Archive for December, 2008

Happy Holidays and have a great start to 2009

Posted in Uncategorized on December 18, 2008 by mga guy

To all a wondrous holiday season and prosperous and fulfilling new year.

My family and I are off for a couple of weeks to start the road trip that is visiting the families for the holiday season. As a result I am not sure how much online time there will be and I am truly anxious as to the size of unread articles upon my return. Either way, things are going to be quiet until we get back. Until the next one, have fun!

2008 December 17 – Links for today

Posted in ASP.Net, CSS, jQuery, Silverlight, Surface, TDD, WPF with tags , , , , , , on December 18, 2008 by mga guy

ASP.Net

Scott Hanselman posts a well articulated response to some of the community goings on in ASP.NET MVC Samples, Oxite, and Community

CSS

Dmitry Fadeyev on the Pressed Button State With CSS

Joren Rapin offers CSS Navigation Rollovers With Drop-downs

Sylvain Galineau  presents The CSS Corner: Alternate Style Sheets

jQuery

Jon Hobbs-Smith offers Improve your jQuery – 25 excellent tips

NetTuts spotlight the rather nifty jQuery Cheat Sheet

Other

The Microsoft SDL Threat Modeling Tool v3

Roger Johansson on how to Find inline CSS and JavaScript with Inline Code Finder

Shawn Wildermuth on ADO.NET Data Services for Multiple Databases?

Dirk Metzmacher presents 60 Beautiful Christmas Photoshop Tutorials 

Scott Koon highlights Wubi – Ubuntu Installer for Windows

Silverlight

Katrien De Graeve announces Unity for Silverlight by P&P group has been released

Jonathan van de Veen with his Adventures while building a Silverlight Enterprise application part #1

Page Brooks announces Silverlight Contrib 2008.0.0 – Alpha 3 Available!

Boyan Mihylov with Silverlight SEO

The Swiss MSDN team have release their thoughts on WPF vs. Silverlight for Intranet Line of Business apps

Koen Zwijstra released his Parts & States presentation

Karl Shifflett with details of a WPF Toolkit DatePicker Memory Leak Problem and Using WPF Binding StringFormat Property with Nullable Types

Rick Barraza writes (and subsequently revised by Adam Kinney) a tutorial with Silverlight Trigonometry – play with the demo in the middle of the article. It is stunning.

Timmy Kokke on Sending queryparameters to Silverlight

David Kelley on Scrubbing Timeline MediaElement

Derek Hatchard with an interesting sideline post on The Netbook Resolution Conundrum

Surface

Eric Havir highlights Surface in Day the Earth Stood Still and Spotted: Library with Microsoft Surface

TDD

Ivo Manolov with an Introduction to TestApi – Part1: Input Injection APIs

WPF

James Bacon with a Fix for invalid XAML error – the member is not recognized or accessible when using ControlTemplate

Dr Z on Building and Deploying WPF Applications Using the .NET Client Profile

Kurt Brockett with IdentityMine on Channel9 – XAML Guidelines, Part 1

2008 December 16 – Links for today

Posted in ASP.Net, Design Patterns, jQuery, Silverlight, Surface, TDD, UX with tags , , , , , on December 16, 2008 by mga guy

ASP.Net

Nick Berardi is Introducing the ASP.NET MVC (Part 1) – The Model-View-Controller Pattern

Scott Koon outlines some of the issues with Oxite in NEW ASP.NET MVC SAMPLE – OXITE – NEEDS SOME TLC

Karl Seguin lends his voice to those not most impressed by Oxite in Oxite – Oh Dear Lord Why?!

jQuery

Jeffrey Way continues with jQuery for Absolute Beginners: Day 10

Brian Reindel on how to Create an Amazon Books Widget with jQuery and XML  thought this one might be good for a Silverlight widget too 🙂

Other

Smashing Magazine with some stunning Light Blurs Brushes and Decoration Pack For Photoshop

Gotta love this one – Css Juice’s 13 Online Generators for Web 2.0 Design

W3C Web Standard Defines Accessibility for Next Generation Web

Jeff Attwood’s My Scaling Hero

Rick Strahl on Removing the .SVC Extension from WCF REST URLs

Glen Stansberry lists 10 Steps to Learn a New Coding Language Fast

Patterns & Practices

Davy Brion on The Importance Of Releasing Your Components Through Windsor

Rob Reynolds with The Real Reason to Use IoC/DI (Inversion of Control/Dependency Injection) and a Container Like Windsor

Microsoft’s Code Analysis Tool .NET (CAT.NET) v1 CTP – 32 bit – “a binary code analysis tool that helps identify common variants of certain prevailing vulnerabilities that can give rise to common attack vectors such as Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), SQL Injection and XPath Injection”

Silverlight

Mike Demopoulos spotlight’s Mark Dawson’s work with Silverlight Photosynth Viewer

Tim Anderson’s First steps with offline Silverlight and Live Framework

Bryant Likes on Silverlight Dependency Properties

Jeff Prosise on SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT ON XAMLREADER.LOAD

Jeff Wilcox on AutoCompleteBox without cycling navigation and Adding page up and down support to AutoCompleteBox

Dave Anson on Expanded access to Silverlight 2’s generic.xaml resources [SilverlightDefaultStyleBrowser updated for better compatibility!]

Michael Washington with a great wee Silverlight Dashboard implementation

Robby Ingebretsen on Free Typefaces for Your WPF of Silverlight Project

Michael Wolf on a Silverlight ConfigurationManager

Andy Beaulieu announces the release of the Physics Helper Beta 3

Surface

Eric Havir on Hotel 1000 and Microsoft Surface

UX

Jakob Nielson on Interaction Elasticity

Dmitry Fadeyev lists 10 Useful Techniques To Improve Your User Interface Designs

2008 December 15 – Links for today

Posted in jQuery, Silverlight, SQL, TDD, UX, WPF with tags , , , , , on December 15, 2008 by mga guy

jQuery

Speckyboy lists 37 Phenomenal jQuery Plugins and Demos for Developers

WebResourceDepot spotlights 25 Amazing JavaScript Games (Some Fun And Inspiration) and Free CSS Menus: Styled Menus

Germán Schuager on jQuery Autocomplete + JSON + ASP.NET MVC

Other

Noupe spotlights the Templatica launch

Thought this was a brilliant post from Davy Brion on Bridging The Gap Between Requirements And Code

Microsoft Anti-Cross Site Scripting Library V3.0 Beta

Silverlight

Jesse Liberty on Sorting a List

Nigel Sampson asks Why won’t Generic.xaml work?

Ning Zhang looks at a Design Time Features in Silverlight Toolkit

Mike Demopoulos spotlights Felix Wang’s work with the excellent Create Silverlight photo galleries from your Flickr account with Mooncake

Alexey Zakharov provides a Silverlight Tip: Splash screen issues.

Jon Galloway looks at Silverlight Crossdomain Access Workarounds

Mike Ormond looks at Silverlight No Selection ListBox and ViewBox

Jose Fajardo with What a beautiful, thou distracting, flash website! Let’s do it in Silverlight 🙂

Einar Ingebrigtsen on INotifyPropertyChanged revisited

Kirupa Chinnathambi posts a great tutorial on Easing in Silverlight and WPF

Kevin Dockx on Silverlight: Easily Reading Application Settings from Configuration File (web.config)

SQL

Kevin Simmons offers some advice on SQL Server 2008 Sparse Columns Identifying Columns For Conversion

TDD

Jeremy Miller with a comprehensive post on Design and Testability

UX

WebResourcesDepot spotlight MephoBox: Website Interface Collections

WPF

Beth Massi on Formatting Data in WPF Controls

András Pálinkás on MapperCommandBinding – Mapping commands in WPF

Marlon Grech on AttachedCommandBehavior V2 aka ACB

Charles Petzold on WPF Retained Graphics and the SubPropertiesDoNotAffectRender Flag

2008 December 12 – Links for today

Posted in CSS, Design Patterns, jQuery, Silverlight, SQL, TDD, WPF with tags , , , , , , on December 12, 2008 by mga guy

CSS

The All Web Design Blog lists 30+ CSS Cheat Sheets & Quick Reference Guides

jQuery

James Padolsey on Extending jQuery’s selector capabilities

Jeffrey Way continues with jQuery for Absolute Beginners: Day 9

Other

Kirk Evans on Understanding Tracking in Windows Workflow Foundation

Adrian Gondelle spotlights the Stunning 128 free icons by wefunction

Google have released a Browser Security Handbook

Patterns & Practices

Justin offers his C# Design Patterns – The Decorator Pattern

Bert Czernicki with WCF 101 – Understanding Transfer Security Visually

Michael Demopoulos on Thumbtack from Microsoft Live Labs – Collect, Organize, Share

Frank Kelly offers some advice on How to Motivate Developers – A three step framework

Dmitry offers some sage design advice with Take a Step Back to See the Big Picture

Jacob Gube presents 20 Excellent Websites for Learning Ajax

Silverlight

Shawn Oster on Working with Units of Measure in a NumericUpDown

Kevin Dockx with Silverlight: Scale from Sender-popup animation

David Anson with Great Silverlight charts are still just a click away [ChartBuilder sample and source code updated for Charting’s December 08 release]

Jeff Wilcox with Silverlight AutoCompleteBox: What’s new in the December release

Rick Strahl asks SilverLight ListBox Selections or what’s with SelectionChanged Events?

Jeff Handley on Custom Controls Everywhere – In XAML

SQL

Denis Gobo presents The Ten Most Asked SQL Server Questions And Their Answers

TDD

Scott Koon on Mocking IDataReader Using Rhino.Mocks 3.5

WPF

Peter van Ooijen reckons WPF = Code + Markup (Custom pushpins for DeepEarth)

Karl Shifflett announces his WPF M-V-VM Series Begins which links out to the WPF & Silverlight Line of Business UI Design Pattern Home Page

Ivan Towlson on Smart editors for the WPF Property Grid meet smart templates

2008 December 11 – Links for today

Posted in Silverlight, WPF with tags , on December 11, 2008 by mga guy

A fairly quiet one today

Other

WCF Test Harness available on CodePlex

Silverlight

David Kelley presents some Silverlight 2 Performance Best Practices

Robbe Morris with Silverlight Line Of Business Applications With Offline WPF Version

Stephen Dunlap looks at a Digg style Silverlight Pager Control

Russell Greenspan with How-To #11: Build a Silverlight ToolbarButton user control

Jerry Evans on (Much) Faster Silverlight Scrolling

Jeff Wilcox with a great article on Silverlight Charting: Creating rich data point tooltips

Jonathan van der Veen looks at Storing Silverlight DataGrid settings

WPF

Vincent Sibal on WPF TestApi and DataGrid Sample

Amit looks at Using Command Binding to Enhance Any WPF Control

2008 December 10 – Links for today

Posted in ASP.Net, CSS, jQuery, Silverlight, SQL, Surface, TDD, UX, WPF with tags , , , , , , , , on December 10, 2008 by mga guy

ASP.Net

Adam Kinney: Oh, Oxite, we love this open source .NET blog software

CSS

Stephen brings us the incredible CSS Stacked Bar Graphs

Smashing Magazine’s excellent list of 50 really useful CSS tools

Jacob Gube asks Six Questions: Eric Meyer on CSS3

jQuery

Adrian Gondelle on how to Create a smooth tabbed menu in jQuery

Other

Amirthalingam Prasanna looks at Offline data for occasionally connected applications

Kirk Evans on Understanding Persistence in Windows Workflow Foundation

Noupe presents the 50 Most Beautiful Icon Sets Created in 2008

Silverlight

Chris Anderson continues with Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Part 5

David Kelley gives some Architectural Best Practices for Silverlight 2.0

Rob Zelt looks at Silverlight 2 Controls – Styles and Templates

Jonas Follesø releases code and video of his Silverlight Designer and Developer Network Presentation

Ruurd Boeke announces the Silverlight controls toolkit december released – expect a slew of similar announcements, but this is the first I saw.

Jeff Wilcox announces Silverlight unit test framework – updated source and binaries now available and Announcing the availability of the Silverlight Toolkit December 2008 release and on a different note Reid Borsuk releases an MD5 implementation for Silverlight 2 in pure open source goodness

David Anson details Silverlight Charting gets a host of improvements [Silverlight Toolkit December 08 release now available!]

SQL

Rodney illustrates Keywords, Brackets, Identifiers and Ridiculous

Surface

Darren Announcing ToneGrid – Collaborative Music Creation for Microsoft Surface

TDD

Jeremy Miller on Design and Testability

UX

Glen Stansberry lists 10 Principles of the UI Design Masters

WPF

Radu Martin looks at the WPF content model and layout

Niamtu Dragos offers a XAML ComboBox Style

The guys at WindowsClient have released the WPF Application Quality Guide

2008 December 09 – Links for today

Posted in ASP.Net, Design Patterns, jQuery, Silverlight, WPF with tags , , , , on December 9, 2008 by mga guy

ASP.Net

Justin continues looking at Working With ASP.Net MVC Part 2 – The Model And The Repository Pattern

jQuery

Jeffrey Way continues with jQuery for Absolute Beginners: Day 8

Other

An absolute cracker from Jeffrey Zeldman on 20 signs you don’t want that web design project

Matt Gromes continues with My First Agile Project Part 14: Did We Need A Coach? Does Anyone?

Chris Heilmann on Liberated Accessibility at A-Tag in Vienna

Joe Stagner recommends we Download Oxite – the Code we use to run the MIX Web site

Patterns & Practices

Patrick Smacchia Advices on partitioning code through .NET assemblies

Rudi Grobler on how to make a existing application extendible using MEF

Silverlight

Jesse Liberty discusses A complex home for very some simple Toollkit examples

Robby Ingebretsen on Running Custom Code / Firing Custom Events from Within Storyboards

Mark Monster on Combining Silverlight and Google Chart API and Getting the NTLM Username into your Silverlight application

Nigel Sampson on Beginning a Silverlight Animation framework

Miguel de Icaza looks at some incredible bits when Moonlight goes 3D

David Kelley releases his DevTeach Conference Content – Best Practices, Hacking Silverlight, Controls

WPF

Evan Lang gives a D3DImage Overview

Lester follows up on Ivo’s announcement yesterday about the launch of a WPF Test Helper Library

2008 December 08 – Links for today

Posted in ASP.Net, Coding Standards, Design Patterns, jQuery, Silverlight, SQL, TDD with tags , , , , , , on December 8, 2008 by mga guy

Crikey, work has been a wee bit hectic recently with everything needing to be done before the festive season. As a result this has fallen behind a little. However the rest of the world didn’t 😐 There have been a lot of really good posts / articles over the last few days and I think I have finally managed to catch up. Phew! Anyway here goes with today’s links. Enjoy.

ASP.Net

Andrea Colaci looks at Executing Asynchronous Tasks in ASP.NET

Phil Haack discusses some Known Installation Issues With ASP.NET MVC

Suprotim Agarwal on Creating CollapsiblePanelExtender Functionality using ASP.NET and jQuery

Steve Smith gives an SEO Tip Move Hidden ASPNET Fields To Bottom of Page

Colin Angus Mackay on Data Visualization with the Virtual Earth ASP.NET Controls

Coding Standards

Howard van Rooijen announces a New StyleCop for R# release

jQuery

Jeffrey Way continues with jQuery for Absolute Beginners: Day 7

Other

Alex Villmann with How to Setup a Dedicated Web Server for Free

Eugenio Pace on Architecting Cloud Applications for the Enterprise – Part I – Introducing the Actors

Microsoft Research “Boku” preview

Martin Hinshelwood announces TFS Event Handler v1.3 released

Smashing Magazine’s 50 Excellent Digital Photography Photoshop Tutorials and Designing The Holy Search Box: Examples And Best Practices

Patterns & Practices

David Hill on UI Composition Patterns

Rudi Grobler on MEF: Taking extensibility to the next level

Karl Seguin picks up the SOLID baton with Get SOLID: Single Responsibility Principle

Pádraic Brady on The M in MVC: Why Models are Misunderstood and Unappreciated

Silverlight

Nick Kramer BeginAnimation for Silverlight 2

Ronnie Saurenmann on Error Logging in Silverlight 2 with IIS and the Isolated Storage

Kirupa Chinnathambi on Using Initialization Parameters in Silverlight

Martin Grayson announces BLACKLIGHT V2.0 (DEC08) IS HERE!

Sacha Barber on How To Bind To Generic Method In XAML

Mike Snow’s Tip: Animating Objects with DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames

Jesse Liberty has published a Creating Skinnable Custom Controls – Video and a Tutorial on multi-page applications posted and The Wrap Panel

Mike Ormond on his Adventures with the Silverlight Viewbox

Pete Brown on Pie Chart Styling in the Silverlight Toolkit – Cross-Slice Gradients

Matthias Shapiro and his Final-ish Silverlight Color Picker Utility and How To Give a Silverlight 2 Gadget a Transparent Background and How To Write a Custom Event in Silverlight and Tips for Creating a Silverlight 2 Gadget for Vista and Getting a MouseLeftButtonDown or MouseLeftButtonUp Event From Your TextBox

Boyan Nikolov with a HTML header + Silverlight plug-in scenario

Tim Heuer with Event (analytics) tracking in Silverlight and announces The Silverlight Application Corner

Azret Botash looks at Silverlight on a Desktop

Bert Czernicki informs that Silverlight enabled WCF Service Template is Bad Practice

Jeremiah Morrill gives a Silverlight MVVM Example

Josh Twist looks at Making the ScrollViewerThumbnail interactive

Brad Cunningham on Think outside the TextBox

Alex Golesh gives a Silverlight Tip: How to Inject and Execute JavaScript Function(s) on-the-fly from Silverlight

C Carper on Silverlight, PlayReady and BSkyB

Jordan Knight announces SDDN Site Updated – With Video!

Harsh Bardhan on Selecting and Displaying Images and Text Files from a Client Machine using Silverlight 2

Ofir Shemesh on Silverlight: GridSplitter with a collapse button (V2)

Jacek Ciereszko on how to Improve installation experience in Silverlight 2.0

Jeff Wilcox on Creating a testable WebClient for Silverlight unit testing

Michael Wolf looks at Silverlight and Encryption

Osore Watashi on the Custom Panel in Silverlight: Advanced Canvas

Chris Idzerda on PathGeometry Figures Property XAML Attribute Syntax in Silverlight

Bill Reiss offers A simple Silverlight game particle system and An improved Silverlight Sprite class

Page Brooks on Building a Resizable Silverlight Control

Bill Reiss on Embedding a F# class library in a Silverlight 2 Application

David Justice on Azure 1/10 + Facebook Connect 1/2 + Silverlight 2/5 = Fun

Chris Szurgot on building a Silverlight Gadget  (Version of Snowflake App)

SQL

David Bird lists some Free Tools for the SQL Server DBA Part 2

Karen Delaney on Using a Nonclustered Index to Avoid a Sort

TDD

Ivo Manalov announces TestApi v.0.1 Released

2008 December 03 – Links for today

Posted in ASP.Net, Design Patterns, jQuery, Silverlight, SQL, WPF with tags , , , , on December 4, 2008 by mga guy

ASP.Net

Suprotim Agarwal is Exploring the ASP.NET 3.5 Chart Controls

jQuery

Dave Bush on jQuery – Events

Other

Bob Familiar posts ARCast.TV – Steve Michelotti of e.imagination on High Performance Web Solutions

Janko Jovanovic announces his Best of the web – November 2008

Sarah Perez on how to Mount SkyDrive As A Virtual Drive In Windows

Drew Douglass posts his The 75 Most Enlightening Design Tutorials

Patterns & Practices

Justin Etheridge is still Addicted To MEF – Part 2

Silverlight

Josh Twist is Controllerizing the ScrollViewer Thumbnail

Page Brooks on Using ReSharper with Silverlight

Alex Golesh has some Quick Silverlight Tips: Control Reflection, Control Properties Data Binding, Window Title and Status Bar text (IE only)

Azret Botash has started a series on Silverlight Line of Business Applications: Part 1 – Getting Started

Tim Heuer pens some Silverlight install experience best practices

Keith Craig and System.Windows.MessageBox in Silverlight 2.0 RTW

Michael S. Scherotter publishes An Interview with the Developer of a Silverlight 2 Ribbon Interface

Matthias Shapiro’s Mac Style Button Tray In Silverlight

SQL

dineshasanka announces MapDotNet Enables Geospatial Data Visualization for Microsoft Single View Platform