We love SketchFlow over here at the Open Light Group. As Ian would say, it's "bomb-diggity". Well the Open Light Group has a Open Source project called SilverlightDesktop.net that uses draggable movable windows. We needed to make these windows in our SketchFlow projects because the point of SketchFlow is that you can quickly make a sketch that actually moves.

I finally got around to updating the Silverlight 3 Drag and Drop sample to use the latest Tim Heuer's Floatable Window.

His latest version fixed the problem with the left side moving while dragging the window to the right. We will work on this in the coming weeks as we prepare to eventually incorporate this into SilverlightDesktop.net. Our desire is to make Floatable Window work in SilverlightDesktop.net without modifying Floatable Window. This will allow SilverlightDesktop.net to benefit from future enhancements with Floatable Window.

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I recently spent about 2 hours making a DotNetNuke Silverlight SketchFlow Viewer. After I had it working with about 20 files and directories the Blend 3 packager creates, I then realized that all you really needed to make it work is the .xap file.

Well Jan Olsmar already created a module Silverlight Media for DotNetNuke® that allows you to load a .xap file for a Silverlight application into your DotNetNuke site.

However, I didn't want my effort to go to waste so I added a way to upload the file through the application rather than requiring you to use the DotNetNuke...

The latest ADefHelpDesk release (A Free Open Source DotNetNuke Help Desk / Support Desk / Ticket Tracker Module) took over 30 hours of work. This is almost half the amount of time it took to create the first version. The reason it took so long is we finally added Localization. This allows users to create additional resource files that will allow site administrators to display ADefHelpDesk in different languages.

To implement Localization we had to go through every screen and replace all text with label controls and add a resource tag and an entry in a corresponding resource file. We also had to create an entry in the corresponding resource file and a reference to it in al the code behind code that generated any text on the page or in emails.

This allows site administrators to create or obtain resource files in additional languages that will allow them to display ADefHelpDesk...

 

I finally got around to creating a DotNetNuke 5 and Silverlight 3 "Hello World" tutorial. Keep in mind that all the Silverlight 2 tutorials still apply so I wont "redo" any of them.

One thing that is different about this tutorial is that I am using the authentication cookie that DotNetNuke passes to the web browser (and Silverlight then passes to the web service) to authenticate the user . This allows me to eliminate code that I normally use in tutorials such as this one: Silverlight 2.0 Webservice Example.

However, this comes at a price. If the user "times out" on the DotNetNuke site due to a period of inactivity, they will also "time out" in the Silverlight application.

One of the advantages of Silverlight is that the user never has to "time out". A...

After seeing this demo: [Mini-Tutorial] Blend 3: Rich Interactivity with No Code and the cool way she was able to simply drop a "Behavior" on a button and a menu displays (and allows you to set some properties using simple drop downs no less) and then the button is now able to make another element move, I had to learn how to make behaviors.

There are examples on the web but all the ones I found were based on the Silverlight 3 preview and with the released version of Silverlight 3, there have been changes.

SketchFlow included in Microsoft Expression Blend 3 is really a great program. It is a product that you didn't know you needed until you have it. Essentially after 2 hours of practice, I can now mock up a interactive website about as fast as I could sketch it on paper.

To get started watch these videos:

[Mini-Tutorial] Blend 3: SketchFlow Part I [Mini-Tutorial] Blend 3: SketchFlow Part II [Mini-Tutorial] Blend 3: Visual Data Binding...

Ian and I decided to use the Silverlight Chat a week ago and the conversation went kinda funny. There were long pauses and each person made comments that seemed out of place. After awhile one of us asked the other, "Did you get every message I sent you?".

The chat has a log and we each looked at it and realized that more than half of the conversation was missing! Turns out that any message more than 100 characters was not being sent. It was an easy fix and the latest one is deployed at this link, but had we not used it we would have not found the bug. In testing we always tested using short messages.

At my work we recently started to use ADefHelpDesk. On the first day a number of small bugs popped up. They were small, like a misspelling on a notification email, but they are the sort of thing that still makes a difference. We just did a release...

I have avoided left outer joins in Linq to SQL because I have been always able to use a linq projection to get the needed values in a sub query. However, I had a bug in ADefHelpDesk that would not allow a search on the description of a ticket if the Ticket didn't have a related details record.



ADefHelpDesk_Task contains the ticket, and ADefHelpDesk_TaskDetail contains 0 or more detail records. The previous search code looked like this:

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Well I spent all day working on ADefHelpDesk. I got these features in and released:

Allows users in the Assigned group to selectively send emails to Requestor.

Fixed url link in emails when the current user that created the emails was using a url that was not the default url.

Removed the use of the Ajax update panel to fix a bug in DNN5 Beta that did not allow Administrator to create a ticket for another user.

Fix bugs in search and optimized code to improve performance.

Fixed formatting of the Logs screen.

Doesn't seem like a lot considering...