Community developer blogs

.NET, Silverlight, and other ramblings

Recent Posts

• Modifying web.configs on the fly in Windows Azure

  Posted: 04 Jul 2009 at 15:19 by chrishayuk

  This has caught me out often enough that I should blog about it. If you are working with a web role in Windows Azure your web project is copied into the bin directory of your cloud project and is ran from there.  This allows the Windows Azure Development environment to simulate running within the cloud. If you need to therefore modify a web.config setting then modifying your web.config on the fly from your source file won’t make the slightest bit of difference. You need to either modify the web.

• Azure Pricing

  Posted: 04 Jul 2009 at 11:03 by chrishayuk

  So we will soon know the pricing model of Windows Azure (yay), we will probably find this out on the 13th of July but we will certainly know this by 4.30pm on Tuesday the 14th of July. If we don’t have the information on this date then the folks attending session “SS006 – The Azure Service Platform Partner Model and Pricing” could be in for a surprise.  The Microsoft Worldwide Partner conference site has more details of this.

• Loosely couple code/data for static known types

  Posted: 01 Jul 2009 at 22:47 by chrishayuk

  So the title is a bit of a mouthful but I couldn't think of a better one. The problem is simple and we have all faced it.  We have a database with static data that never or hardly changes.  The major issue we have is that we keep a copy of the data on the database and the we make loose runtime references to the code which can break our application. For example lets say I have a payroll database.  Some employees are paid weekly, every 2 weeks or ever calendar month.

• NULLS FIRST LAST

  Posted: 01 Jul 2009 at 22:06 by chrishayuk

  As I said in my previous post, I've been looking at other technologies in my continuing quest to become a better developer. One technology is open source database called postgresql.  I haven't installed it yet just looking at the manuals and comparing to sql server.  Perhaps after the book is done I'll get a chance to play. One of the features that I spotted that I think would pretty cool in SQL Server is the ability to specify sort order of nulls in SELECT statements.

• I’ve got lots to say just not enough time

  Posted: 30 Jun 2009 at 09:13 by chrishayuk

  I haven’t really spent anytime blogging in the past few months.  I have a tons of things to say, unfortunately just don’t have enough time at the moment. I’ve obviously been writing my book on Azure and have loads to blog about regarding. I’ve also spent time messing around with design patterns Data Layers OR/M’s, Caching I’ve also been looking outside of the Microsoft stack which reaffirms my position of why I’m glad I work with Microsoft.

• Silverlight: (and Azure) Range Http Request Header

  Posted: 06 Jun 2009 at 12:46 by chrishayuk

  So this one is for the Azure team.Can we have in Windows Azure Blob Storage the ability to pass through as an http request header key x-ms-range as well as range.Both Silverlight and Flash don't allow the ability to pass the range in the header. I suspect that the NSAPI plug-in is preventing this. This means we can't make us of range downloads (and other functionality such as authorization) unless the Azure teams adds some extra support.

• Please make the classes in RestHelpers.cs public

  Posted: 04 Jun 2009 at 21:42 by chrishayuk

  There are a bunch of very cool set of helper classes (resthelpers.cs) in the Windows Azure storageclient library. If these could be made public rather than internal my life would be so much happier

• Blob Scenarios for the Azure in Action book

  Posted: 04 Jun 2009 at 21:05 by chrishayuk

  So I’m currently looking at the Blobs chapter of the “Azure in Action” book that myself and Brian Prince are writing. In our call with the publisher the other night, our very cool publishing company (Manning) encouraged us to get as much input from folks in the community as possible.  I love this philosophy and I love working with such an enlightened company. So if there any cool samples that you would love to see done, then please give me a shout.

• My new Azure Book

  Posted: 24 May 2009 at 15:32 by chrishayuk

  So I've just agreed to write a book on Azure for Manning.  The timeline is very aggressive so I'm going to pretty focused on Azure for the next few months. I'm incredibly pleased and honored to have had my proposal accepted and today is my first day of writing.  Actually, when I say first day of writing, it's more of my first day setting up my environment for writing the book.

• Silverlight: Toronto Code Camp Slides + Samples

  Posted: 28 Apr 2009 at 21:33 by chrishayuk

  A big thanks to everyone who came to my session on Silverlight Communication at Toronto Code Camp. Also a big mega thanks to everyone I met, and everyone involved in the organization.  What a great event. My slides are available here and my samples are available here

• Silverlight: Multiple Http Requests Screencast

  Posted: 19 Apr 2009 at 22:00 by chrishayuk

  It's important to remember that Silverlight is a browser technology and is therefore subject to the limits imposed by the browser.This is especially true in the networking stack and Silverlight is limited to the number of connections it can make just as the browser is.I show you this is the case in my latest screencast, Multiple Http Requests in SilverlightThe video is embedded below for you to view also:

• Silverlight: Who cares if Binary Encoding is not interoperable?

  Posted: 18 Apr 2009 at 22:39 by chrishayuk

  I know the title of this post is a little tongue in cheek but actually who cares? Just to put this in context in SL3, Microsoft have added support for binary encoding of soap messages for communication between Silverlight 3 applications and WCF Services. Binary encoding means that the server can process messages faster, meaning higher throughput and the ability to handle more clients than the SL2 text encoding for SOAP. The downside that the binary encoding is a proprietary Microsoft format (not

• I wish I was at WebDD

  Posted: 18 Apr 2009 at 17:55 by chrishayuk

  I have to admit, I wish I was at WebDD as an attendee or a speaker. I decided not to submit a session (not because I didn't want to), but because I am working on my session for Toronto next week, which is the same reason I can't attend. Looks like it was a cracking day, lots of webby things.

• Silverlight: Toronto Code Camp Session

  Posted: 16 Apr 2009 at 09:08 by chrishayuk

  I guess I’m getting a little excited about going to Toronto Code Camp next week.At the same time, things are hectic, lots of preparation to do :)I am presenting a session on Silverlight 3 Communication. Funnily enough although the title suggests that I will be focusing on the new Silverlight 3 WCF Features (which I will be), this is not the complete story.In order to truly understand the improvements made to networking in Silverlight 3, you need to understand the networking stack as it relates

• I'm a PC (thankfully)

  Posted: 13 Apr 2009 at 11:24 by chrishayuk

  This Easter bank holiday weekend, I decided I wanted to learn some new stuff.  So since I have been sporting my new IPhone for the last few weeks, I thought learning how to develop on the IPhone would be cool. So I have borrowed my mates MacPowerbook Pro, and I picked some books on IPhone development and Objective-C. I haven't developed any IPhone apps yet, as I thought I would concentrate on the Objective-C language, which I feel I have a good grip of now. So later today, I will attempt to crea

• Silverlight: Toronto Code Camp

  Posted: 13 Apr 2009 at 11:13 by chrishayuk

  I'm pleased to say that I will be presenting at Toronto Code Camp in a few weeks time. I will be doing a session on Silverlight 3 communication, covering lots of WCF stuff, Local Messaging and the new networking api used for Out of Browser. I'm really looking forward to my first trip to Canada and meeting lots of cool people. I hope to see you there.

• Enabling Hardware Virtualization on a Sony Laptop

  Posted: 10 Apr 2009 at 15:21 by chrishayuk

  This post is important to me as this was a real pain for me. So virtualization is increasingly important today, and today I was needing to run a VM, and it turned out the VM was running a little slower than I was expecting.  This is because my laptop didn't have Virtualization enabled on the bios. This is normally very simple, just go to your bios settings on bootup and enable it, however I own a Sony.  I love Sony Vaio's however you can't switch on hardware virtualization easily. In

• Silverlight: DDD Belfast Silverlight 3 talk

  Posted: 07 Apr 2009 at 13:33 by chrishayuk

  A big thanks to everyone who came to my session at DDD Belfast on Silverlight 3 at the weekend. I really enjoyed presenting in Belfast and I had a great a time all round, and glad that it went so well.  In the end I pretty much covered nearly every new feature of SL3 (which was a challenge).  I worked out that it took me about 80-100 hours to prepare that presentation.  So I think I will now take a few evenings off this week to relax. The slides are available here: http://cid-f6bb92b5df4cfec0.sk

• Silverlight: Screencast: Silverlight 3 Derived Styles

  Posted: 06 Apr 2009 at 22:29 by chrishayuk

  In this short screencast, I show you how to quickly get started with style inheritance in Silverlight 3. You can download the video from here, or watch below

• Demo Gremlins

  Posted: 02 Apr 2009 at 14:31 by chrishayuk

  So everytime I build a new presentation, I try and find an unsuspecting audience to try it out on before I present it for real. I have a brand new presentation on Silverlight 3 in Belfast, and today I did my dummy run in Cambridge for a company that I work with.  They are a very forgiving audience :) So I got really great feedback and it went really well (even though I was still changing things last night).  However the demo gods did strike on more than one occasion.  As I said they are very for