Silverlight and non-IIS hosted WCF-services
I’m currently working on a kiosk application for a company called TicketDirect. They sell tickets to different events all around New Zealand and have decided to create a kiosk based solution where customers can buy tickets. The application needs to be Silverlight based for a couple of reasons, and must run Silverlight 3 as 4 doesn’t have a go-live license yet. The problem with this is that the application needs to talk to a credit/debit card unit as well as a ticket printer. The problem as you probably realize quickly, is that these units are connected to the computer physically and therefore are not available to Silverlight. And yeah…as you know, printing support is “limited” in Silverlight, so printing custom ticket layouts to a special ticket printer will not work…
This is how I solved it. I created a couple of WCF services to run locally on the machine and then had Silverlight connect to those to access the local system. The problem was that I did not want to run IIS on the local machines. Why? Well, for different reasons…such as the need for simple XCopy deployment. So the services would be hosted by a Windows application instead.
More...
Welcome to BlogEngine.NET 1.6.0
If you see this post it means that BlogEngine.NET 1.6.0 is running and the hard part of creating your own blog is done. There is only a few things left to do.
Write Permissions
To be able to log in to the blog and writing posts, you need to enable write permissions on the App_Data folder. If you’re blog is hosted at a hosting provider, you can either log into your account’s admin page or call the support. You need write permissions on the App_Data folder because all posts, comments, and blog attachments are saved as XML files and placed in the App_Data folder.
If you wish to use a database to to store your blog data, we still encourage you to enable this write access for an images you may wish to store for your blog posts. If you are interested in using Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, VistaDB, or other databases, please see the BlogEngine wiki to get started.
Security
When you've got write permissions to the App_Data folder, you need to change the username and password. Find the sign-in link located either at the bottom or top of the page depending on your current theme and click it. Now enter "admin" in both the username and password fields and click the button. You will now see an admin menu appear. It has a link to the "Users" admin page. From there you can change the username and password. Passwords are hashed by default so if you lose your password, please see the BlogEngine wiki for information on recovery.
Configuration and Profile
Now that you have your blog secured, take a look through the settings and give your new blog a title. BlogEngine.NET 1.4 is set up to take full advantage of of many semantic formats and technologies such as FOAF, SIOC and APML. It means that the content stored in your BlogEngine.NET installation will be fully portable and auto-discoverable. Be sure to fill in your author profile to take better advantage of this.
Themes and Widgets
One last thing to consider is customizing the look of your blog. We have a few themes available right out of the box including two fully setup to use our new widget framework. The widget framework allows drop and drag placement on your side bar as well as editing and configuration right in the widget while you are logged in. Be sure to check out our home page for more theme choices and downloadable widgets to add to your blog.
On the web
You can find BlogEngine.NET on the official website. Here you'll find tutorials, documentation, tips and tricks and much more. The ongoing development of BlogEngine.NET can be followed at CodePlex where the daily builds will be published for anyone to download.
Good luck and happy writing.
The BlogEngine.NET team
Button “hacks”
After that somewhat useless title, let me explain. I’m currently working on a kiosk application in Silverlight (there will be more about it later). And while working with it I had two issues with the Button that comes with Silverlight. First of all, as with most controls, it swallows some of the events that I needed, and second it raises the Click event before the VisualStateManager takes the state back to Normal. The second one is very specific to my kiosk application, or at least to touch screen interfaces…so I wrote a couple of custom buttons to help me with these problems…
More...
OpenXML + Silverlight using a little library
As I mentioned in my last post, I decided to try to create a simple little OpenXML library for Silverlight. The goal with the task was to see how it could work and if it was possible to roll it in to something useful. And to be honest, it is very useful. And even though the library that is available for download at the end of the post is small, it is aimed to be as open and flexible as possible. A small intro on how to use it might be in order…
More...
OpenXML + Silverlight
I’m back again with another one of my interesting and insightful posts…or well…at least another post. Unfortunately, since it is quite a big subject, I will have to divide it in to two parts. This first part contains information about what OpenXML is and how to use Silverlight to creates office documents. While the second part will show the how to use the simple library I built to make it simpler.
For those of you who don’t know what OpenXML is, it is a standardized XML based format for storing Office type documents, which is used by MS Office as well as some other office packages. It is certified by ISO as well as ECMA. You can read a lot more about it at http://www.openxmldeveloper.org. Normally you work with it using the OpenXML SDK, but that is not available to Silverlight…yet at least…
I personally had very little experience in the format as such, until recently. Just before x-mas, I got assigned to a project at my company that opened my eyes to it though. I got the honorable task, together with another developer at our office (who actually did most of the work), to update the lab material on the OpenXML Deverloper site and make sure it worked with the upcoming Office 2010. After just a few slides about the standard, it dawned to me that it seemed like a pretty simple task to implement a small, but extensible, OpenXML library for Silverlight. So I did…
More...