2008 August 29 – Links for today

LINQ

Scott Mitchell on Easy LINQ Queries, Becoming A Better Developer, And Logging Help
Ken Getz’s The LINQ Enumerable Class, Part 2

Silverlight

Shawn Wildermuth’s Create Data-Centric web applications with Silverlight 2
John Papa’s Service-Driven Apps With Silverlight 2 And WCF
Dino Esposito on Building A Secure AJAX Service Layer (and Silverlight)

UX

Screen readers came into focus today so I downloaded a couple for testing with
NVDA and Thunder are the 2 I have initially gone for. I must confess I would have liked to try JAWS but the $895(US) kinda put me off a little. Any chance of a free developer version guys? We can only hope.
Oh, and a great article about accessible rich internet applications at Yahoo! to top it off too

WPF

Rudi Grobler’s blog today mentions a couple of links regarding WPF in LOB applications: Lawson Smart Office and a video as to why / how it works
A reminder of all the great video tutorials up on windowsclient.net
Glenn Block’s Patterns for building composite applications with WPF
Brian Noyes’ article on Understanding routed events and commands in WPF
Charles Petzoid on Dependency Properties And Notifications

SQL

Kent Tegels’ Model Your Data Hierarchies With SQL Server 2008

Other

User Group TV (ugtv) –

a monthly webcast dedicated to bringing informative programming to User Groups worldwide while providing Microsoft the ability to introduce up and coming informatino to user group communities as well as highlight our engagement with them

2008 August 27 – Links for today

Slow one today from the looks of it 🙂

Silverlight

Templating the Silverlight Calender Control

Modelling

The guys over at The Data Administration Newsletter are going through a series on The 10-Minute Data Model Review and have released part 1 and part 2 for consumption

Jonas Follesoe has a great article on Configuring Silverlight apps with the WCF config file

UI, WPF

Billy Hollis does a dnrtv UI show on Getting smart with WPF

2008 August 26 – Links for today

ASP.Net

Another wee article on URL re-writing. Note to self. Implement this in a couple of my sites!

Coding Standards

Design Patterns

An excellent VS.Net addin which checks for duplication of code! Well worth a looksee, definately view the video first. Be warned though, some of my colleagues have had issues with the installation rofcing them to reconfigure some of their other tools settings. Mine was fine though 🙂

jQuery

A really good reference on everything jQuery

Modelling

Enterprise Architect – an extremely well priced modelling tool

Silverlight

Mike Snow has another helpful tip for detecting Alt, Shift, Control, Windows and Apple keys with Left Mouse Down
A comprehensive collection of free and open source Silverlight Controls started by Page Brooks over at SilverlightContrib
Julia Lermans Web Drawing app

Tools

ReSharper articles

WPF

Vincent Sibal has a couple of nice entries I noticed today. The first on adding a preview tooltip to the scrollviewer in a wpf datagrid and the other about using stock and template columns in the WPF DataGrid

2008 August 25 – Links for today

ASP.NET

Determine Whether to Use a Web Site or a Web Application Project

Silverlight

Authentication in Silverlight using ASP.NET FormsAuthentication
A Silverlight Menu Control with a live preview
A Personal getting started guide by Jesse Liberty
A bunch of new labs are available for building the Margie’s Travel Silverlight sample application

WPF

Item Presentation Models for WPF
Firing generic events with EventAggregator

2008 August 22 – Links for today

Yeegads, this day has hurt my head. Much of today has been spent trying to establish how to kick off a WorkFlow event based on a database field changing without calling a webservice from SQL Server. Oh the joys.

On another note, today a colleague asked if I had had any experience with forms validation in WPF / XAML today. Up until now most of my work with this has been tinkering with no real world teeth cutting applications to work on and most of my focus is on Silverlight at the minute, going through a couple of books at the moment, and applying some of the lessons from some of the links I am posting here, which is going quite well. So anyway, I started to dig around for him to see what I could come up with. Essentially he wanted to know if there was anything similar to ASP.Net’s Page.IsValid() function in WPF and as near as I can figure, there was nothing. This seems to have changed somewhat with the introduction of IDataErrorInfo in 3.5. A most wonderful article from Karl Shifflett (his blog here) does a really good job of breaking it down. Along with some supurb articles by Josh Smith and Sacha Barber (blogs here and here respectively), and along with the following links, we should be well on our way to WPF / XAML validation enlightenment!!! (ahem).
So here goes:

WPF

The official MSDN SDK Page for Data Validation in 3.5
A Self Validating TextBox
Hows about some RegEx validation thrown in to the mix
Make way for the Validizor
The Paul Stovell article that just about everyone seems to refer back to (so why should I be any different)
More Business Object Validation bits from Karl
and Martin Bennedik’s Validation Application Block that many also refer to

And one which has noting to do with validation but some really nice graphics demos

WPF, Linq

Bindable Linq

WPF, TDD, Design Patterns

MVC for Unit Testing in WPF

ASP.Net Dynamic Data

A post 3.5 SP1 release article about Dynamic Data

CSS

Styling and functionality techniques

jQuery, ASP.Net

Effects in jQuery

jQuery & ASP.Net MVC

UX

Microsoft’s Inductive User Interface Guidelines – describes a new user interface model called inductive user interface (IUI). Also called inductive navigation, the IUI model suggests how to make software applications simpler by breaking features into screens or pages that are easy to explain and understand – oldie, but worth looking at to see if it still holds up.

2008 August 21 – Links for today

ASP.NET AJAX, jQuery

Article title says it all for this one – Easily build powerful client side ajax paging using jQuery

Coding Standards, Design Patterns

FXCop 1.36 released

CSS

Tony White puts out his 7 Principals of clean and optimised CSS code

Security

Microsoft have released their “Writing Secure Code” book as a free e-book for a limited time (until August 28, 2008) at their e-learning site. You need to have a Windows Live ID and enter the code 7234-N4E8-4995 when prompted.

Silverlight

Mike Snow once more with Sprite Animation. Note to self, could well be useful as a reference for a glowing stars effect.

WPF

Rudi Grobler exposes his slides and demos from his Tech Ed Building Data Driven Applications using Windows Presentation Foundation and Five Cool Things to Know and Use for Smart Client Development with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 presentations
Text clarity in WPF

explain the current issues with small text rendering, give insight as to how WPF text rendering works and provide some basic workarounds to optimize small text rendering quality in currently released WPF versions

2008 August 20 – Links for today

Ok, so after speaking with the missus, she thinks I should provide more than just links so that anyone who does stumble upon these will get some commentary as well. So… from this point forwards, and yes I do realise this is only day 2, I will include a least a basic breakdown of what the link is for and when I have investigated further, time and inclination allowing, I may even update it with a mini review although I hope most of the articles / pages that I link to should kind of speak for themselves

Silverlight

Dan Wahlin updates his SL articles – REALLY worth a looksee
A flyout stackpanel menu control
Vector based particle generator engine
An awesome tutorial on Messagebox functionality in SL2
Creating a Silverlight 2 Client Access Policy Socket Server Silverlight 2 provides built-in support for sockets which allows servers to push data to Silverlight clients :0 I knew this not! I wish to know more
Pushing Data to a Silverlight Client with a WCF Duplex Service – Part I – Erm guess this one continues on from pushing data to SL Client from server.
Pushing Data to a Silverlight Client with a WCF Duplex Service ? Part II – continues on from Part 1 above.
Mike Snow does it again with a stunning demo on creating a transparent draggable dialog with rounded corners. P.S This is a gorgeous effect and may well be kinda useful in line with the Messagebox functionality above.

Crikey, there is just soooo much Silverlight goodiness out there when you start digging.
windows Journal / scribble app in Silverlight
Slide show / gallery and yeah, I know it’s old, but it’s still pretty cool and with easy to follow instructions on how to set it all up

Standards

StyleCop updated for all those with code style and self documenting code fetishes disorders standards

UX

The Natual UI guys are doing some incredible stuff with multi touch Natural Interfaces, and at their community site
Stepping beyond the GUI with Windows surface / NUI tools
More examples of Surface type technology
Google’s Summer of code NUI projects
And more on gestural interfaces

WPF

Christopher Bennage adds Part 3 of his “Building a WPF Application” series

2008 August 19 – Links for today

PEX, TDD

http://research.microsoft.com/pex/
http://research.microsoft.com/pex/screencast.aspx
http://csdl2.computer.org/persagen/DLAbsToc.jsp?resourcePath=/dl/proceedings/&toc=comp/proceedings/ase/2006/2579/00/2579toc.xml&DOI=10.1109/ASE.2006.51
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/briankel/Pex-Automated-Exploratory-Testing-for-NET/
http://research.microsoft.com/pex/wiki/Reference%20Manual.html
http://research.microsoft.com/pex/articles/pextutorial.pdf
http://research.microsoft.com/pex/downloads.aspx

Silverlight, Surface

http://silverlight.interknowlogy.com/Videos/VitruView/default.html

Design Patterns

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Object_pattern
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/architecture/DotNetMVPFramework_Part1.aspx

SQL Optimization

http://wiki.lessthandot.com/index.php/SQL_Server_Programming_Hacks_-_100%2B_List#Query_Optimization