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Developer Flotsam

Developer Flotsam - random stuff floating around?

WOW! What a rush!

Last week we launched the Silverlight Designer and Developer Network in Melbourne… the first user group in Australia (and Asia Pacific we hear) dedicated to Silverlight.

Attendance was fantastic with a touch over 90 people - scoffing up all 35 pizzas in good time. You can see some pics of the meet here.

We had two fantastic talks: Shane Morris from Microsoft spoke to us about user centric design, what that means and how it can help you. He then related this to Silverlight. Jonas Folleso from Capgemini then spoke about the latest and greatest Silverlight goodies, including very cool demos of Windows Live Mesh and the new Line of Business framework that previously had only been seen at PDC!

As promised we recorded the sessions and the site will be updated soon with some new features including streaming video (which turned out fantastic by the way).

Thanks goes to

A big thanks to Phil and Mashesh for all their help setting up the group and organising the night… without them the group would not have had a chance. Also a big thanks to Nadia and Bruce for their support and encouragement, and for helping out on the night.

We have a Winner!

A big congratulations to Dea

Fire collection updated events from a special Silverlight ItemsControlNovember 10

Fire collection updated events from a special Silverlight ItemsControl

For the last few months I’ve been working solely with the Model-View-ViewModel pattern developed by John Gossman of WPF fame (http://blogs.msdn.com/johngossman/archive/2005/10/08/478683.aspx). This pattern simply makes life easier The idea is that you create special ViewModels which map the model directly to the view… so anything the view needs to use it can get from it’s view model (the view never talks straight to the model).

The mapping is achieved using DataContext + Data Binding. You pass in the ViewModel as the DataContext and then bind to things as required. When changes are needed to the interface, you simply update the data source and binding does the rest. You can bind values from simple text and colors through to more advanced scenarios involving zoom levels and positioning.

Controls like the ItemsControl play a major role in making all this work together. ItemsControl is great because you can quickly and easily map a list of items to a template in XAML and then place them within a panel of your choice. You then bind the ItemsControl to an ObservableCollection meaning the interface will update when eve you change an item in the collection.

There is one issue with this however - what if you want to show an unload animation before the collection

Silverlight Animation Builder and ChainerNovember 1

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been mucking around with dynamic animations in Silverlight 2, and I found them quite tiring and verbose to write. I also found it time consuming to link them together in to a series - to run animation a, then b, then c and so on.

So I decided to do something about it, and this is the result.

High Quality (view in browser and download WMV).

I created a new set of classes collectively called the AnimationChainer. It allows you to quickly create animations using a convenient syntax. You will find creating animations with this set of classes is much nicer than the manual way. These animations can then be easily chained together to create more advanced behavior.

The basic overview of the AnimationChainer is:

Create groups of animations
Add groups to a main animation controller
Groups contain multiple animations
Animations can be delayed
Groups can run in serial or parallel mode (run all animations at once etc)
You can make the manager run all groups at once or again, serially (so run a group, which has 3 animations, then run the next group and so on)
You can fire callbacks on completion
After a manager has started animating, you can control behavior if you add more animations to it.
Cancel

Reduce your XAP file size in secondsOctober 30

Want to make your Silverlight XAP packages smaller? It couldn’t be easier!

Extract the XAP file (rename to .ZIP and use any extractor). Then… re-compress it using a good ZIP tool, like WinRAR.

Third party zippers are far more efficient than the one built in to Visual Studio.

In my trial, I got a 280k file down to 220k!

Dell m4400 Blue ScreenOctober 29

I recently purchased a Dell Precision m4400 notebook. All was well for a few weeks until out of the “blue” it started blue screening on boot. Safe mode reported some VMM start-up problem, which didn’t really mean much to me (I assumed it was Virtual Memory Manager).

So I did’t what all good developers do, cracked the s#!$% and formatted it. All was well for another few days. Then it started again - this time I was completely sure I hadn’t changed something.

This time, rather than jumping in and reformatting, I decided to try “investigation”.

Long story short, it was an option in the BIOS, on the Virtualistaion tab, “Enable Direct I/O” or something similar. I disabled this and no more bluey