July 2008 Entries
I just found out that I'll be speaking at the Richmond, VA Code Camp on October 4th, 2008 (Thanks to Lou Vega and Kevin Hazzard!). I'll probably be delivering my Silverlight Controls presentation once again. This should be a fun trip since I grew up in Virginia and I haven't been back in several years. Maybe I can make a stop in my hometown, South Boston. It looks like quite a few of us will be making the trek from South Carolina to speak, including Lou Vega, Chris Craft, Chris Eargle. See you there!
I work with several different computers on a daily basis and sometimes it can be a chore to keep up with multiple copies of files and remember which machine has a particular file. In particular, I have a few applications that are constantly out of sync with one another and manually keeping them in sync is next to impossible. With the release of Microsoft Live Mesh, I have been able to solve the problem (at least to some extent). I'll show you how. Password Managers It's a good idea to use different passwords for...
Controlling your Treadmill from Silverlight - Part 1
In the first part of this series, I demonstrated a Silverlight application that controls a treadmill. Today, we will go into a little more detail on using various audio signals (aka Chirps) which, in turn, instruct the treadmill to change settings. To keep things simple, we are going to just focus on the speed and incline aspect of the application in this post. In the next post, we will enhance the application by adding a feature that will allow you to create treadmill workouts.
Obtaining the Chirps
In order to...
Introduction If you are like me, you have a treadmill that sits in your garage collecting dust while you sit in front of your computer all day. Well, it's time to drag that 350-pound waste of metal within reach of your computer so you can wire-up some bleeding-edge technology to it! Yes, we are going to control your treadmill with Silverlight. Off to the side, you will see a picture of my treadmill (at least it looked that way when I bought it). This is the IMAGE 15.0Q Treadmill. It's your average treadmill with speed and incline...
I will be speaking at the following locations in August. I hope to see you there! Introduction to Reshaprer 4.0 Tuesday, August 12, 2008 Pee Dee Area .NET User Group (PDANUG) Florence, SC Learn about the new features in Resharper 4.0, the best productivity enhancement tool for Visual Studio. Creating Custom Templatable Controls in Silverlight Thursday, August 14, 2008 Greater Charleston .NET User Group (GCNUG) ...
The clock is ticking down and you only have 21 days left to submit your controls to the Silverlight Control Builder Contest! Even if you have already seen the prizes, you should go check them out again. We have added a ton of new prizes since the contest began at the beginning of July. In addition to giving away a control suite from almost every major Component Vendor, we are giving away gift-certificates to Amazon and NewEgg.
This should go without saying, but I've heard the question asked enough to warrant a blog post. Generally speaking, the developer would like to store some secret information in a Silverlight application and, at the same time, prevent someone from accessing that information. A secret, in this context, is anything that could be used to compromise the system or any information that should not be disclosed to unauthorized entities. Let's take a quick look at how Silverlight applications are packaged and deployed. When you build a Silverlight application, your code is compiled into one or more assemblies. ...
This is not an original idea, but someone had asked this question on the Silverlight Forums and I couldn't find an answer written with ASP.NET so I thought it would be nice to provide a complete example here on my site. Suppose you are generating a file in your Silverlight application and you would like to allow the user to save the file on their computer in the location of their choosing. Currently, there is no mechanism that allows for this in Silverlight. However, since Silverlight is hosted inside of a web browser, you can...
Some of you have asked for the source code from my presentation at the Columbia Developers Enterprise Guild so I have posted the code for download. Enjoy! Download: Source Code from Presentation
Since the initial announcement of the Silverlight Control Builder Contest, we've received a lot of attention and support from various vendors! I am happy to announce that we have added prizes from vendors like Telerik, Xceed, and the SilverlightShow to the contest prize purse. If you look on the prizes page, you can see that we are really giving away a lot of stuff! A special Thanks goes out to all the vendors for helping to make the contest...
I will be speaking about building Templatable Silverlight Controls at the Columbia Developers Enterprise Guild on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008.
Presentation Details
Creating reusable controls is an important aspect of productive software development. When you can supplement this reusability with customizability, you have the power to rapidly deliver seamless and compelling user experiences in your products. Silverlight offers both of these through the use of custom templatable controls. In this presentation, we will take a short journey through the process of building a custom control using Silverlight.
See you there!
Tuesday, July 8th, 2008, is the next meeting of the Pee Dee Area .NET User Group. Lou Vega will give us a brief intro to Windows Mobile development using SMS and some common mobile developer tools. Then we'll take a closer look at using the State and Notifications Broker and provide a real-world working example of using SNB to develop a call blocking program for your Windows Mobile phone. Focus will be Windows Mobile 6.x and using Visual Studio 2008 to developer mobile applications. Speaker Bio Lou Vega CSSI,...