wintellect-blogs|Apr 23, 2010

Yet Another MVVM Locator Pattern

Been working with a lot of customers using the MVVM pattern with MEF and the issue always comes up regarding how to marry views to view models. There have a been a few musings on this, from my own ViewModel locator pattern to the even more advanced (and elegant) locator proposed by John Papa et…
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Blogs|Apr 22, 2010

Transactions with MVVM

One objection to MVVM I often hear is that it doesn’t manage transactions well. I’m not talking about database transactions or “true atomic” transactions, but those short-lived transactions that happen in the UI. With data-binding, updates happen immediately. If I pass a validation, the field is updated. Many applications, however, don’t work this way. While…
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Blogs|Apr 20, 2010

Learning Windows Azure platform Resources

I’ve assembled a short list of training materials and utilities that are helpful in learning the Windows Azure platform Windows Azure SDK v1.1 samples http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=dba6a576-468d-4ef6-877e-b14e3c865d3a&displaylang=en Windows Azure Samples: C:Program FilesWindows Azure SDKv1.1Samples.zip Windows Azure platform AppFabric v1.0 Code Samples http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=39856A03-1490-4283-908F-C8BF0BFAD8A5&displaylang=en C:Program Files (x86)Windows Azure platform AppFabric SDKV1.0Samples Windows Azure Platform Training Kit http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=413e88f8-5966-4a83-b309-53b7b77edf78&displaylang=en Windows Azure…
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missing-export|Apr 15, 2010

AsyncEnumerator Survey for Microsoft

If you have never used my AsyncEnumerator class (which is part of my free Power Threading library) to simplify writing code that performs asynchronous operations, then you can ignore the rest of this blog posting. I have been working with Microsoft in an attempt to add my AsyncEnumerator (or something like it) into a future…
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Blogs|Apr 14, 2010

Converting Silverlight 3 to Silverlight 4

In this video, I wanted to share just how quick and easy it is to convert a Silverlight 3 project to Silverlight 4. The steps are basically as follows: Make sure you have the Silverlight 4 tools If you use Blend or any of the interactivity extensions (for triggers and behaviors) be sure to get…
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wintellect-blogs|Apr 12, 2010

VS 2010 Launches (and video of me!)

Unless your internet connection died today you no doubt heard that a new version of Visual Studio released to the public today. It’s a big release and one most of you will be upgrading to very shortly if you haven’t already. The fact that you can still target existing .NET 2.0 applications with the benefits…
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Blogs|Apr 6, 2010

Understanding Windows Azure platform AppFabric Access Control Service Resources

Before we can begin using the Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service (ACS) to decouple our applications from security concerns and enable claims-based identities we need to understand the Resources contained in the Service Namespace and what role they play in the authentication and authorization infrastructure. This brief blog entry is meant to provide you…
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Blogs|Apr 6, 2010

Ten Reasons to use the Managed Extensibility Framework

One question I’m commonly asked is, “Why do I need the Managed Extensibility Framework? How do I know when to use it?” In addition to that really being two questions, I’m not sure I can tell you the top ten reasons to use MEF or whether or not it is the right tool for you.…
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Blogs|Mar 30, 2010

Using WriteableBitmap to Simplify Animations with Clones

I’m going to deviate from my typical “line of business” blog posts to discuss a topic that comes up quite a bit with Silverlight: animations. I’ve had a few projects where it’s been necessary to use animations to transition between “screens” in the application. While I use the visual state manager as often as I…
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Blogs|Mar 29, 2010

Asynchronous Controllers in ASP.NET MVC 2

I’ve been working with version 2 of Microsoft’s ASP.NET MVC framework and have found a lot to like about it, particularly the new support for client-side validation based on data annotations. But the feature that excites me the most is support for asynchronous controllers and controller methods. Asynchronous pages have always been the secret to…
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missing-export|Mar 28, 2010

Code Signing Best Practices

In the past I’ve written about code signing and how it’s not as expensive or hard to do. Today I was searching up how to add a code signing certificate to a build machine’s Local Machine store and ran across a wonderful document I hadn’t seen before. It’s a complete discussion of all Code Signing…
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