As you might have noticed, Microsoft PDC ‘09 has “just” finished. Unfortunately, like with all other conferences, I didn’t get to attend. PDC did however give me a lot of good things. First of all, the most obvious, a new Silverlight beta. Silverlight 4 includes a lot of interesting stuff that will be really interesting to play around with. Among the interesting features to note is webcam support, COM integration, support for external devices, access to local files, support for showing HTML, RichText and lots more. Oh…yeah…they have also added a bit of commanding support… And a few nice Visual Studio enhancements for Silverlight, such as Intellisense for bindings…
Another cool thing about PDC was that even if I didn’t get to attend, I was still sort of there. I was involved in building three Silverlight applications for Microsoft. If you attended, or have looked at some of the videos from PDC, you might have seen one or two of them.
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I’m finally back with another blog post. I have been really busy and have not had time to blog as much as I wanted to, but I have finally got around to get together a hopefully interesting post. Ever since I heard that Silverlight 3 had multi-touch support, I have wanted to try it out. Unfortunately I’m not wealthy enough to be able to run off and get a new laptop just because the one I have doesn’t support multi-touch. So I have had to wait, until a couple of days ago, when I finally got around to buying an iPod Touch. Using the iPod Touch’s multi-touch support to do Silverlight multi-touch development is actually not that hard, just a bit fiddly.
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I’m currently working on some cool demos for PDC09. Unfortunately, I can’t talk about them yet, but I can tell you some interesting things that I have found along the way. Since I do a lot of different development on a lot of different projects, most of my projects are built inside a VM. This makes it really easy to keep the projects separate and keeps the host machine clean. However, Hyper-V seems to kill the performance of graphics intensive tasks. So, Blend work is really slow. And besides, I’m among other things running some things that work with Azure, which is kind of slow. So I have opted for a solution where I share the Silverlight project between my VM and my host, making it possible for me to do the graphically intensive things on the host, but keep the source and source control in the VM.
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For some reason, I keep ending up with restyled ListBoxes in my projects. I don’t know if it is because I lack imagination or if the ListBox is just such a useful control. Anyhow, it is a control that most people will use in a lot of projects and that often needs to be restyled. However useful it is, the layout is pretty stiff and Windowsy and unless you are going for that old school Windows look, you will most likely want to style it and make it a bit flashier. Unfortunately, after having had a look around the web, I still haven’t found a good resource explaining the innards of a ListBox, so I decided to create one. It might not be a complete one, but it will cover most of the things you need to make some serious layout changes… So here we go
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Lately, I have been bombarded with talk about inversion of control (IoC), dependency injection (DI) and service locators. Unfortunately, I have also heard a lot of odd comments that doesn’t really make sense. But I think that is because people are having trouble separating the different words and understanding what they actually mean. So I thought I would try to explain the different things as I have understood them. And do so using a simple understandable language, instead of the often overly complex way that a lot of other people use.
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