IStreaming

Saturday, May 1, 2010

Unity + Silverlight 4.0 + VS2010 + Prism = Heartache

Found an issue yesterday that caused me to lose half-a-day. It seems that The latest V4 drop of Prism (including the Unity container) has an issue resolving partial classes. The signature: Container.Resolve[shell]();

Would not compile - at all! Note: for those of you paying attention, replace the brackets with the appropriate greater-than, less-than signs!

It seemed as if the source code was not in sync, which is typically the case with most SL projects. Nope, was absolutely horrendous experience. Turns out someone also "discovered" the issue and promptly when to CodePlex to report it, I'd give them "props" but I am unable to link to the original issue - which for all intensive purposes is not on the site anymore. Curious.

To be fair - I wouldn't typically resolve to a concrete instance anyway, but when dealing with newness, I find it best to take smaller steps! I'm abandoning Unity for present and looking into Ninject to meet my Silverlight needs. Might consider MEF if it wasn't so attribute "dirty". It feels unclean to drive the heart of your composition framework with attributes; also I'm not sure how I feel about the sheer "randomness" of potentially IMPORTING multiple modules within a given view. Silverlight Goodness (with Blendability in mind!) Another funday morning.

Saturday, April 10, 2010

iPhone Development with MonoTouch

Worth every penny - enough for corporate types to consider if they really want to start developing for the Apple platform.
Wiki-site
Gps is ridiculously easy
When I think of the pain I've went through - even simpler.
Will it work with Microsoft backends? Well, kinda. The jury is still out, and it's still experimental.WCF Services for iPhone
The best part. They actually support Sqlite intrisically on the phone. Are you listening Silverlight product owners?

Silverlight 4 Hopes and Woes

Woes
A developer from VistaDB posted the following.
the .net framework in silverlight, compact framework, ADO (not!)

A key comment in the blog entry is this:

“I do agree that Silverlight is an underserved market, but I think that is by Microsoft design. They want everything to be service driven and use online services. They appear to be skipping over the local database entirely. I guess your phone is never supposed to be out of range of a tower, or your Silverlight app on a desktop that is offline.”

Really?

And with all the work for Out-of-Browser mode (elevated trust, device support, etc), that never seemed to cross anyone's mind? Ooops, I'm offline. Let me save my work?

Really?

Maybe Sqlite is an option?

Maybe siaqodb is an option?

Really? No-one considered this?

really.

IoC for Silverlight

Ninject vs. Unity who will win in a fight. Right now it seems that Ninject may have a problem with the new Windows Mobile O/S. And I was really rooting for Ninject too!

How to Target Multiple .NET Frameworks

General concerns is that a majority of Open Source projects don't really consider Silverlight.

Now porting existing WPF applications to Silverlight - it really makes you appreciate the fullness of the .NET runtime!

If I continue to be abused by Microsoft I guess there is always Mono although it tends to lag behind the MS expectation and hype.

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Silverlight 4.0 and VS2010

I am not an MS evangelist, but I am excited about the potential for Silverlight 4.0 to knock-down the boundaries of cross-platform development. Additionally, having to deal with "spotty" coverage and "sometimes connected" clients have made the browser-based solution a "nice-idea" but unrealistic for most of our endeavours. Having just gone to Orlando CodeCamp 2010, and seeing that Mobile 7 really is trending in the Silverlight direction - plus the fact that a Silverlight application can run the same "in-the-browser" as well as a "standalone" application. Yes, I know. Those features were there in 3.0, but without any serious data-binding, lack of ICommand support, printing, trust conditions etc. it really didn't make any sense, to me anyway. Will spend most of my "free-time" looking into this platform.

PDC 2009
http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/P09-11?type=wmvhigh

Resources
http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-4/#getting-started
http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/Five-Silverlight-4.0-features-you-cannot-do-without.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/dphill/archive/2009/12/24/custom-content-loaders-in-silverlight-4-0.aspx

Update (It's not all ponies & rainbows!)
http://stevesmithblog.com/blog/untrusted-projects-and-blocked-files-in-visual-studio/