the DeploymentCatalog. I wrote about it here and here . It’s really easy to use but when I encountered the PackageCatalog I felt like I wanted something “bigger” and wrote a bit of code back here that wrapped up the PackageCatalog into a component that knew how to download not just one additional package but a number of them. I wanted to do a similar thing with the DeploymentCatalog and so I put together a few simple classes to let me do that. Here’s a resource from an app.xaml file showing how the classes that I knocked up might be used; <Application...(read more)

Website Rehosting

mtaulty — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:04:50 GMT

Just a quick plea. I’ve re-hosted my website with a new hoster so if you spot problems with the site please let me know as I’ll have no doubt forgotten to switch something on or off. Thanks. Normal service should now resume :-)...(read more)

Silverlight 4, Experiment with Pluggable Navigation and a WCF Data Service

mtaulty — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 06:15:13 GMT

Warning – bit of a sketchy post this one so apply a pinch of salt, just an idea I’ve been toying with… One of the things that I find a bit mind boggling about Silverlight 4 is the new support for pluggable navigation. I wrote about it a little here but there are a better series of posts on it over here on David Poll’s excellent site . The basic idea is that Silverlight 3 introduced the the Frame control. You tell the Frame control ( via its Source property or via its Navigate method ) to navigate to a Uri and it will attempt to load content from that Uri and display it within the bounds of the Frame and maintain a navigation stack around the content that it is navigating to. In Silverlight 3, that content needed to point to a real control. That is – you caused the frame to navigate to a control derived from UserControl or, more likely, Page which has some extra navigation support on it and you had built that control into one of the assemblies in your XAP so it is “real” in the sense that it’s a compiled control...(read more)

Free Client Day at Microsoft TechDays UK – London, 15th April

mtaulty — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 01:56:28 GMT

I wanted to do a call out for the Client development day that we’re running as part of the UK TechDays event. This is a FREE event that’s running all day in London on the 15th April and it’s targeted at developers who are interested in hearing about client development with .NET Framework V4.0 and for Windows 7. The agenda on the website doesn’t quite do it justice in that we’ve managed to get some really fantastic speakers for this day; Specifically, there’s 2 full sessions of walking through features of .NET Framework V4.0 that apply to client development with Ingo Rammer of ThinkTecture; Ingo’s one of the very best tech speakers around and we’re thrilled to have him at this event. If you want to get a deeper dive into what’s present in .NET 4.0 that a Client developer can take advantage of, then this is the place to be. We’re equally lucky to have a session on Windows Presentation Foundation 4.0 delivered by Ian Griffiths who’s a WPF/Silverlight guru, MVP, consultant, developer, top speaker and also teaches...(read more)

MEF, Silverlight and the DeploymentCatalog

mtaulty — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 01:10:37 GMT

I posted about the DeploymentCatalog in the new MEF preview the other day and I got a question or two along the lines of “show me an actual example rather than snippets” and so I thought I’d walk through a simple example here. Let’s say that I want to build a Silverlight application that has a need for a photograph to be provided by a user and I don’t really care how this photograph is captured. It might be captured from the webcam, it might be captured from the file system or drag-drop or anything. I don’t mind, I just want to host a plugin that is happy to gather a photo from the user and then hand it to the rest of my code. I started to write this up as a blog post but I realised it would involve so many steps that it’d take a long time so I quickly recorded it as a screen capture. Note that this is one of the roughest screen captures I’ve ever made as I largely just pressed the “record” button and then made stuff up on the fly but I hope it still captures the essence of things. And here’s the code that I just...(read more)

Jesse Liberty at TechDays and on UK Tour

mtaulty — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 04:24:14 GMT

Jesse Liberty ( the Silverlight Geek ) is doing a UK and Ireland Tour talking about Silverlight and calling at; Bristol, London, Cambridge, Leeds, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Belfast and Dublin You can find details on Jesse’s blog . His visit to London is being brought under the banner of the TechDays event and he is being hosted by the Silverlight User Group – you can find the details of that on Michelle’s blog up here – it’ll form meeting 12 of the Silverlight User Group and will happen in the TechDays venue. Sign up – hope you see you there ( at the London venue )....(read more)

VS2010 and IntelliTrace

mtaulty — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 15:55:10 GMT

Some links that I made use of today in reading about the new IntelliTrace ( or “historical debugger” ) in Visual Studio 2010… Habib ’s articles; An in depth look at the Historical Debugger in Visual Studio 2010 (Part I) An in depth look at the Historical Debugger in Visual Studio 2010 (Part II) An in depth look at the Historical Debugger in Visual Studio 2010 (Part III) An in depth look at the Historical Debugger in Visual Studio 2010 (Part IV) An in depth look at the Historical Debugger in Visual Studio 2010 (Part V) Debugging LINQ to SQL queries using the Historical Debugger The anatomy of the Historical Debugger Navigation Bar (Navbar) How to debug an exception with the Visual Studio 2010 Historical Debugger John Robbins’ articles; VS 2010 Beta 2 IntelliTrace In-Depth First Look How Does VS2010 Historical Debugging Work?...(read more)

Microsoft UK TechDays – London – April 12th to 16th

mtaulty — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 11:23:25 GMT

Ooh, check out those graphics :-) We’re putting on a week of free ( free, free, free ) technical events in London in the week of April 12th to 16th. There are two events every day with one focused towards the “IT Professional” and the other focused towards the developer. There’s also fringe events organised by the community that I’m hoping will expand out in more detail ( like the main days themselves ) over the coming days/weeks. The developer days line up looks like this; I’ve had a small hand in planning some of those days and the current plan is that I’ll be speaking in slots on 3 of the days ( if the logistics don’t kill me first :-) ). The shape of the “Windows 7” day is down to me and whilst I’m probably not supposed to share the agenda, we’ve got some great speakers lined up for that day including Ian Griffiths and Ingo Rammer . Did I mention that it’s free? Click the image above to register....(read more)

Silverlight Bootcamp at MIX10

mtaulty — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 01:23:19 GMT

I’m doing a half-day “bootcamp” session with John Papa at MIX 10 and wanted to publicise that again here – if you’re already signed up for MIX then you can still revisit the pre-conference workshop registration and register for our session. If you’re not registered for MIX then registration is still open ( and reduced by $200 ) so that you can still grab a flight and come and get the detail on the Windows Phone developer story ( amongst many other things ) in person. Hope to see you there :-)...(read more)

New MEF Drop (Preview 9) on CodePlex!

mtaulty — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 01:11:05 GMT

I was pretty excited to see that there’s a new drop of MEF up on CodePlex – if you’re a reader here then you’ll know that MEF will ship with Silverlight 4 and with .NET Framework 4.0 ( it’s already in the beta/RC bits in both cases ) and there are versions on CodePlex targeting Silverlight 3 and .NET Framework V3.5 Sp1. The phrase that I like to use to describe MEF is that it is a; framework for composing applications out of a set of loosely coupled parts that are discovered and can evolve at run time that’s not an official “MEF team” definition – it’s just Mike’s view and there’s many places where MEF makes sense such as in building pluggable application architectures and also in implementing patterns like MVVM. If you’re looking to get started with MEF then here’s some quick resources; Glenn Block’s new MSDN Magazine Overview Article and Glenn’s Blog The Overview on CodePlex The Programming Guide on CodePlex My Channel 9 Videos My London Silverlight User Group Session Recording but if you’re already up...(read more)

MEF in the MSDN Magazine

mtaulty — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 04:57:48 GMT

...(read more)

Silverlight 4 – Implicit Styles and Themes

mtaulty — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 17:31:39 GMT

I hadn’t really thought properly about implicit styles in Silverlight 4 although I wrote a little about it back here and it’s something that WPF always had ( if I remember correctly ). The bit that I hadn’t really thought about was how you could set up a set of implicit styles for all your controls, throw them into separate resource dictionaries and then just load one style or the other at runtime and push it into the MergedDictionaries property of your application’s ResourceDictionary . It’s fairly obvious so I don’t think I’m stating anything new but I just hadn’t really thought about it. Also, of course, the Silverlight Toolkit already has this sort of theming support for both Silverlight 3 and 4. You might load those resource dictionaries from embedded XAML files in your assembly or XAP or it might be from loose XAML files that you load from the file system or from the web. As a simple example, below is an “app” which displays a few controls and then offers the chance to load one of 2 XAML files ( based on...(read more)

Silverlight 4 Beta Networking Screencasts

mtaulty — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 03:59:38 GMT

I’ve been putting together a session around networking in Silverlight and I wanted to get a little more re-use out of the work that I’d put into it so I thought I could quickly turn some of it into screencasts that go onto Channel 9. In Silverlight, applications are browser-initiated and ( usually ) have limited access to the local machine so being able to work on the network is key; whether that be ( as the picture suggests ) going to the site that the application came from ( the “site of origin” ) or to some other website or maybe even just on the intranet to talk to some local server. I’ve made a few screencasts. I’ve not yet decided how/when to publish them because I’ve found in the past that if I publish a lot in one go then people tend to watch the first few and then drop off so I’m trying a new tactic here of publishing them one at a time. You can find them all by clicking the image below; and I’ll add explicit links to the series below; Silverlight 4 Beta Networking. WebClient and XML . Silverlight 4 Beta...(read more)

WCF and netTCP Binding in Silverlight 4

mtaulty — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 06:45:58 GMT

Tomek has a fantastic post over here about the netTCP binding in Silverlight 4. I’m linking it so that I never lose it! :-)...(read more)

Silverlight & MEF Talk from the London Silverlight User Group

mtaulty — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 01:44:30 GMT

Just a quick plug for a talk I gave last week at the London Silverlight User Group on the Managed Extensibility Framework in Silverlight 4. Ian Smith kindly recorded this with great skill and speed and has the video available if you click the picture below; The Silverlight User Group is growing really quickly – I’d say about 100 people turned up on the night which is all the room could take so I guess bigger venues are going to be called for in the future and it’s great to see so many people building with Silverlight and keen to get out and chat to others about it. On the same evening, Johannes Kebeck also presented on the Bing Maps Control for Silverlight and you can find his talk via Ian’s link here as well so it’s “2 for the price of one”....(read more)