Community developer blogs

Ian Blackburn

Recent Posts

• Free Typemock Licenses

  Posted: 19 May 2009 at 11:58 by Ian Blackburn

  Hands up – by blogging about this quickly, I may get a free typemock license.  All I have to do is post the text below!    *Begin* Unit Testing ASP.NET? ASP.NET unit testing has never been this easy. Typemock is launching a new product for ASP.NET developers – the ASP.NET Bundle - and for the launch will be giving out FREE licenses to bloggers and their readers. The ASP.NET Bundle is the ultimate ASP.

• Silverlight for Mobile – further thoughts

  Posted: 07 Apr 2009 at 10:34 by Ian Blackburn

  Bart Czernicki had good post recently titled Silverlight 3 - Where is Silverlight Mobile? I thought a lot of the comments he made were spot on.  We have been lead up the garden path by the mobile team and in particular Amrit Chopra who has been announcing Silverlight for Mobile for 3 years now.  In fact I was expecting that he would announce it again at Mix year and then deliver nothing again!  Turns out he took a back seat in the 6.5 overview instead and no significant news on Silverlight Mobil

• Microsoft Architect Insight Conference – 8th May, London

  Posted: 28 Mar 2009 at 10:00 by Ian Blackburn

  Just a quick shout out to this conference – just booked my ticket- looks like a very interesting day.  Thanks to Mike Taulty for highlighting it in his blog. I have grabbed a screen shot of the agenda below, but you can visit the site here for full details of speakers etc.  Fee is a reasonable £99+vat Cheers Ian Technorati Tags: Microsoft,conference,architect

• Silverlight Pulse – a twitter silverlight app

  Posted: 17 Mar 2009 at 01:32 by Ian Blackburn

  Just a quick note to point you towards a little app I have been playing with to keep track of Silverlight news on Twitter.  Thought it might be interesting to keep an eye on this week with all the Silverlight announcements. This is a very early attempt at some ideas I have for a richer Silverlight Twitter app – [read more]  Cheers Ian Technorati Tags: Silverlight,Twitter

• Brad Adams talks about “Silverlight 3 for Great Business Apps”

  Posted: 09 Mar 2009 at 19:25 by Ian Blackburn

  Robert Hess has a interesting chat with Brad Adams about silverlight 3 – this is a sneak peak of Brad’s session for Mix09, without, as he calls “the super secret stuff”. [read full article] Technorati Tags: Silverlight,LOB,Validation

• Silverlight M-V-VM Resources

  Posted: 02 Mar 2009 at 09:36 by Ian Blackburn

  The Model-View-ViewModel pattern has been gaining a lot of popularity for WPF, and there have been a growing number of posts and resources about adapting it for Silverlight. This is a short summary post of some of those resources.  I will follow this up later with a detailed post on M-V-VM where I will also explore the business case for adopting such a design .. [read more] Cheers   Ian Technorati Tags: Silverlight,M-V-VM

• Silverlight Visualisation Example – how much energy is wasted in US households?

  Posted: 24 Feb 2009 at 08:29 by Ian Blackburn

  This example was produced rather quickly in response to a challenge by Tim Heuer and shows the energy consumption of US households over the last few years and then predicted to 2030.  I was inspired by an article in National Geographic that I was reading, and it highlights I hope, the rather dramatic amount of energy is wasted through “electrical loss” (though I was a little disappointed from the visualisation point of view, how little the data changed in the prediction, made for a less dramatic

• Implementing Validation Logic in Silverlight 2

  Posted: 07 Feb 2009 at 11:38 by Ian Blackburn

  In Silverlight 3 we have seen that the Alexandria Framework will have a rich validation and business logic framework that is really very powerful and productive.  Silverlight 3 is due to be announced at Mix 09, and I would expect a CTP or Beta to be available then. But what can you do now?  Even if we get a go-live license on a SL 3 Beta it will be too early for many corporate teams to adopt.  This post will look at using Silverlight 2 and: ... Read full article Technorati Tags: Silverlight,E

• Will this be the biggest feature of IE8?

  Posted: 05 Feb 2009 at 15:38 by Ian Blackburn

  Ok – that’s a bit unfair – I do like IE8 but the amount of sites that are broken until you switch compatibility on is quite startling! Developers don’t need to do much to fix it, just add the following header to force IE8 to enter IE7 compatible mode automatically (or change your site to be IE8 compatible of course ;-) <meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=EmulateIE7? /> Note too that in the dialog above Microsoft are creating an updated list of sites that need

• Silverlight Accessibility and creating DDA Compliant applications in the UK

  Posted: 05 Feb 2009 at 15:16 by Ian Blackburn

  [cross posted from: http://blackburnian.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!FB8B852EF1AB0B35!1917.entry] In the UK the DDA (The Disability Discrimination Act, 1995) makes it a legal requirement for service providers to ensure access for disabled customers and if necessary make reasonable adjustments to the way they deliver their services; this includes web sites (see Part III, 2.2, 4.7, 2.13-2.17, 5.23 and 5.26).  This almost certainly isn’t news to most of you, but I think there is a large degree of conf

• Why Software Sucks (Windows Mobile Live Search vs. Google Maps Mobile)

  Posted: 28 Jan 2009 at 09:24 by Ian Blackburn

  Sorry Microsoft but you lose this battle (in the same way that Google beat UPS in David Platt’s classics Sweden story). Using your mobile to find local information and directions is really useful; I have both Live Search and Google maps installed on my TyTn II.  Live Search has recently added the ability to find your location without a GPS – using triangulation or your IP address I assume.  Google maps has had this for a while.  So imagine this situation:  I live in Kent, UK, both apps find me f

• Silverlight Drag and Drop and HitTest on any layout (not just Canvas)

  Posted: 17 Dec 2008 at 19:03

  [Cross Posted from http://silverlightforbusiness.net ] A common requirement for a rich UI in a business application is to support dragging and dropping of UI elements.  For this to be successful you will need to be able to detect what elements you are dragging over, and you will need to support drag

• Skydrive &ndash; now no Windows ID required to collect files

  Posted: 12 Dec 2008 at 10:09

  This little checkbox is a welcome addition for me: It means that I can share files on a Skydrive and not require recipients to have a Windows Live ID, which was occasionally a problem before, 25GB is available for free now too which is nice Technorati Tags: Skydrive,Windows Live Ian

• Working with Data in Silverlight 2 (Entity Framework, Ado.Net Data Services, and DataGrid)

  Posted: 07 Dec 2008 at 18:48

  [Cross posted from: SilverlightForBusiness.net ] Since the announcement from Tim Mallalieu (Program Manager, LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework) that “as of NET 4.0 the Entity Framework will be our recommended data access solution for LINQ to relational scenarios” your first decision on how to get dat

• Serializing Objects to Isolated Storage in Silverlight 2

  Posted: 27 Nov 2008 at 11:26

  [Cross posted from: SilverlightForBusiness.net ] Silverlight 2 does not have a BinaryFormatter like the full framework does so you have to take a different approach to serializing data to Isolated Storage. However there is a simple solution by using the DataContractSerializer.  You will need to add

• Announcing: Silverlight &quot;Power Seminar&quot;

  Posted: 12 Nov 2008 at 15:15

  Kings Hill Conference & Training Centre (location) Friday November 28th, 2008 (10am-1pm) I am presenting this seminar in Kings Hill on November 28th – should be a good overview and I will be drilling into some depth with the demo’s later on. Hope you can make it. Marketing info and content below

• Silverlight 2 vs. Asp.Net Ajax

  Posted: 05 Nov 2008 at 19:15

  Shameless plug for my new blog:  silverlightforbusiness.net And the latest article:  Silverlight 2 vs. Asp.Net Ajax Cheers Ian Technorati Tags: Silverlight,asp.Net Ajax

• VS2010 &ndash; two screenshots to warm the hearts of TDD fans

  Posted: 04 Nov 2008 at 15:31

  When you are doing TDD you want more more than the Generate Method Stub functionality in VS2008 – you want to be able to generate stubs for anything! Well VS 2010 comes to the rescue (as it should since it states they are targeting TDD as mainstream for this release) And if you click Generate Othe

• New SilverlightForBusiness.net Blog

  Posted: 03 Nov 2008 at 14:20

  Most developers and managers are impressed with Silverlight when they first see it, and most are keen see what it can do.  Most see the immediate benefits for rich web based UI, and often there is a comparison drawn with Flash (“Is Silverlight a Flash Killer?”).  However the business case is not alw

• Creating Reusable Animations in Silverlight 2

  Posted: 01 Nov 2008 at 09:36

  I answered a post on the Silverlight forums recently about creating reusable animations for an Image, and thought that it was worth a blog entry to expand on it a little. I am looking here at two common approaches to creating reusable animations within a single project: Create the animation in xam