Mike Taulty gets to play with all the good stuff

I’ve been quietly following Mike Taulty’s posts on his experiments with the Live Framework SDK, and with creating a simplistic photo sharing application that supports online/offline working via Live Mesh.

Now he’s got to the point of starting to implement Mesh Object sharing, I’ve started to get really interested. This is the functionality that will raise an application way above its competitors.

Sure there will be plenty of issues regarding information governance (does a user have the legal right to share whatever they want), but for the kind of application I’ve got in mind those security issues can be baked into the application at the root level – for example by encrypting the data stored, by having a central mesh object that stores “access keys” to the data or some such – nothing that can’t be solved.

What this gives is a simple way for a user to work disconnected, to upload to a central store, and to share that work with their colleagues, who can also work disconnected.

This is hard to get your head around to start with but is seriously good stuff.

Part 1: http://mtaulty.com/CommunityServer/blogs/mike_taultys_blog/archive/2008/12/18/10965.aspx

Part 2: http://mtaulty.com/CommunityServer/blogs/mike_taultys_blog/archive/2008/12/19/live-framework-sdk-more-steps.aspx

Part 3: http://mtaulty.com/CommunityServer/blogs/mike_taultys_blog/archive/2009/01/02/live-framework-sdk-having-a-single-meshobject.aspx

Part4: http://mtaulty.com/CommunityServer/blogs/mike_taultys_blog/archive/2009/01/07/live-framework-sdk-adding-a-silverlight-mewa.aspx

Part 5: http://mtaulty.com/CommunityServer/blogs/mike_taultys_blog/archive/2009/01/07/live-framework-sdk-inviting-others.aspx

User Experience - It Ain't Just Paint

We’ve known for a while now that Microsoft is taking User Experience seriously – Bill Buxton’s keynote at MixUK ’08 being clear testament to that – but it’s nice that they’re starting to share out the goodness so the message can be shouted out clear and loud.

In December’s MSDN magazine, Dr Charles B Kreitzberg and Ambrose Little give us the first I of a new set of columns focusing on putting usability into practice.

From the article, the facets of UX are:

Interaction Design Defines how the user interacts with the product. It specifies the behavior of the product in response to actions by the user and focuses on the product's navigation as well as the specific controls that are used.

Information Architecture Defines how information is organized and presented. Its goal is to support discoverability and usability.

User Research The process of studying users in order to develop a design that meets their needs, capabilities, and preferences. The methods are varied and typically employ a number of interview techniques along with observation. User logs and secondary sources are also used. Surveys and focus groups can also be used although many UX designers avoid them.

Visual Design The graphic treatment of the UI. Visual designers may be graphic artists rather than UX designers. While visual excitement is important, it is also essential that the visual design does not impair readability or usability.

Usability Testing The process of observing users performing specific tasks on a prototype or mock-up of the UI. Traditionally, usability testing was performed in a lab with observers behind a one-way mirror. However, increasingly, usability tests use webcast technology.

I’m really looking forward to the rest of this series – if only there was an RSS feed for it!

Usability In Practice : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd263095.aspx

Not a lot of people know that #1: ESENT

Well actually, probably a lot of people *do* know about ESENT, but it was new to me today!

I found a link through to a .Net API for ESENT via a MSDN post this morning, and was curious as to what on earth ESENT actually is – and it turns out to be a rather interesting piece of Microsoft technology.

From the Wikipedia entry here:

The Extensible Storage Engine (ESE), also known as JET Blue, is an Indexed Sequential Access Method (ISAM) data storage technology from Microsoft. ESE is notably a core of Microsoft Exchange Server and Active Directory.

The MSDN entry goes in to more detail and links to the reference, and there’s a good introductory blog entry on the WindowsSDK blog. You have to wonder whether this might be a useful technology for offline enabling applications – so my next bit of research has to be whether Sync Services supports it.

Time to Google…

Microsoft ESE : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms684493(VS.85).aspx

Managed API for ESENT : http://www.codeplex.com/ManagedEsent

Silverlight controls coming of age...

For me, Silverlight has never been about rich media, so much as rich applications. So the announcement and release of Silverlight 2 was a turning point. Prior to that, Silverlight had effectively no controls – meaning no useful controls for building line of business applications.

Today though, I came across a nice posting (in Italian) by Pietro Brambati that pointed to samples pages for both the intrinsic Silverlight 2.0 controls, and for the Silverlight Control Toolkit.

I love these kinds of mini-sites – they demonstrate the controls so much better than a textual description can, and handily give you a test harness as well. We use a “sample” ourselves when developing custom controls.

Italian introduction : http://blogs.msdn.com/pietrobr/archive/2008/12/22/silverlight-2-controls-demo.aspx

Silverlight 2.0 Controls Sample : http://silverlight.net/samples/sl2/silverlightcontrols/run/default.html

Silverlight Control Toolkit Sample : http://silverlight.net/samples/sl2/toolkitcontrolsamples/run/default.html

Top Tip: Rooted Views

In this VSJ article, Neal Ford highlights some quick tips and tricks for increasing your productivity.

One of the more interesting ones was that of improving your “focus” as a developer by using a feature of Windows Explorer that I’d never heard of – rooted views. All you need to do is start Windows Explorer with a couple of extra parameters, and the tree-view will appear to be rooted wherever you specify. So rooting your explorer view to the root of your projects’ source code will focus your attention on the files you should be working on rather than all the other guff in your computer.

Here’s how – just run (start->run)

explorer /e,/root,c:\myprojects\project1\source

which will give you an explorer folder rooted at the source folder for your project.

You can also create a shortcut (right-click on the desktop and select new->shortcut) with the above command as the target – put this shortcut on your start menu, desktop, dock, etc for fast focused access to your project folder.

Developer productivity Tips: http://www.vsj.co.uk/articles/display.asp?id=772

I know I've been quiet...

Busy with paying work and all in the run up to Xmas…

But three postings on developerFusion.com piqued my interest this morning.

The first two are by Jon Skeet, and cover what Iterators are, and how to use them to auto-generate state machines. Really interesting stuff as it gives a great deep-dive into the IL code that’s being generated and what that can mean in terms of the code that actually gets executed.

The third post is by Mark Smith, and provides a good worked examination of the how to create extensible applications with the Managed Add-In Framework. Not to be confused with the Managed Extensibility Framework, which is more about dynamic composition, this is a well-structured mechanism for handling plug-ins. Another one for me to get my head around, I guess.

This evening tho’, I’m off to the screenedit session at the Circle in Manchester for UX themed sessions sponsored by Microsoft. See you there.

 

Iterators, Part 1: http://www.developerfusion.com/article/9398/iterators-iterator-blocks-and-data-pipelines-in-c/

Iterators, part 2: http://www.developerfusion.com/article/9397/iterator-blocks-in-c-2-autogenerated-state-machines/

MAF: http://www.developerfusion.com/article/9396/creating-extensible-applications-with-maf/

I'm off to DDD - are you?

Well, they opened up registration this morning, and I had to jump on it fast to ensure I get a place… That’s done, so now I can safely blog about it!

Developer! Developer! Developer! is a UK development community event that’s hosted by Microsoft at their Reading campus. The next event – DDD7, is on Saturday 22^nd November.

The agenda looks really good – especially Phil & Dave’s “ASP.Net 4.0 – Top Secret” session, but it looks like there’s something for everyone there. Other potential highlights (for me, at least), include Mike Hadlow’s “Using an Inversion of Control Container in a real world application” and “Toby Henderson’s “How to develop .Net on Linux using Ubuntu”.

They just need to set up the twitter feed, the facebook event and the backnetwork now!

Get in quick! http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032393874&Culture=en-GB

You can't stop the light (redux).

Loads more Silverlight goodness today too.

Robin Mestré has posted no less than four three-part series on why Developers, Designers , Marketing types and Application Architects should look at Silverlight. The posts are very much brochure-style, but they do give an excellent overview of the capabilities of the Silverlight platform – plenty of pictures to help you sell the technology to your managers.

Shawn Burke notes the release of Silverlight 2, but more interestingly give a teaser as to the state of play with the Silverlight Toolkit – due for a first preview release at PDC. The screenshot shows just how cool these controls are going to be.

On the WPF SDK Blog, Jim Galasyn points to the revised Silverlight 2 documentation now available on MSDN.

Finally, Scott Morrison has posted about what I think is one of the most exciting controls released as part of Silverlight 2 RTW – the DataGrid. This control will be making a number of 3^rd party control manufacturers sweat – it’s already VERY fully featured, as Scott#’s post shows. In a follow-up, he also shows how to use the Frozen Columns feature – damn handy.

Silverlight Toolkit: http://blogs.msdn.com/sburke/archive/2008/10/14/silverlight-2-released-silverlight-toolkit-on-the-way.aspx

Documentation: http://blogs.msdn.com/wpfsdk/archive/2008/10/14/silverlight-2-docs-are-posted.aspx

DataGrid Features: http://blogs.msdn.com/scmorris/archive/2008/10/14/silverlight-2-datagrid-is-released.aspx

Frozen Columns: http://blogs.msdn.com/scmorris/archive/2008/10/15/freezing-columns-in-the-silverlight-datagrid.aspx

You can't stop the light

(was "Busy day at Silverlight Central" - don't ask!)

Yep – today the Microsoft Blogosphere has been buzzing with the news that Silverlight 2.0 has Released to the Web (RTW). Congrats to the Silverlight team on that – I was expecting the release to be closer (if not DURING) the PDC.

Of course ScottGu is the authoritative source as always, but I lost count of the MSDN blog posts today that reposted the news - now all I’ve got to do is un-install the RC0 bits and install the RTW bits before I can compile up code that will be shippable. Well, it will probably be shippable as soon as the CUI and Controls teams update their control libraries!

Interestingly, Ronan Geraghty went in a slightly different direction – pointing to a set of Silverlight tooling for Eclipse. This is good, because it gives an alternative tooling for Silverlight, and one that’s in use by a load of Java developers out there. Whilst it’s Windows only at the moment, it’s roadmap does include support for “Other OS” – so it probably won’t be long before that same tooling will allow for Silverlight / Moonlight development on Linux. Good times!

Scott shows us the light: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/10/14/silverlight-2-released.aspx

Eclipsing the light: http://www.eclipse4sl.org/download/

New! Atomic Memory will wash your concurrency grime away!

I’ve kind of being expecting this to rear its head, so it’s gratifying to spot that the Transactional Memory team at Microsoft are starting a blog.

This follows on from the presentation that Simon Peyton Jones made in the final Sneak Peeks session at Mix UK ’07 – and whilst they “are not working on a product release at this time” it can only be a matter of time. It’s also nice to see another part of DevDiv opening up and gathering opinion as part of their development process.

Read about it (atomically): http://blogs.msdn.com/stmteam/archive/2008/10/08/welcome-to-the-transactional-memory-team-s-blog.aspx

REMIX UK Sessions on the Web

Well, it took a while, but at last all the sessions from ReMix UK '08 are online – time to catch up on all the sessions you couldn't get to (and maybe see if you can spot yourself in the audience for those you were at).

"Get 'em while they're luke!": http://www.microsoft.com/uk/remix08/agenda.aspx

(thanks to Mike Taulty for pointing this out in this posting)

Who'd have ever thought it...

ScottGu’s been at it again – this time, however, he’s announcing something quite unusual for Microsoft – shipping an open source toolset as part of Visual Studio in preference to creating a proprietary equivalent. To quote his posting:

“I'm excited today to announce that Microsoft will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio going forward.  We will distribute the jQuery JavaScript library as-is, and will not be forking or changing the source from the main jQuery branch.  The files will continue to use and ship under the existing jQuery MIT license.”

This is a big win – jQuery is a great framework for client-side AJAX, with a huge community behind it – and it’s also an extremely pragmatic approach – why re-invent the wheel again?

Kudos then to Scott and his team – and time to buy “jQuery in Action”, I think!

Get the low-down here: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/09/28/jquery-and-microsoft.aspx

Scott Guthrie - Does the man never sleep?!

Only a week ago, Scott was in the UK for ReMix UK ’08, but somehow he’s managed to slip something significant into his busy schedule:

Silverlight 2 Release Candidate 0

Yep – that’s right, RC0 is here! From his posting, there are a load of bug fixes, some breaking changes, 3 new controls and a whole new look-n-feel. Password boxes and Progress bars I can take or leave, but the ComboBox is the important one as far as getting Silverlight into enterprise applications.

There’s a slight gotcha (as well as the well documented breaking changes) in that you have to uninstall Blend 2.5 before you can install RC0 (and boy did THAT take a while) but the upgrade of Blend 2.0 to SP1 (preview) was seamless. Personally I think making Silverlight support available in Blend 2.0 was the right move – not everyone is willing to use Beta software in order to get the tooling.

Good stuff and well done to Scott & his team.

Silverlight goodness: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/09/25/silverlight-2-release-candidate-now-available.aspx

Design... Design... Design...

Kintan Brahmbhatt has posted a very good series of articles that make you think about the design process.

In asking “How would you design a kitchen?”, he looks at the design process, and reminds us about what has to be the key tenet of design – making sure that your specify something that is fit for task for the end user.

Kitchen magic starts here: http://www.kintya.com/blog/2008/08/how-would-you-d.html

Freebies are always good -

Yesterday Joe Stagner posted about the free digital release of the first draft of “Data Structures and Algorithms: Annotated Reference with Example”.

It’s not complete, and rather rough in places, but it’s definitely worth a bit of your time to remind yourself about fundamental data structures and the algorithms to manipulate them. In particular, the authors highlight the complexity of each algorithm – and tell you how the algorithm will scale.

Download, Read, Internalise:  http://dotnetslackers.com/projects/Data-Structures-And-Algorithms/

The "evil empire" embraces the source...

Lots of people have blogged about it, including The Moth, but it’s still a remarkable thing to see happen – Microsoft has released the source code to .Net 3.5 (under appropriate licenses) so you can debug into the framework itself.

Why is this important? Well, even in plain-old ASP.Net, the framework can often appear to swallow your code entirely, making it nigh-on impossible to work out why your code is broken.

Now you can trace all the way up and down the stack – and Daniel’s posted a video on how to set up VS2008 to use this to go along with the official blog.

Use the Source: http://www.danielmoth.com/Blog/2008/08/debug-into-fx-35-sp1-source.html

Ani-XSS - Dang well just use it!

Vineet Batta has posted a great first article on the CISG blog, espousing the virtues of the Anti-XSS library available to ASP.Net developers.

 

What does Anti-XSS do? Well, plenty actually – but in particular Vineet covers how to use the SafeHtml and SafeHtmlFragment methods to sanitise rich text input from a web form. I’m looking forward to his next instalment.

 

Dang well use it!: http://blogs.msdn.com/cisg/archive/2008/08/27/what-does-anti-xss-offer-for-html-sanitization.aspx

Quick Tip: Getting at the current Page from MasterPage code-behind

I had to work this out today as I wanted to disable functionality on a master page based on the type of page it was attached to.

The MasterPage class is one that sits “beside” the Page class in ASP.Net – specifically, whilst you can access the MasterPage instance from a Page instance, there’s no property on the MasterPage to go back to the current page.

Of course, we can fix this with a helper class – here I’ve coded the sample as an extension method just for fun:

public static class MasterPageExtensions
{
public static Page OwningPage(this MasterPage master)
{
HttpContext context = HttpContext.Current;
Page page = context.Handler as Page;
return Page;
}
}

Now we call access the page from the code-behind of a master page thus:

public partial class MyMasterPage : MasterPage
{
private void DoSomething()
{
Page currentPage = this.OwningPage();
...
}
}

Easy!

Nuggets of goodness

Busy day on the MSDN blogs today – as well as Mike Taulty wondering if he’s been blacklisted from TechEd (*G*), we’ve got a posting from Doug about uninstalling .Net Framework 3.5 SP1, but also serves as a very good reminder as to how the .Net framework is layered.

Next, Kirill Osenkov has a good post on understanding generics, Eric White has posts on finding duplicates using LINQ, using Lambda expressions for Event Handlers, and taking a “flat” collection and chunking it into a data structure.

Finally, Ed Glas points to a new version of Fiddler, that apart from anything else has a cool timeline visualiser.

Update: It's not over yet! Vincent Sibal has a great article covering how to use the new WPF DataGrid, and in particular it's templating options, whilst Motley & Maven have an argument about Test Automation.

Silverlight - for or against

The Register has a remarkably balanced article today giving 10 pros and 10 cons for silverlight.

Which side of the fence do you fall on? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/18/silverlight_pros_and_cons/