An article about Silverlight Controls - The path to reusable XAML

C# and C++ source code for .Net application packer tool

This tutorial examines the new Visual Studio 2008 Server Control and Server Control Extender. A compendium of tips, tricks and gotchas, it is a comprehensive tutorial that will provide readers with the skills necessary to start building advanced AJAX-enabled custom controls with Visual Studio.

One of the blog's readers from Italy, Fabio Cozzolino has written a interesting host for WCF that gets and merges configuration from different configuration files. You can download the code from his post, which is completely in Italian. (Anyway, the code is not, it is English).

This could be a good solution to separate the configuration in logical partitions or divisions, and then, have a central host that consolidates all the configuration (It is a server side solution).  

Using Humax v0.2, this article is going to explain how to write and apply aspect-oriented/metadata driven programming in JavaScript.

This article builds a web based message board and uses several new technologies introduced with Visual Studio 2008 such as LINQ, WCF Web Programming, WCF Syndication, ASP.NET ListView, ASP.NET DataPager etc

If for some reason you need to convert an ISBN-13 to ISBN-10 (one being that Amazon doesn't support ISBN-13 in product affiliate links) then you need not only to remove the first three characters. You also need to recompute the checksum.

Here is a piece of code that I wrote to handle this conversion:

public static String Isbn13to10(String isbn13)
{
  if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(isbn13))
    throw new ArgumentNullException("isbn13");
  isbn13 = isbn13.Replace("-", "").Replace(" ", "");
  if (isbn13.Length != 13)
    throw new ArgumentException("The ISBN doesn't contain 13 characters.", "isbn13");

  String isbn10 = isbn13.Substring(3, 9);
  int checksum = 0;
  int weight = 10;

  foreach (Char c in isbn10)
  {
    checksum += (int)Char.GetNumericValue(c) * weight;
    weight--;
  }

  checksum = 11-(checksum % 11);
  if (checksum == 10)
    isbn10 += "X";
  else if (checksum == 11)
    isbn10 += "0";
  else
    isbn10 += checksum;

  return isbn10;
}

I use this to create the Amazon affiliate links on Clair de Bulle, the famous French comics website of my wife. Yes, it's the holidays season, so I have to work for her ;-)

Iron Speed Designer builds database, forms, and reporting applications for .NET – without hand-coding. Quickly create feature-complete custom applications that integrate Web pages, controls, data access, validation and security. Accelerate development and eliminate infrastructure programming.

Just before Christmas as well :-)

Download DSA 0.3

New features for this release include:

• Probability Search
• Power algorithm
• Greatest common denominator algorithm
• Reverse words algorithm
• Set collection (will be renamed to OrderedSet in DSA 0.4 and an unordered Set will be introduced in DSA 0.4 as well)
• Sequential search
• Merge sort
• Merge ordered

Some other not so major features include:

• Pseudo code for around 75% of everything to enable easy language ports (100% of everything will be in DSA 0.4 - the paper to screen conversion is taking a while)
• Queue and Stack have been dropped - DSA will only support collections not in the BCL
• ArrayList is being dropped in DSA 0.4
• Complete XML documentation for every public algorithm/data structure - also private methods are XML doc'd as well.

Also this is the first release to include offline documentation (or documentation of any kind excluding XML docs).

Download DSA 0.3

DSA 0.4

This release will be out mid February and will introduce some new key algorithms and collections.  I am in the process of finalizing the features to be added in DSA 0.4 but you can expect more tree data structures as well as balancing algorithms to further optimise tree data structures.  I will post something when this is finalized - will be the back end of December.

Download DSA 0.3

Thank you for your support and if there is anything you would like to suggest then it is not too late...also if you find any issues please let me know.

A 2D platform game engine using Javascript DOM manipulation and CSS

Are you a Microsoft MVP ?
Are you running Vista ?
Planning to go to the Summit ?

Then download my MVP Global Summit Countdown Gadget for Vista!!
http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=c36fa782-4ab9-4383-aaff-81b1b2a27314&bt=1&pl=1

This new release supports 3 languages (english, spanish and french) and the flyout window shows latest entries from the MVP Summit event rss.

Enjoy, and Merry Christmas.

I am beggining to really like to ease of using LINQ, On a project I am working on now I am storing configuration in an XML file like so:

<sites>
    <site id="1" sitename="foo">
       <domains>
          <domain url="www.foo.com" />
       </domains>
       <settings>
          <setting key="foo" value="foo" />
       </settings>
    </site>
</sites>

My original solution to load this involded looping over the nodes looping over the domains and settings and loading this into my Site object. Time consuming to write and looked messy. And then LINQ to XML steps in. My code to parse this XML file into my collection of Site objects now becomes:

Me.Sites = (From site In document.Descendants("site") _
                        Select New Site With { _
                        .ID = site.Attribute("id").Value, _
                        .SiteName = site.Attribute("sitename").Value, _
                        .Domains = (From domain In site.Elements("domains").Descendants("domain") _
                                    Select domain) _
                                    .ToDictionary(Function(domain) domain.Attribute("url").Value, Function(domain) domain.Attribute("url").Value), _
                        .Settings = (From setting In site.Elements("settings").Descendants("setting") _
                                    Select setting) _
                                    .ToDictionary(Function(setting) setting.Attribute("key").Value, Function(setting) setting.Attribute("value").Value) _
                        }).ToList()



The speed of this is actually pretty fast and I tested with some large XML files and was happy with the performance. And I dont think life can get easier....


Cheers

Stefan
 

This article explains some of the useful features and properties of the new ListView control in ASP.NET 3.5.

Guide to development of custom ASP.NET controls with revolutionary UI provided by Silverlight

Big Blue agrees to acquire in-memory database software provider Solid Information Technology, backed by Apax Partners and CapMan, for an undisclosed sum.

So, the other day, someone was asking for a TextBox that would better support decimal or currency values:

What he want is a simple control to allow him to enter decimal or currency values.  He would prefer behavior that looks a lot more like a standard text box, rather than showing the mask or dictating the number of digits. He'd like it to be aware of the decimal functionality and handle it properly (e.g. he want to be able to type 1.23 regardless of how long the entry can be).

This seems like such a simple and fundamental control.

He suggests that .NET Framework would provide such a control.

Somebody over on the .NET Framework team had an interesting answer:

We wrote a full-featured sample DecimalTextBox control that can be installed from here.

Now I did find the control to be an interesting sample.

With that said, I gave a hard time calling anything that does not handle the globalization side of the equation full-featured, if you know what I mean.

The problems with the control?

Well, it uses NumberFormatInfo.CurrentInfo for its number formatting information, which means that it does not pick up user overrides -- and thus if the user customizes their settings, the customizations are not picked up.

And of course there is no mechanism to pick up user changes that happen after launch, either.

It does not do anything special to handle bidirectional support.

Its notions about group separators have severe limitations.

Now I do think such a control could indeed be useful worldwide, but I can't help feeling the whole internationalization issues section of the spec could have used a little more research, and subsequent to that research, a little more support.

Because full-featured in this market, coming from Microsoft, has to mean full support for all of our customers, not just the ones with "convenient" settings....

 

This post brought to you by , (U+002c, aka COMMA)

This article shows you how to bring revolutionary UI provided by MS Silverlight to the world of ASP.NET control development with the help of recent released ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions CTP

Hi All!

Just wanted to say Merry Christmas to everyone. I know l stopped blogging about 6 months ago but the reason behind that was I became a dad for the first time and little Sofia came into our lives.

 Now everyone says this and I can vouch that it is true, when you do have a kid it is fantastic (yes there are sleepless nights although we have been very lucky in that respect) and you put many other things to the side.

I'm manage to squeeze in some time to stay up-to-date on the latest .Net tech (and some non .Net related things) but haven't had the time to keep my Points of interest posts going (possibly in the new year).

I've been following Silverlight with great interest and I'm glad it has been rebranded as Silverlight 2.0 as 1.1 didn't sit right. I'm also glad about the extended feature set but hope they include some of the features I feel would ease adoption (printing support [add your vote] http://silverlight.net/forums/t/516.aspx etc).

.Net 3.5 is out which is great (just need to find a project where I can actually use it) and I've been following the Fran's posts (http://weblogs.asp.net/fbouma/) about Linq to LLBLGen Pro with interest. I've used every release Fran's has put out but feel he is going to gain a much bigger audience when he has a friendlier way of utilising the code LLBLGen generates.

Anyway have to keep this short and sweet as I'm at the in-laws for Christmas dinner in Denmark.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all.

Roll on 2008.

John

An application for users to play Circular Chess over the internet based on Silverlight, ASP.NET Ajax, WCF Web Services and LINQ to SQL

A new method for Extending Microsoft Office 2007 User Interface using MFC/ATL and .NET technologies.