I was having trouble with my intranet this week.  Ever since I uninstalled Silverlight Beta 2 and replace it with RTW I've been getting this weird error "Error loading DLL"

It wasn't affecting functionality as far as I could tell, but it sure was annoying!!

Anyway, it turns out I needed to repair my Office installation to get rid of the message.  45 minutes later and all is well

Fingers crossed it doesn't return

we scored another seminar for early next year with the guys from NxtGenUG

Simon and I will do another whirlwind tour of the Blend tools, wiring up the C# to make it all dynamic

Sign up and come see us in action

http://www.nxtgenug.net/ViewEvent.aspx?EventID=176

Hope to see you there, we're booked for Janurary 19th so plenty of time to get signed up

Back to the land of browser inconsistencies :¬(

I had such high hopes for the silverlight plug-in.  Cross-browser incompatablities can be the most time consuming areas of web development, so a browser plug-in overcomes these by sandboxing the application so it handles all of it's rendering internally

Or so I thought.  Having developed all my silverlight under Internet Explorer, everything renders fine with the default 100% heights and widths.  Rendering the controls is important for templated controls and the loaded event only fires when the control is rendered and the loaded event is important in order for the control to pipe up and accept some data from the dartabinding process. 

To my amazement, and slight relief, Firefox actually requires a fixed height in order for it to render.  By default, you are given a silverlight plugin, set to 100% height and width, wrapped in a div with a height : 100% style attribute.  Just change the containing div to a fixed height and your controls now render fine in Firefox :¬)

so from this

<div style="height: 100%;">

<asp:Silverlight ID="Xaml1" runat="server" Source="~/ClientBin/NavTeqBannerMain.xap" MinimumVersion="2.0.31005.0" Width="100%" Height="100%" InitParameters="ctlid=SilverLightBanner" />

</div>

to this

<div style="height: 256px;">

<asp:Silverlight ID="Xaml1" runat="server" Source="~/ClientBin/NavTeqBannerMain.xap" MinimumVersion="2.0.31005.0" Width="100%" Height="100%" InitParameters="ctlid=SilverLightBanner" />

</div>

 

Man, I love the .net framework.  Each release see me writing less and less of the boring stuff, allowing me to concentrate on the more exciting things in development.  However, as each release passes by, I'm always left with the thought : "How did we cope before this release??!?!!"

It struck home good and proper today.

A Web Agency strives for perfection in design, perfection in usablity, perfection in accessability, perfection.*.  W3C validation is one of the many tests we put our sites under, and it gives some really good feedback on your mark-up ; which attribute have you forgetten to add? Which elements fit inside which elements?

We  know, by now, that <span> can contain very few HTML elements.  This has been the case for all eternity.  So, why oh why, does setting RepeatLayout.Flow on a DataList make anyone @ Microsoft think it's going to get away with wrapping each template up in a <span> when it can contain so few elements?

Thats the problem i was having today.  Alexey had coded me up some excellent HeaderTemplate, FooterTemplate and ItemTemplate for one of our ZoomSpace applications.  The raw HTML looked brilliant, the HTML was W3C compliant, everyone was happy, especially me.

Along comes DataList to ruin my day by injecting it's dodgy, non-compliant, and downright short-sighted markup into my ResponseStream.

DataList was prevalent in .net 2.0.  A good, lightweight, databound control which you could use to edit items, delete stuff, add new items, the lot.  I know the purer way would be to use the Repeater, but i needed the data-driven code.  I could have used ListView, but this a .net 2.0 application so that's out too.

We've been using ListView for a while.  It's pure mark-up, no additions and no weirdness.  How  easy I forget how different things were!!

For those trying to make headway into Silverlight, there is a lot of old knowledge which needs to be gained in order for silverlight to become productive. 

For Flash-heads, there simply isn't enough material about to make a judgement about which one to use.  Based on in-house experience, and the fact that people won't have previous Silverlight experience (it was only released on the 14th October), Flash is tried and tested

Then along comes Project Rosetta with a 10 lesson how-to on comparing some old Flash-staples to new Silverlight techniques, code for both versions and working demos to boot!!

The new silverlight tools can now be accessed using the FREE Visual Web Developer edition of Visual Studio 2008, and there's trial version of Blend if you want to your Draw on :¬)

Enjoy

Tim

 

You have got to check this out

I've been using RedGate's tool for year.  Their SQLCompare and SqlDataCompare are essential parts of my toolbox.  Being more dev than DBA, these tool offer excellent functions for marrying up your dev databases to the production servers.  Even when you can't see your production databases, all the work is scripted so you can save the Sql files and send them on to your hosts.  Magic

Their latest offering, ANTS Profiler, is another high calibre tool that we've become very attached to.  We all like to write bullet-proof code which works lightening quick, but old habits die hard and it's often a thing we aspire to but never quite get there

we've been using a lot of LINQ lately using IQueryable results.  Alls well while you're coding them up and using them on your dev server.  However, combine thse results sets with 10,000 users all looking for the latest news and the code starts to get a bit laggy to say the least. 

We installed the ANTS profiles and it instantly identified these query's as the casue of a lot of the lag we were experiencing.  It seems they are still attached to the database in some manner as any subsequent access was still causing a call to the database , even though we'd stored them in an application variable.  We converted to List<> and the lag was a thing of the past.

There must be more to it but i'm miffed that all these new Microsoft tool are behaving like this.  Sure, they're a dream to code for ; LINQ style queries make up some of the most logical (from a coding perspective) syntax i've seen for a long time and object-oriented data access is somehting i've personally spent ages emulating in previous languages i've worked on.  Who would have thought that they'd be so expensive on the processor

If you're getting any kind of weird slow-down on your code, i can highly recommend the ANTS profiler.  Even if you're not, the profiler can still identify problematic sections of code and offer you some pointers.  We run everything through it now as a matter of course :¬)

I've been trying to fathom this for ages and finally have found a solution

When we're been working on the older ASP sites, using ADO for the data access, Text fields are constantly coming in blank.  We try casting them as VARCHAR(8000) but this is a bit dodge as you can't guarantee that you won't be truncating any data.  Text is meant to be infintely long, after all

After some digging around, I noticed a few threads on the same problem, some indicating that the issue was a bug in the driver we were using.  We use a set of standard connection include files, all with DRIVER={SQL SERVER}.  This was the cause of the problem.  There is a bug in the standard sql server driver which stops Text fields coming back to your Recordsets correctly

We changed it to Provider=sqloledb and it works a lot better :¬)

Two days after the VBug presentation,  Simon and I have been asked to do a similar presentation at the Conchango offices in London

Promises to be a high-profile event with a good mix of developers and designers attending

 http://blogs.conchango.com/michelleflynn/archive/2008/07/21/uk-silverlight-user-group-date-confirmed.aspx

It's happening on the 14th of August and they're still filling designer spots.  Pop Michelle an email if you're a designer and wish to attend :¬)

Plenty of the CJ team will be there

Microsoft have just created a case study detailing our winning competition entry for the 'Be all you can be challenge'

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000002403

Nice to be featured on Microsoft.com, big props to all involved :¬)

Simon and I scored a presentation piece for VBug in August

Based on the success of the Microsoft Mix07 'Be All You Can Be Challenge', VBug asked us to do a seminar on how it was all put together, from Expression Design, into Expession Blend to add all the visual states and into Visual Studio to wire up the events and data, to then be displayed on the form for all to see

It's in Bracknell on the 12th of August 2008, stars Creative Jar's finest silverlight developers and there will be refreshments courtesy of Conchango who have also blogged the event for max spider effect http://blogs.conchango.com/michelleflynn/archive/2008/07/09/vbug-bracknell-creating-silverlight-apps-using-blend-amp-vs-08.aspx

Event is listed here >> http://www.vbug.co.uk/Events/August-2008/VBUG-Bracknell-Creating-Silverlight-apps-using-Blend-and-VS08.aspx