- Posted by mateid on June 15, 2007
The Calgary .Net user group is hosting an event on June 27 : SQL Querying Tips and Tricks presented by Richard Campbell. Registration starts at 5 PM at the Nexen Theatre.
- Posted by mateid on June 9, 2007
I've recently been involved with a competition hosted by TopCoder for Microsoft. Working with the CSF (Connected Service Framework), the objective was to develop a designer for the session manifest using AJAX or Silverlight (preferably Silverlight). I've been working with AJAX for some time now and I wanted to learn more about Silverlight.
I've developed the UI using Silverlight 1.0 Beta and AJAX for calling into webservices exposing my domain model. I was a little troubled at first by the poor support for keyboard input, and wasted a lot of time trying to develop a custom Silverlight textbox control. Finally I resorted to overlaying HTML controls over my canvas that worked quite well. However, there is no keyboard input when in full-screen mode, and worse the overlay HTML controls disappear since the Silverlight control is windowed in full-screen mode.
My goal was to develop a solid base of reusable controls that would make extending and adding new features to the application fairly easy. The buttons and message box are custom Silverlight controls. Unfortunately I did not manage to get all the required features in. The session participants are not displayed and I was pretty far from my goal of designing the routing table using drag and drop by the time the deadline rolled in.
I'll be posting more over the next few days about what I've learned while developing the custom controls, and as you will see it is fairly simple.
- Posted by mateid on May 27, 2007
Just finished watching the third installment Demystifying Design Patterns with Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo on dnrtv.com. This is really cool stuff and you get to see TDD and refactoring in action as part of the package. Excellent weekend entertainment!
Check out the series at dnrtv.com!
- Posted by mateid on May 22, 2007
An awesome nAnt tutorial series by J.P Boodhoo. Walks trough setting up the build file, automating tests, database setup, etc. Great stuff! Find it here:
http://www.jpboodhoo.com/blog/NAntStarterSeries.aspx
- Posted by mateid on May 21, 2007
As long as I am on the mixin' and matching of technologies, I wonder what would happened if I tried writing a Silverlight control adapter say for the menu ASP .Net control? The control adapter would spit out XAML for use on the Silverlight canvas. I've got to give that a try one of these days.
