wintellect-blogs|Feb 23, 2010

Top 10 Silverlight Myths and the Facts to Bust Them

Silverlight is a client side plug-in based technology that has been in production since late 2007. I’ve been a web developer for well over a decade now, and recently have focused almost exclusively on Silverlight since version 3.0 was released. It astounds me how many people still resist Silverlight because they either don’t understand what…
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wintellect-blogs|Feb 18, 2010

A Fluent RSS Reader for Silverlight Part 2: NDepends on What you Need

NDepend is a product that analyzes large code bases and provides information about dependencies, complexity of code, best practices, and more. While designed to help manage large code bases, it also works well as a “reality check” as you are developing new projects. The latest release supports Silverlight and I’ll be using it to clean…
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wintellect-blogs|Feb 15, 2010

Windows Phone 7 Series (Formerly called Windows Mobile 7)

There has been a lot of buzz around Microsoft’s latest mobile phone operating system. I hope to be involved with this product as much as possible and will blog the detals that I can as they are made available. While the buzz has referred to this as “Windows Mobile 7” the platform has been officially…
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wintellect-blogs|Feb 10, 2010

Windows Communication Foundation Data Services (Astoria) – The Stuff They Should Have Told You Before You Started

Entity Framework derived types support inheritance and relationships, just as you’d expect from any Object Relational Mapper tool (ORM) Windows Communication Foundation Data Services (Astoria) throws an exception if your derived entities have relationships. That means if a Contact, a Lead, and a Doctor all inherit from a Person… and derived entities have different needs…
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wintellect-blogs|Feb 8, 2010

Silverlight 4’s New INavigationContentLoader Interface

One of the extensibility points added to the run-time in Silverlight 4 is the new INavigationContentLoader interface, which allows applications that use Silverlight’s navigation framework to take control of page loading. In Silverlight 3, navigation URIs had to target XAML files containing Silverlight pages. In Silverlight 4, a navigation URI can target anything—a class name,…
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wintellect-blogs|Feb 7, 2010

A Fluent RSS Reader for Silverlight Part 1: Proof of Concept

One of the most common examples to help learn a language or framework is an RSS Reader. This is an ideal mini-project because it includes networking, parsing XML, and binding to data elements such as lists. I wanted to provide an example that shows some more interesting solutions that are possible using C# in Silverlight.…
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wintellect-blogs|Feb 2, 2010

Using Moq with Silverlight for Advanced Unit Tests

Moq is a library that assists with running unit tests by providing easily mocked objects that implement interfaces and abstract classes. You can learn more about Moq on their website. There is a distribution for Silverlight, and in this post I’ll focus on some ways to use Moq for some more involved testing scenarios. Download…
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wintellect-blogs|Jan 30, 2010

Microsoft Online Services: Very Cool (and Cheap!)

This is not a technical post, but one that bumps into business. Yes, occasionally us software developers have to lift our heads up and see that there’s more to life than hacking code. This is especially true at small companies, such as Wintellect, were the effort to do business means you can’t just hide in…
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wintellect-blogs|Jan 29, 2010

Programmatically Accessing the Live Smooth Streaming API

Live Smooth Streaming is a Microsoft technology that allows you to take a live, encoded, incoming video stream and rebroadcast it using Smooth Streaming technology. This technology multicasts the video stream in segments of varying bandwidths. This can then be played with a Silverlight-based client like the built-in MediaElement or more advanced player like the…
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debugging-and-performace|Jan 24, 2010

Introduction to Debugging Silverlight Applications with WinDbg

I’ve had a few users ask me about finding memory leaks and understanding what happens with references in Silverlight. One very powerful tool to use when debugging Silverlight applications is the Windows Debugging Tools. You can download the 32-bit (x86) version side-by-side with the 64-bit (x64) version. Both WPF and Silverlight ship with an extension…
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wintellect-blogs|Jan 23, 2010

Simple Dialog Service in Silverlight

I noticed on the forums there are a lot of users not comfortable with asynchronous programming who struggle a bit in Silverlight with getting their arms around the concept of a dialog box. In other environments, you can simply shoot out a dialog, wait for the response, and continue. In Silverlight, of course, the action…
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wintellect-blogs|Jan 22, 2010

Amazing .NET Reference Visualizations

Half the battle when tracking down memory problems in a .NET application is seeing the reference chain so you can see why an object is still in use. You can use SOS and its !gcroot command to track them down, but that can bring new definitions to tedious. If there were only away to see…
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