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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I’m finally back after a couple of weeks with too much stuff to do. It is definitely time to finish off the blog series about SilverTweet, the Silverlight twitter client that you can build on your own. Hopefully you can then take this thing and extend it with the features you need.
For those of you who haven’t read the previous parts, I would recommend doing so. Otherwise, this part will give you just about nothing valuable. And for those of you who have, and did so before I posted this part, I just want to mention that I found a pretty obvious bug in part 3.
The example code in this post will create a functional, but fugly UI. The downloadable code will contain this UI, as well as an extra UI with better layout, some animations and so on. The reason for the fugly UI here is simplicity. Not that the other UI is REALLY beautiful, but it is at least a lot better…
But let’s just get started straight away and have a look at the UI that we need to start using the application.
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30. September 2009
ZeroKoll
Silverlight
And once again I’m back on my computer with Live Writer and Visual Studio open. I thought it was time to give you the 4th part of the SilverTweet series. If you have missed part 1, part 2 and/or part 3, I recommend heading back and looking through them.
If someone would have told me a year ago that I would be so obsessed with my work, that I would be sitting on a plane at 07:20 in the morning writing a blog entry, I would probably have said that they must have me confused with someone else. Software development is just a job, it isn’t my life… Well, I guess I care more about it than I would like to admit…
Anyhow, in this part of the blog series, I’m going to go on and show you the rest of the models/viewmodels used in the SilverTweet application.
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23. September 2009
ZeroKoll
Silverlight
Once again I am back to my Twitter client. The next step in my application is to create some view models to bind the view to. This includes adapting the models I get from the Twitter service to the interface that I am going to create, as well as creating some models of my own. The modification of the auto generated ones, is pretty easy to do using the “new” partial class definition, that the objects defined in by the service proxy use.
Anyhow, let’s get started with some coding. But before I get started with the viewmodels, I am going to create a very simple little layer of abstraction. What? Why? Well, I want to de-couple the Twitter service as much as possible. The reasons for this are a couple, but mainly because of the way Twitter works. Since it is on the web, it means that I need to have internet connection to access it. It also has a limit to the amount of requests one can do per hour. This means that if I work without an internet connection or do a lot of testing with loads of requests to the service, it might cause some problems. By de-coupling it, I can switch the implementation to a mocked version, removing the need for internet access as well as the request limits. It also makes it possible for me to create unit tests for my viewmodels if I wanted that. So this layer of abstraction gives me some options. Not that I will use any of them in this example, but I have the option if I ever needed.
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21. September 2009
ZeroKoll
Silverlight
Welcome back! Or at least I hope it is welcome BACK. If you are not coming back, that means that you have missed the first part of this blog series. And in that case, I recommend by starting out by reading the first part. If you have already done that…let’s get cracking…
In the first part, I focused on the connection to Twitter. That included implementing OAuth and the Twitter methods I need to get the client to run. In this part, which will be a lot shorter, I’m going to focus on creating a webservice that can expose the Twitter functionality to the Silverlight client.
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16. September 2009
ZeroKoll
Silverlight
A while back, I wrote this blog series about how to build a Silverlight client for flickr. This seemed to be pretty popular among a bunch of the people who stumble across my blog. I don’t know if it was specifically because it was using flickr or if it was because it went through the entire application step by step or if it was something else. But since then, I have gone around thinking about other possible applications that I could dissect in the same way, and for some odd reason I stumbled across Twitter. I know…you don’t stumble across Twitter. It is all over the place, and anybody that hasn’t heard of it is probably dead or deaf and blind. I’m personally not that active on Twitter, even though I try on and off. For anyone interested, I’m available here.
Anyhow, after having looked at it for a while, I decided to create a Silverlight based Twitter application. Even though it’s not as fancy or useful as some of the other alternatives out there, it will show the basics behind how to build a client. And not a client that just allows you to read a feed, but actually interact with it and send tweets. If you are not interested in how to develop a Twitter client and just want a Silverlight based client, I would recommend Gadfly, which is a fantastic client compared to what I’m going to show. But the idea behind this blog series is not to get the coolest application, but have a look at how one could go about building a client.
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There is a simple little feature available in Silverlight that I think everyone should use, or at least more or less everyone. It is the possibility of adding a custom loading screen that will be shown while the plug-in downloads the Xap. It is simple to implement and gives your application that little extra to make it stand out. If you look at Flash for example, you will see that every Flash application has its own loading screen. During the time that the application downloads, you can display how much has been downloaded, but you can also give the user something to look at or even do. My favorite loaders the ones that gives you a simple game to play with while the application loads. This however, is only useful if the application is really big. And in that case, I would recommend splitting up the application in smaller pieces and load them on demand. Anyhow, how do we do it?
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Welcome back! Or possible Welcome! Sort of depends on if you saw my previous post… Anyhow, you have probably figured out that it is time to go on with even more binding information. In the previous we looked at the basic binding syntax and functionality. So, what’s left? Well, a bunch of small, medium and large details…
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If you have read anything I have written in the past, you are probably familiar with the fact that I am a huge fan of MVVM. There will have to be a lot of convincing before anyone gets me to switch pattern when working with Silverlight. There are several things one must learn and understand before one can use MVVM well.
There is the obvious part of learning the actual pattern and how it works. Learning how to build a good viewmodel, which is dependent on the data model and time and other circumstances. I know that there are a lot of people out there, especially bloggers, that will tell you that you have to build something according to this or that and be a true purist to be a good developer. However, a lot of these people forget that most of us do actually have clients that don’t feel like spending 2 months or $10.000 just to get it to be a perfect solution. In most cases one must adhere to this and make the best of the situation.
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I’ve recently come up with a thing that is probably old news for most people. But to me it was new. I have styled a bunch of things lately, among them a bunch of buttons. Most of the buttons had MouserOver states, but no Pressed state. So I changed the template of the buttons and added my VisualStateManager (VSM from now on).
Being lazy as I am, I opened up generic.xaml and stole the original style for the button. And no, I did not use Blend! Why not? Probably because I’m a stubborn meticulous person who like coding things on my own…
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