Joe's Blog : .NET, Silverlight

New Blog

Joe — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 04:05:00 GMT

After many months of ignoring my blog, I finally decided to try and get it fixed. After the last Community Server upgrade something in the software was broken, and I was unable to use Windows Live Writer to blog. The upgrade was such a headache I loathed even the thought of spending more time trying to figure out the issue. This week I finally decided to break down and figure it out. However it appears to be too little too late. Being unable to find the required upgrades on their website, I contacted »telligentsystems tech support. This is what I received:

“Unfortunately, we no longer offer the free versions of our products, nor do we support them any longer. We will not be able to provide you the upgrades. Please contact our sales department if you wish to purchase a license.”

So, welcome to WordPress! I was pleasantly surprised with a simple and seamless install. After browsing through some of the available themes, I finally decided to create my own. I created this theme based on Bea Stollnitz’s wonderful looking blog. My goal is to eventually move my posts over, however for now my old blog will still be up and running. For now, lets create some new XAML posts!

UI Design Patterns Presentation Code + Slide Deck

Joe — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 04:24:00 GMT

Thank you to everyone who came to my presentation on UI Design patterns! It was great to see so many people interested in patterns for building user interfaces.

One user group member recorded the presentation on his laptop's webcam; I should have that available for download this weekend. The video is so-so, but the audio isn't too bad. Thanks Walt!

Links

Download Code & Slides - http://xamlcoder.com/joe/downloads/UIDesignPatterns2008.zip

Martin Fowler MVC
Martin Fowler MVP
ASP.NET MVP & Other Patterns
Karl Shifflett MVVM

Requirements

Visual Studio 2008 SP1
Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio
NUnit (included with code)
Rhino Mocks (included with code

There's a small "gotcha" with the Silverlight sample. The implemenation is slightly different than that of it's WPF counterpart. Silverlight Dependency properties do not automatically fire change notifications when their values have changed. Therefore if you want property change notifications your control (read DependencyObject which the Dependency Property is a member of) itself has to implement the INotifyPropertyChanged interface, or you can do what I've done here and set the DataContext of a container control.

Utah .NET User Group Presentation - UI Design Patterns

Joe — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 18:39:00 GMT

Join me this week at the Utah .NET User Group where I’ll be giving a presentation on UI Design Patterns.

UI Design Patterns

In this session we’ll explore three UI design patterns: Model View Controller (MVC), Model View Presenter (MVP), and Model View ViewModel (MVVM). We’ll prove that you can reuse the same logic to drive a WinForms, ASP.NET, WPF, or Silverlight "View". We’ll also see how using these patterns allow the bulk of your UI to be testable using testing frameworks such as NUnit and Rhino Mocks.

Date: Thursday, November 13th, 2008

Time: 6:00 PM

Place: Neumont University 3rd Floor (10701 South River Front Parkway, South Jordan)

See you there!

Composite Silverlight 2.0 Application Library Updated to RTW

Joe — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 17:46:00 GMT

I’ve updated my demo of the Composite Silverlight Library I built to work with Silverlight RTW. The P&P group has plans to ship the next version of the PRISM library (PRISM 2.0) that supports Silverlight, so I’ve started to use their bits instead of the ones that I built with this sample. Bellow is a screenshot of the conversion. As you can see, the default styles in Silverlight 2.0 have been changed, and the rendering is much better.

Download: CompositeSilverlightRTW.zip

Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (SP1) Released

Joe — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 15:19:00 GMT

Today Microsoft made Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (SP1) available for download. I was able to participate in a case study done on SP1 with Microsoft, Misys, and Veracity Solutions specifically using ADO.NET Data Services and the Entity Framework. You can read the full case study here, though here’s a small snippet:

“For more than a decade, Misys Healthcare Systems and Veracity Solutions have partnered to develop innovative applications that meet the needs of healthcare providers while improving the quality of patient care. To help medical staff reduce manual, paper-based processes, Misys Healthcare Systems and Veracity Solutions collaborated to create FreeNatal, a Web-based application that provides prenatal care providers with an easy-to-use, secure interface for managing patients’ records. Using Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2008 SP1 and the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, eight members from the Misys-Veracity team created the application. By taking advantage of these powerful technologies, the team increased development speed by 60 percent, enabling accelerated market delivery and further strengthening their respective positions in the healthcare informatics industry.”

FreeNatal “Face Sheet” view.

FreeNatal application architecture diagram.