Step Into The 'Light

MVVM article

Jeff Brumley — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 19:30:11 +0000

At long last, I might be actually building my first Silverlight app – although it’s likely to just be used to host a PivotViewer control. (Which is incredibly cool.)

Anyway, I was recently passed a great article on using MVVM for Silverlight – enjoy!

Tutorialization

Jeff Brumley — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 23:18:20 +0000

I got a tip a few weeks ago to check out some tutorials on Expression Blend, and I said that I’d review them when I got through them. Here are my thoughts:

They’re definitely focused on Blend itself, and not on Silverlight as a technology. Doesn’t touch XAML or C# one bit. This is not necessarily a negative. If I were to work in a team with a Blend designer and a C# dev, these would be fantastic for the Blend designer to go through. If you’re looking to learn front-to-back Silverlight development, this is mostly about the front part. The cool thing is how much you can do with Blend- it’s really a fantastic tool.
Some of the tutorials seem to be out of date, like perhaps they wrote these for a beta or RC version and things changed in the meantime. For example, one tutorial mentioned changing a TextBox’s LineHeight property- unfortunately, apparently you can only do that in WPF, not Silverlight. Another said to add an Image Control…which doesn’t exist. You can drag in an image from your Media collection, but it’s not under the Controls collection. I’m not sure if this is a functionality change or merely an unclear instruction.
The accompanying ZIP files for a number of the tutorials return 404 errors. For some things I was just able to make my own up, but for 2 or 3 of the tutorials it would take longer to create the object files than it would be to do the entire tutorial. I’ve contacted their support to see if those can come back online, and I’ll update here when I hear back from them. UPDATE: These 404 errors have now been fixed! (Thanks Hans!)

All that said, I just spent about 2 hours going through a handful of these, and feel pretty confident that I could figure out Blend to a usable degree now, far more than if I’d just faked my way through it. I’m impressed with this software- I will be happy to use it!

One last note- thanks to Eric Veal, I just got turned on to ProjectLocker, a free SVN hosting provider. This will save me from having to set up another SVN server here at the house, and I’ll be able to get there over the web without opening up my home network. That’s a big plus. UPDATE: I tried out ProjectLocker…some connectivity and usability issues…so I also signed up for XP-DEV, hoping it works better.

Paving the Way

Jeff Brumley — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 07:13:52 +0000

Today was Pave-The-Home-Dev-Box Day. I’ve had it running Win Server 2003 for the last few years, and I recently got a copy of Win 7 Professional that was itching to get installed. Nice to have the box running on x64, too!

I can’t say enough about Ninite.com….what a fantastic service for days such as today. You just have to go take a look.

Also, got turned on to a link of Expression Blend video tutorials – will review these when I get time to watch them! Time to finish wrapping Christmas presents…

Getting Started…slowly

Jeff Brumley — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 18:34:54 +0000

So, now on to the actual process of learning Silverlight. What better place to start than right at the source? http://silverlight.net/getstarted/

Hang on…I need to install how many pieces???

Visual Studio 2008 SP1
Microsoft Web Platform Installer
Silverlight Developer Tools
Expression Blend 3 (Thank you, Microsoft ProductsWeb and Company Store)
Deep Zoom Composer
Silverlight Toolkit
.NET RIA Services

So, about 2 hours later, I’m ready to watch my first video. Sheesh. How about a Ninite-style download manager for all this? I did all this on my work laptop…now I have to do it all again on my home dev machine.

Oh, and I finally found out what RIA stood for (thanks to Accelerated Silverlight 3) – Rich Internet Application. In case anybody else didn’t know.

Venturing forth

Jeff Brumley — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:57:24 +0000

Hello world…so I’ve been working in the ASP.NET space for a number of years now, and I’ve been looking for a new way to stretch myself into a new technology. My primary experience as a development has been weighted toward the back-to-middle tiers – database development, OO design, etc. I’ve had the opportunity this last year to finally step into some of the newer options for enhancing the client experience, namely with AJAX and jQuery, but have still struggled with how to bring a rich experience through the web browser that doesn’t require postback lifecycles and yet doesn’t feel like a hack. (Javascript is not exactly unit-testing friendly.) I did also get a chance a few months ago to play with the ASP.NET MVC Framework (and will get much more experience in the next few months), and while the user experience there is improved from a performance perspective – it’s super lightweight – it wasn’t exactly the rich experience I was hoping for. I may get pleasantly surprised by that as I get more into it, though.

But for now, this brings me to diving into Silverlight. My primary project at work is an ASP.NET application with hugely convoluted user functionality that could really benefit from some consolidated, high sex appeal, high performing modules. This quarter, I have been given the assignment of converting one of the high-profile user modules from ASP.NET to Silverlight, and sharing my experiences with the world. I’m really looking forward to this!