Community developer blogs

Mike Taulty

Recent Posts

• Catching up on blog reading…

  Posted: 03 Jul 2009 at 14:57 by mtaulty

  It was very warm and humid last night in Manchester, UK and so I sat up late catching up on a whole bunch of blog-reading that I haven’t done for a few weeks. I tend to use my blog-reader ( FeedDemon ) in the same way that I use Outlook. I go through everything, delete anything I’m less interested in and then revisit the other stuff at a later point and I thought I’d spend some time today visiting all those posts I’d flagged as interesting.

• TODO List

  Posted: 02 Jul 2009 at 23:30 by mtaulty

  There’s a bunch of things that I feel I need to know a whole lot more about so I thought I’d write it down. This is my current list of technologies that are buzzing around in my head, nagging me to spend time on them. Azure Services Platform - Microsoft .NET Services Azure Services Platform – Windows Azure .NET Framework V4.0, Specifically Windows Workflow Foundation V4.0 Windows Communication Foundation V4.0 Windows Presentation Foundation V4.

• Windows 7: Experimenting with Multi-Touch on Windows 7 ( Part 4 )

  Posted: 02 Jul 2009 at 23:16 by mtaulty

  Following up on this post , I wanted to see if I could continue to use the interop wrappers in order to add inertia to my multi-touch manipulations. The intertia API in Windows 7 is really “just” a physics engine that you can use to add more realism to things like touch interactions. There’s some detail on that physics engine in the docs and, specifically, here .

• Windows 7: Experimenting with Multi-Touch on Windows 7 ( Part 3 )

  Posted: 01 Jul 2009 at 12:56 by mtaulty

  Following on from the previous post and the one before , it was fun to play with my own interop wrappers for a while but I figure it’s going to be a lot more productive to use the interop wrappers contained up at; and they also include wrappers for the manipulation API and its friend the inertia API which I didn’t really want to get into wrapping if I could avoid it.

• Upgrading Community Server 2.1 to 2008.5 Service Pack 1

  Posted: 22 Jun 2009 at 16:38 by mtaulty

  I’ve been a bit stuck with blog engines. I run Community Server and have done for a long time and, during that time, the product’s become very big and very rich and I only use about 10% of what it does. I just want a blog engine. I was recently considering what to do about this as I’ve been getting behind on Community Server versions.

• Windows 7: Experimenting with Multi-Touch on Windows 7 ( Part 2 )

  Posted: 18 Jun 2009 at 09:49 by mtaulty

  Following on from my previous post and remembering that I’m just playing around here and there are better resources up at; which will lead you to a full, sample interop library wrapper. I wanted to carry on a little with my experiment though and move up into the world of touch gestures.

• Windows 7: Experimenting with Multi-Touch on Windows 7 ( Part 1 )

  Posted: 18 Jun 2009 at 09:41 by mtaulty

  I was down in the Microsoft Technology Centre at Reading the other week where I got a chance to take a look at a piece of proof-of-concept work that one of our customers is doing around using touch in Windows 7 to improve the user experience of one of their applications. ( I’ve captured this on video and will share at a later point as I’m not able to just at the moment ). But this got me thinking about Multi-Touch in Windows 7 and wondering how easy/hard it is.

• Video Catch-Up: Trip reports from DevDays Holland and NxtGenUG Fest 09

  Posted: 16 Jun 2009 at 08:14 by mtaulty

  I dropped a couple of videos to YouTube around recent trips that I’ve made. A couple of weeks ago I was at DevDays Holland delivering some sessions around Silverlight 3 and WPF and I captured a bit of video with the intention of giving people a flavour of what that conference looks like and also some of the “speaker experience” of turning up, finding the session room and setting up kit and so on; if you’re in the UK and you’ve never considered DevDays then it’s worth a look at because I think

• Speaking at MIX Essentials, Dublin, 24th June

  Posted: 15 Jun 2009 at 09:43 by mtaulty

  Just a quick plug – I’ll be doing some sessions on Silverlight 3 at MIX Essentials in Dublin on the 24th June. Click the picture above to jump to the site where you can register. It’s an all day event with 2 tracks running concurrently and I like the strap-line that says “Completely Free” :-) Maybe see you there…

• WCF, Type Names and BehaviorExtensionElement

  Posted: 15 Jun 2009 at 08:10 by mtaulty

  This is one purely for a search engine. If you’re ever looking at WCF and adding a BehaviorExtensionElement in order to add custom behaviors then take care if you see an error message like; "Verify that the extension is registered in the extension collection at system.serviceModel/extensions/behaviorExtensions" It looks like a bug ( see report here and here ) in that if you use a typename like this in your config file; <extensions>   <behaviorExtensions>

• Silverlight: Product Maintenance Application ( Part 6 – Porting to WPF )

  Posted: 14 Jun 2009 at 11:39 by mtaulty

  Following on from this post. As expected, porting my Utilities library to WPF wasn’t too difficult. It was a matter of creating a WPFUtilities class library, adding the existing source from Utilities as linked code files and then referencing PresentationCore and PresentationFramework and hitting build. then again, there were only a couple of very basic classes in there so it’s not too surprising.

• Silverlight: Product Maintenance Application ( Part 5 – Running the app and thinking about WPF )

  Posted: 14 Jun 2009 at 11:24 by mtaulty

  Following on from my previous post it’s time to run up the app ( it’s not exactly a visual feast :-) ) and experiment a little with it. I can log in as my user ursula; and she’s presented with “the UI” ( the graph should probably be hidden for users that are not in the viewers role but I’ve left it for now ); and then she can search for some data; and get back a bunch of paged data; and then navigate through it; because she’s neither a viewer or editor that’s all she can do and the gri

• Silverlight: Product Maintenance Application ( Part 4 – Adding some controls )

  Posted: 14 Jun 2009 at 11:18 by mtaulty

  Following up on this post I thought the first control I’d build would be a graph control so I just referenced the Silverlight Toolkit for its graphs and very quickly had; <UserControl x:Class="SilverlightApplication6.Controls.ChartDisplayControl" xmlns=" ; xmlns:x=" ; xmlns:charts="clr-namespace:System.Windows.Controls.DataVisualization.Charting;assembly=System.Windows.Controls.DataVisualization.

• Silverlight: Product Maintenance Application ( Part 3 – Getting some data )

  Posted: 14 Jun 2009 at 11:16 by mtaulty

  Following up on this previous post I wanted to start building out some classes that managed data for me “in front” of the services I’d built. I figured that I needed data for my chart, data for my products and reference data and so I sketched out a “DataModel” class; public class DataModel : PropertyChangeNotifier { public DataModel() { salesChartData = new ChartData (); referenceData = new ReferenceData (); productData = new ProductData (); } public ChartData Sales

• Silverlight: Product Maintenance Application ( Part 2 – Building some web services )

  Posted: 14 Jun 2009 at 10:52 by mtaulty

  Following up from this post, I set about building some services to power my application’s data requirements. These aren’t perfect by any means but they’re enough for a sample application to get going with. Working from the sketch of how the services need to look given at the end of the previous post, I put together a LINQ to SQL diagram; and left LINQ to SQL to do concurrency checking based on every column in the Product table ( I only plan to modify the Product table ) which is its default if

• Silverlight: Product Maintenance Application ( Part 1 – Authentication, Roles and Logging In )

  Posted: 14 Jun 2009 at 10:48 by mtaulty

  I wanted to try and follow up on this idea of the XAML Continuum and the basic example that I did with Silverlight and WPF versions of the Pong game by doing something that looked a bit more like a business application. I figured that I’d take my trusty Northwind database and build some kind of functionality that let you maintain the Products table. Specifically; Display a grid with data from the Products table allowing CRUD against that table.

• Silverlight 3 Session at NxtGen Fest 09, Microsoft Research Cambridge

  Posted: 12 Jun 2009 at 13:33 by mtaulty

  I was at the NxtGen Fest 09 event in Cambrdige today talking about Silverlight 3. A truly fantastic day with a cracking start from Professor Chris Bishop of Royal Institute Christmas lectures fame;   who was talking about 3rd generation artificial intelligence technologies. There were other great sessions from Dinis Cruz, Chris Hay amongst others.

• WPF and Silverlight Difference Whitepaper

  Posted: 10 Jun 2009 at 08:14 by mtaulty

  Wintellect have published this whitepaper on CodePlex on the differences between WPF and Silverlight. I haven’t read it all myself yet as it’s reasonably meaty but from what I’ve seen it’s a very valuable resource to have to hand if you’re working with both environments. Some of the items in the paper are illustrated by demos from my “Beyond Silverlight with WPF” talk at DevDays Holland the other week – you can find the materials here.

• Building a Viewbox-like control

  Posted: 09 Jun 2009 at 09:32 by mtaulty

  I found myself reading this post today as I wanted to build a Silverlight control which is a little like Viewbox in that it has ( let’s say ) a single lump of content that it wants to display and I was struggling to find the right base class for it. Why? Because in WPF there are methods like AddLogicalChild on FrameworkElement whereas in Silverlight you don’t have this so you have to look for a control to sub-class which already has some notion of content ( like ContentControl perhaps :-) ).

• WPF: Pong

  Posted: 03 Jun 2009 at 20:23 by mtaulty

  Following up on yesterday’s amazing breakthrough with “Silverlight:Pong” :-) I thought I’d follow a bit of this XAML Continuum myself and move my Silverlight Pong to WPF. I wanted to maintain a single code-base as much as possible. It’s fairly easy to cross-compile C# code by using conditional compilation where necessary for WPF/Silverlight ( Silverlight projects already define the SILVERLIGHT constant which is useful ) but I wanted to also try and have a single lump of XAML so that pretty much