wintellect-blogs|Sep 12, 2011

My Windows 8 Build Predictions

Tomorrow is the start of the major event that has been hyped as heralding the most significant changes to Windows in the past 15 years (the last was when Windows 95 was announced). There has been a lot of speculation around what will happen tomorrow. Some people claim it will be the death of Silverlight…
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wintellect-blogs|Sep 11, 2011

More on TFS 2010 Build Numbers Inside Your Projects

The other day I wrote about how to incorporate build numbers into your .CSPROJ and .VCXPROJ files. In doing some more testing I found in some edge cases where the way I was getting the current build number by including Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.targets could interfere with the TFS Build. That’s not good so I fixed the problem…
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wintellect-blogs|Sep 10, 2011

Vermont Code Camp Presentation Materials

Many thanks to the organizers and attendees of this year’s Vermont Code Camp.   This event continues to set the bar for excellence, and a ton of credit is due to Julie Lerman, Rob Hale, and the rest of the volunteers who all clearly work quite hard to pull it all together. I have uploaded the…
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wintellect-blogs|Sep 9, 2011

Silverlight Enterprise Application Development

Silverlight is a popular platform for building enterprise applications because of its ease of delivery via the web and consistency across browsers and platforms. Most of the existing guidance is simple with introductory examples and basic content for building applications. Enterprise developers need a resource that provides a set of repeatable best practices and patterns…
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wintellect-blogs|Sep 8, 2011

The Cascade Game: From Silverlight to HTML5 (part 1)

A few years ago I played a game on Facebook that had a simple premise, but became quite addictive for a while.  It consisted of progressing levels of spheres in which the player was tasked with exploding by initiating a chain-reaction.  You had one shot.  Placement, timing, and luck determined how well you scored.  At…
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wintellect-blogs|Sep 6, 2011

Data Contracts and Behaviors over the Wire

One feature I employ often in Silverlight projects is the ability to share a model between the client and the server. When you expose a model using a WCF service, you can consume it on the Silverlight side and indicate you want to reuse types in a referenced assembly, rather than having the proxy types…
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wintellect-blogs|Sep 5, 2011

TFS 2010 Build Numbers & File Versions from Inside Your C# and C++ Projects

A while ago, I showed using MSBuild 4.0 to create build version files with the TFS build number so that build number could be included in your binaries. While you can use Jim Lamb’s excellent custom workflow activity, I liked doing the version numbers with MSBuild because you could have the same build for both…
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wintellect-blogs|Sep 1, 2011

Silverlight 5 RC – Using the Task Parallel Library (TPL)

One enhancement that quietly slipped into the Silverlight 5 RC is the inclusion of Tasks. This is not the full-blown Task Parallel Library (TPL) to my knowledge (as it lacks the Parallel class and extensions) but it does provide Task, its related factories, and the functionality to chain and monitor tasks. The purpose of the…
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wintellect-blogs|Sep 1, 2011

Silverlight 5 RC Released – Using PInvoke

It’s exciting to see the progress of Silverlight 5 toward the final release that has been slated towards the end of the year. Today, the Silverlight Team announced the release of the Silverlight 5 Release Candidate. While it does not yet have a go-live license, it integrates many new features that were not available with…
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wintellect-blogs|Aug 30, 2011

Properties or Fields?

There was a great conversation on Twitter today about properties and fields. The discussion was about whether it makes sense to expose variables as fields and not bother with the overhead of properties. After all, it’s quick and easy and you can always change it later, right? One participant suggested there could be design “assumptions…
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wintellect-blogs|Aug 29, 2011

Windows 7 Hang with FireWire 800 Drive Fix

Recently I bought a smoking fast external SSD enclosures from Other World Computing. My plan was to use the FireWire 800 connection to the drive so I can get the best portable speed possible. Alas, on all my machines as soon as I tried to do anything on the drive, Windows 7 hangs completely. That’s…
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wintellect-blogs|Aug 28, 2011

Boston Azure User Group Presentation Materials

Many thanks to the organizers and attendees of the Boston Azure User Group where I had the chance to speak this past week on Developing Cloud-Enabled Windows Phone Applications with Windows Azure.  I hope everyone who attended enjoyed the presentation as much as I enjoyed doing it.  I certainly appreciate everybody having stuck through considering…
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