JohnPapa.net

Leaders in Silverlight

John Papa — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 21:52:00 GMT

There are some great people with Silverlight and many of them are sharing a ton with the community through blogs, twitter, forums, videos, articles, books, training, and speaking engagements. Different folk tend like different mediums, so it is great that we have so many options to share information on Silverlight. Years ago I used to read books to find my information. Then as the web grew, I started reading a ton of articles. That grew into blog reading for me, and in the past few years watching videos and talking over Twitter. Having options is a good thing and it helps keep the monotony out of my life.

People often ask me how I keep up with what is going on outside of “my world”, so here are some thoughts on how I do it. Disclaimer: these work for me and frankly, I am a fly by the seat of my pants kind of guy … meaning I have no formal plan :)

NOTE: Today Marco and some others on Twitter encouraged me to list who I recommend following for Silverlight discussions on Twitter and in blogs. I do have a few lists I watch and I’ll post them tomorrow in case anyone is interested.

Keeping up with Blogs

I check in on blogs of various technologies from popular web sites and various bloggers to see what is leading the way. I use a RSS reader and categorize the feeds. Each day I go through the titles and quickly remove the ones I don’t have an interest in or if its something I knew about already.This usually leaves a handful each day to scan. I rarely read a post until I have first scanned them all. It is the only way I can stay sane with so many flying in. I read probably 10 posts a day beyond the first paragraph. Some I mark for later or bookmark if I know its a good reference. Total time per on average day: 30 minutes

All a Twitter

Twitter is a controversial newer medium. People either love it or hate it. I use Twitter for work to keep an eye on what is going on with tech. There are a lot of people who tweet who do not blog much, though most people who blog do tweet. I have a rule with Twitter: I never go back more than a page scroll or 2. If I missed something in the timeline that was not addressed to me, it is gone forever unless someone retweets it. I keep a Twitter client (Seesmic Desktop 2) up all day long and scan it here and there for something interesting. Not only do I find some great information that I do not see on blogs, but I also catch some great conversations. Twitter is interactive … which is why I like it. People can ask for help, engage in discussions (or passionate positions on technology), or just shoot the … um … breeze. I spend only about 30 minutes a day on average since I rarely ever focus on Twitter … it’s always a background task that does not derail me. In short, my 30 minutes a day on Twitter helps me stay in tune with a different and engaging audience.

Videos

I like videos. I tend to like to put a video up on one screen while coding or writing in the other. Sometimes the 2 are related, sometimes totally unrelated. Videos are great because you can put them in the background and listen to them, then when key moments arrive you can pause the video, rewind it, and move your attention back to the video. I prefer 2 types of videos: tutorials and multi person discussions. Surprising huh, that Silverlight TV is in that model :). Total time per week: varies … some 0 some 8 hours.

Well … I hope this enlightens some … but again, frankly, its what works for me and I fully realize I am a bit different than most people I meet. I don’t follow a plan, I change my mind on what works for me every so often … but the one thing that has remained constant for me is that I enjoy doing more than 1 thing at once. If I was not OK with having videos or twitter up while doing work and ACTUALLY GETTING SOMETHING DONE then this would be a BAD BAD BAD idea. So as long as I can have background threads like this, its my plan … for today :)

Applying Animations and States to your Silverlight Application

John Papa — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:00:00 GMT

John Stockton demonstrates on Silverlight TV how to create animations for Silverlight using Storyboards in Expression Blend. He explores the roles that the storyboards, visual states, behaviors, keyframes, transforms, and easings play in animations. This is a great demonstration of how to add a realistic and natural feel to animations.

Relevant links:

John's blog and on Twitter (@john_papa)

Are you developing with Windows Phone 7? You can pre-order Learning Windows Phone Programming today, by Jaime Rodriguez, Yochay Kiriaty and John Papa! Or check out the book's web site.

Key links for Silverlight TV
	Watch Silverlight TV Shows on Channel 9 Watch shows and catch the latest news in our Silverlight TV blog
	Subscribe to the RSS feed for the show itself Subscribe to the show on your Zune Subscribe to the show for your iPod
	Follow @SilverlightTV on Twitter for updates, alerts for new shows, and to submit comments and feedback.

If you have not watched the previous episodes of Silverlight TV, you can catch them here.

The Future of the Web with Silverlight and HTML 5

John Papa — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:00:00 GMT

Lately there has been a lot of buzz speculating on the future of the web including HTML 5, Silverlight, and other web technologies. Brad Becker, Director of Product management at Microsoft, has posted some valuable insight into the value of Silverlight and the role it does and will play in the web (including where it and HTML 5 will play key roles).

I highly recommend that anyone considering the future of web technologies go check out the article and leave your comments on the site. For those who are more visual/auditory, Brad also has linked to a video where he presents more about the role of Silverlight at this link.

New Silverlight 4 Service Release 4.0.50826.0

John Papa — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 17:59:00 GMT

Today we released a new update to for Silverlight 4 (4.0.50826.0) and a new SDK to go along with it. Tim Heuer posted a summary here and you can check out the full details at KB2164913. I summarized the key elements below.

Here are the relevant highlights:

SDK feature to enable Add New Row capabilities in DataGrid control
Improving startup performance of Silverlight applications
Adding mouse wheel support for out-of-browser applications on the Mac platform
Various media-related fixes around DRM content
Fixed memory leak when MouseCapture is used
Fixed memory leak for DataTemplate usage

For Users

Tim aptly points out that if you want to encourage your end users to upgrade to this new Silverlight version then you will want to set the minRuntimeVersion parameter in the object tag hosting your Silverlight control to 4.0.50826.0. You’ll also want to set autoUpgrade to true.

...
...
<;param name="minRuntimeVersion" value="4.0.50826.0" />
<;param name="autoUpgrade" value="true" />
...
...

For Developers

For Silverlight developers you will want to grab the new developer bits and updated SDK:

Enjoy!

Apply and Customize the New Silverlight Themes

John Papa — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 01:47:00 GMT

Tsitsi Gora, UX Designer at Microsoft, appears on Silverlight TV to announce the new Silverlight themes that her team has been working on. Tsitsi demonstrates the new themes available for download and explains the scenarios they had in mind when they created the themes. The new themes include:

Jet Pack
Cosmopolitan
Windows 7
AccentColor

She also takes a deep look at the cosmopolitan theme and shows how you can customize it, if need be. Tsitsi wraps up by demonstrating some tips you can use to maintain design consistency in your application, including how to apply a simple behavior to your TextBox and content presenters. Tsitsi drops a ton of great design tips throughout this episode—you don't want to miss it.
Relevant links:

John's blog and on Twitter (@john_papa)
Tsitsi's blog post

Are you developing with Windows Phone 7? You can pre-order Learning Windows Phone Programming today, by Jaime Rodriguez, Yochay Kiriaty and John Papa! Or check out the book's web site.

Key links for Silverlight TV
	Watch Silverlight TV Shows on Channel 9 Watch shows and catch the latest news in our Silverlight TV blog
	Subscribe to the RSS feed for the show itself Subscribe to the show on your Zune Subscribe to the show for your iPod
	Follow @SilverlightTV on Twitter for updates, alerts for new shows, and to submit comments and feedback.

If you have not watched the previous episodes of Silverlight TV, you can catch them here.

Top Tips for WCF RIA Services: Silverlight TV 41

John Papa — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 16:14:00 GMT

On this episode of Silverlight TV, Dinesh Kulkarni shares his top tips for creating streamlined and performant WCF RIA Services applications. He walks through some key decision points while creating domain services (server side) for a Silverlight and RIA Services application. Among the tips Dinesh discusses are some of the benefits of creating the minimal number of entities, operations, and amount of data required for your application. He also discusses how to connect RIA Services to:

Entity Framework
LINQ to SQL
nHibernate
Your own custom business objects

Other topics Dinesh walks step-by-step through include:

hooking RIA Services up to your own POCO classes
adding role-based authorization
how to determine what objects will be exposed by RIA Services to the client
adding validation
identifying keys and associations for entities
indicating when to return object graphs
how to use the Composite attribute to bundle objects graphs

This is a great deep dive by one of the masterminds behind WCF RIA Services.
Relevant links:

John's blog and on Twitter (@john_papa)
Nhibernate and RIA Services sample
PDC 2009 talk using same nhibernate sample: Mastering WCF RIA Services
Dinesh's blog and on Twitter (@di_Ku)

Are you developing with Windows Phone 7? You can pre-order Learning Windows Phone Programming today, by Jaime Rodriguez, Yochay Kiriaty and John Papa! Or check out the book's web site.

Key links for Silverlight TV
	Watch Silverlight TV Shows on Channel 9 Watch shows and catch the latest news in our Silverlight TV blog
	Subscribe to the RSS feed for the show itself Subscribe to the show on your Zune Subscribe to the show for your iPod
	Follow @SilverlightTV on Twitter for updates, alerts for new shows, and to submit comments and feedback.

If you have not watched the previous episodes of Silverlight TV, you can catch them here.

Early Bird is Open for the Patterns and Practices Symposium

John Papa — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 19:48:00 GMT

I just received my confirmation that I will be presenting at the PnP Symposium being held in Redmond from Oct 18-22, 2010. Here is a ton of information that the PnP team has released about the event as written by Don Smith …

The Patterns and Practices (PnP) Symposium is shaping into a killer event. We have rock star keynotes confirmed and many well-known speakers who spend all year looking forward to this event and are pretty excited about their sessions. Please feel free to share these updates with your customers. And don’t forget anyone who “refers” 4 people during registration, gets in FREE. See the registration section below for more details.

Keynotes by:


Robert C. Martin	Emma Williams	Jason Zander	Charlie Kindel	Yousef Khalidi

Half day hands-on developer workshops:

On Oct 18th afternoon, there will be three workshops that attendees can choose from on the following topics:

· Windows Azure Guidance

· Enterprise Library and

· Prism

Technical Speakers:

· Rocky Lhotka	· Scott Guthrie
· Ted Neward	· Scott Hanselman
· David Platt	· Ade Miller (p&p)
· David Campbell	· Grigori Melnik (p&p)
· Stephen Walther	· Eugenio Pace (p&p)
· Karl Shifflett	· Scott Densmore (p&p)
· John Papa	· Michael Lehman (p&p)
· David Starr	· Chris Tavares (p&p)
· Brad Wilson	· Chris Keyser (p&p)
· Glenn Block

Technical sessions topics (so far):

Web

Idea: a session on the results of the Microsoft/JQuery collaboration (templates for example) and how customers are using JQuery with ASP.NET MVC and Windows Azure to build engaging Web experiences.
Idea: a session on development and unit testing patterns when using ASP.NET MVC (like testing routes for example). This talk could also provide a sneak peek into ASP.NET MVC 3.

Cloud

Confirmed keynote: Yousef Khalidi, a Distinguished Engineer on the Windows Azure team, will deliver a keynote on October 20th on the current and future state of the on-premise and off-premise Windows Azure platform. Abstract forthcoming.
Confirmed: Half-day hands-on workshop: the Cloud Guidance team in patterns & practices will deliver a hands-on workshop on how to get the most of the Azure platform. Abstract forthcoming (soon).
There are plenty of other options for sessions about the cloud. I’ll post some of our other ideas in the near future. In the meantime, I’m interested in what you would like to see. Perhaps something like connectivity with ...

Windows Phone 7

Confirmed keynote: Charlie Kindel, a General Manager on the Windows Phone 7 team, will deliver a keynote on October 21st on the developer experience. Abstract forthcoming.
Idea: given its mobile nature and its ability to always be connected, a session illustrating how best to use the Azure and Phone platforms together would be mega-useful. Other areas p&p has been working on is push notifications and how to take advantage of specific features like geo-location awareness and how to hook into the camera and audio features of the phone.

SharePoint

After having delivered three different sets of SharePoint guidance, there is a lot we can talk about. Some of the options include exposing and consuming data to/from SharePoint, testing and development practices, a broad overview of the changes in SharePoint 2010. Let us know.

Parallel

Confirmed: Parallel Programming with Design Patterns and .NET – Ade Miller
Multi-core and HPC technologies are rapidly moving into the computing mainstream, allowing us to develop applications with improved performance, increased responsiveness, and reduced latency. The many established design patterns in this space can help developers and architects reuse proven approaches to solving many types of problems using parallelism. This talk covers many of the key patterns and gives examples of how they can be implemented using the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 libraries. This talk is aimed at experienced software developers who are relatively new to the parallel computing space but expect it to become more important to their work.

Enterprise Library

Confirmed: Half-day hands-on workshop: This relatively-advanced workshop will focus on the patterns and implementation of EntLib’s provider model to show how it reduces coupling and facilitates testing. This is a great choice if you’re using EntLib today. Abstract forthcoming.
Confirmed: Session on the new features of EntLib 5.0: If you attended the Summit last year, you heard about data accessors, the perf gains and a few other things. This year you’ll hear about the new things that made it in and see the new (super) config tool and other asked-for features. Abstract forthcoming.

Inversion of Control

Idea: How would you feel about a duo session between 2 heavy-hitters in the dependency injection space? We’re thinking one speaker can cover the preliminary principles, background and concepts to make sure everyone is on the same page and the other speaker can follow it up with implementation details using say, MEF. Thoughts?

Rich client

Confirmed: Half-day hands-on workshop: The infamous David Platt, accompanied by members of the Prism team, will cover the latest Prism release in an overview of the major parts of the project. Abstract forthcoming.
This is another space that we have the opportunity to talk about a lot of different things from patterns to implementations and we’re talking to some rock star speakers on possible topics. Let us know what you would like to see and we’ll try to accommodate.

Visual Studio

Confirmed keynote: Jason Zander, Corporate VP of the Visual Studio team, will be delivering a keynote where he discusses the new features of Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server and how they improve the experiences for .NET developers and architects. Abstract forthcoming.
Confirmed: Session on Feature Builder. The patterns & practices team has valued the automation and consistency that can be achieved through extending the developer’s tool box. Feature Builder is the latest incarnation of such tooling and is easily the most compelling offering to date. This session will focus on how easy it is today to bend Visual Studio to your will. Abstract forthcoming.

Agile Practices

Here are some of the titles we are currently considering. Which are you the most interested in?

What has changed in Agile
Behavior Driven Development and Executable Specifications in .NET
Patterns of Healthy Scrum Teams using Visual Studio and TFS
Be a Better Developer with Coding Katas
Effective Test Automation Strategies

There are a bunch of other sessions we’re kicking around that I haven’t included here. Be sure and stay tuned for them. You can also regularly check the Symposium page on MSDN to stay tuned. But the easiest way would be to follow the Symposium on Twitter or the event on Facebook.

Register Now!

It’s $699 if you register on or before August 31st and take advantage of our limited number of early bird seats. This price includes the workshop and 4 days of sessions. That is what I call a deal!

Seats are going fast. See you there!

Problem Resolution: Installing Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools Beta

John Papa — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 18:32:00 GMT

I ran into some issues installing the Windows Phone 7 developer tools beta this weekend on my PC. I had been cleaning up my hard drive of old installs so I likely had a bit of a mess. I had just installed a fresh copy of Expression Suite 4 Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and the Silverlight 4 Tools. I tested those and everything worked great … so far so good.

Next step was to install the Windows Phone 7 developer tools beta. Here is where I ran into this problem …

“Setup has detected that this computer does not meet the requirements to install this software. These requirements must be met before you can install Microsoft Windows Phone Developer Tools Beta - ENU”

The incompatible product it was referring to is “Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express Prerequisites x64” as shown in the window below …

For those wanting the quick solution … it turns out that I had an old build of Visual Studio Express that I had to uninstall. But this message can appear for a variety of install blocking issues so I figured I would share what I learned about debugging the install issues.

Note: Aaron Stebner alerted me to a blog post he had written on debugging this and other messages. You can find that post here. The steps included below are my interpretation of Aaron’s steps in his “Issue #2” with specifics on my issue where applicable.

1) First, I opened the log file dd_install_vs_vstscore_100.txt for the install which is located in the %temp% folder. For me, this was located in this path:

C:\Users\John\AppData\Local\Temp\dd_install_vs_vstscore_100.txt

2) I opened the file in notepad and searched for “ERRORLOG EVENT” … you might as well search for ExecuteEachBlocker though. Either way, I found the section I needed that told me where to go next. Here is the section worth noting:

[08/13/10,23:32:15] VS Scenario: ***ERRORLOG EVENT*** : Error: CVSScenario::ExecuteEachBlocker returned false
[08/13/10,23:32:15] Setup.exe: AddGlobalCustomProperty
[08/13/10,23:32:15] VS Scenario: ***ERRORLOG EVENT*** : Error:There is a blocking condition met, the installer is blocking because of Section :
[08/13/10,23:32:15] Setup.exe: AddGlobalCustomProperty
[08/13/10,23:32:15] VS Scenario: ***ERRORLOG EVENT*** : Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express Prerequisites x64
[08/13/10,23:32:35] Setup.exe: AddGlobalCustomProperty
[08/13/10,23:32:35] VS Scenario: ***ERRORLOG EVENT*** : Failed to pass the Warnings/Blocks checks in CVSScenario::Start()

3) This is the match for the message in the error window so the next step is to find the key for this entry in the setup file. This can be found by going to the setup files for the WPDT beta setup data file named blocker.sdb which is located in the vm_web.exe self extracting package. (Aaron created an extracted copy at this location in case you want a quick link.)

4) Once you open the file search for the offending key, which in my case was “Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express Prerequisites x64”. This finds a section such as the one below:

[Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express Prerequisites x64]
VersionCheck=RegVerBuildCheck
DetectKey=HKLM,SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DevDiv\vs\Servicing\10.0\expbsln
DetectKeyVal=Version
DetectKeyValData=30319.01
HelpLink=Block_on_Non_Dev10_RC_component_vm_exp.htm

5) This section identifies that if the key (DetectKey) is found and has a value (DetectKeyValData) less than the version listed, then a blocking issue will arise. This may be as far as you need to go.

6) If you cannot find this key it might be because the keys are slightly different for 64-bit versions of Windows. For clarity, the 32-bit key is …

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DevDiv\vs\Servicing\10.0\expbsln

… and 64-bit is …

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\DevDiv\vs\Servicing\10.0\expbsln

7) My key had a value of 30128.01, so it was easy to see it was less than the required pre-req of 30319.0 that the message indicated.

Of course, when I went to the Control Panel to uninstall this blocking program it was pretty obvious in hindsight that it was the blocker. Notice the version in the image below is obviously older … reminds me of the old “which one of these is not like the other” saying :).

So in hindsight this issue could have been resolved quicker by a little more common sense on my part, but the steps were still very valuable in understanding the issue and might come in handy in the future.

Special thanks to Jaime Rodriguez and Aaron Stebner for their help with this.

Silverlight TV Upcoming Schedule for August+ 2010

John Papa — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 18:47:00 GMT

Being that I’ve just set the Silverlight TV schedule for August and parts of September 2010 I wanted to share it with everyone. We have some great guests who have some awesome content in the lineup over the next month. Check this out!

8/12/2010 – You are already a WP7 Developer - Jesse Liberty (just aired yesterday)

8/19/2010 – Top Tips for WCF RIA Services – Dinesh Kulkarni

8/26/2010 – Announcing New Silverlight Themes – Tsitsi Gora

9/02/2010 – Animations and States– John Stockton

9/09/2010 – Top 4 Questions From the RIA Services Forums – Deepesh Mohnani

Beyond these we have even more with shows on debugging, profiling, panels, SketchFlow, WP7, Deep dive on behaviors, MVVM, and much more!

Thanks for watching and making Silverlight TV the #1 Silverlight show!

You Are Already a Windows Phone Developer

John Papa — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 16:00:00 GMT

It has been said that if you know Silverlight then you are already a Windows Phone 7 developer. Jesse Liberty joins John Papa this week on Silverlight TV to explore that statement and demonstrate the side-by-side creation of both a Silverlight application and a Windows Phone application.

Watch as Jesse cracks open Visual Studio 2010 and creates two similar applications: one for Silverlight and one for Windows Phone 7. He does this all from scratch so you get to see every step along the way.
Relevant links:

John's blog and on Twitter (@john_papa)
Jesse's blog and on Twitter (@jesseliberty)
Accompanying blog post and code
Windows Phone 7 Training Kit

Registration for PDC10 is now open, and space is limited – don’t miss this opportunity to experience the PDC in Redmond. Join the PDC email newsletter for the latest information about PDC10.

Key links for Silverlight TV
	Watch Silverlight TV Shows on Channel 9 Watch shows and catch the latest news in our Silverlight TV blog
	Subscribe to the RSS feed for the show itself Subscribe to the show on your Zune Subscribe to the show for your iPod
	Follow @SilverlightTV on Twitter for updates, alerts for new shows, and to submit comments and feedback.

If you have not watched the previous episodes of Silverlight TV, you can catch them here.