AWESOME!

If you live anywhere near St. Louis, you have to attend this event next year! If you live further out and can still make it, it is definitely worth your time and money. Speaking of money, the registration fee was only $200 for two full days of learning. That is an amazing price! The value is incredible compared to the cost of attending TechEd or PDC or the other big conferences. I was privileged enough to attend TechEd in 2009 and had a great time, learned some cool stuff (and got to meet Michael in person for the first time). To compare the two conferences: Ounce for ounce STLDODN is either equal to or greater than the value I experienced at TechEd.

The speakers were great, the topics were on point and the atmosphere was charged with excitement and passion… or maybe that was just all the free coffee I pounded down. Seriously, you could tell that the attendees where enjoying the sessions and excited about what they were learning. The caliber of speakers, again, was on par with one of the...

We this is a classic example of “the early bird gets the worm.” I have been on hiatus for far too long, but have not been idle. I have actually been planning this blog entry for a few weeks, along with another one (more on this in a minute). As it turns out, Michael and Haruhiro where working on pretty much the same concept. They beat me to the finish line with there solution as you can see here: Using the “Hisowa Simple PopUp Behavior” in a DataGrid. Since I took a slightly different approach, I decided to go ahead and post this article.

Additionally, I believe that the more information is examined the best solution will be formed based on pieces of all the information. I want to be very clear, I think the solution described in Haruhiro’s article is great! This article is not being posted to “one up” or discredit Haruhiro’s work in any way and I suggest that if you have not read his post, you should.

Side Note: The other blog entry I planned on posting is titled “Embrace your Designer”...

Well working on a few WCF RIA Services projects a need for the UI to update based on what roles the current user belongs to came up with each project. To make this easier for all of us working on these projects I created some behaviors that accepts a list of roles and updates the UI accordingly. I decided to include this in an open source library that is available at the associated OpenLight Group Common CodePlex project site. In this article we will discuss the base class used for all of the role based behaviors and look at the RoleBasedEnabledBehavior as an example of how to implement the base class.

The first class we will look at is the abstract BaseRoleBasedBehavior class. This class is takes a generic parameter that is constrained to DependencyObject to keep it consistent with Behavior base class.

public abstract class BaseRoleBasedBehavior : Behavior where T : DependencyObject 

 

BaseRoleBaseBehavior...

A while back I made a post about using Windows Authentication with RIA Services and this post builds upon the topics discussed there. To further complicate the situation I needed to deploy a RIA services app to a Virtual Directory inside of a sub-folder in the IIS web root. To illustrate consider this URL pattern: https://intranet.companyname.com/division/applicationname

In this setup division is simply a file system folder inside of the root folder used by the IIS6 web site. Application name is an IIS6 Virtual Directory created under the division folder. For example: https://intranet.mycompany.com/accounting/costcalculator

When deploying to the virtual directory the Silverlight application spits out several 404 errors when looking for the auto-generated...

After months of work by Michael and myself, I am happy to announce that Building Websites with DotNetNuke 5 has been published! They have also published a snippet from chapter 6 – Understanding the DotNetNuke Core Architecture: https://www.packtpub.com/article/understanding-dotnetnuke-core-architecture-1 (Somehow Michael convinced them to give him all the credit for the chapter I wrote, but I won’t hold it against him. :P)

The book covers DNN from installation, management, development and deployment. Michael provides some excellent information on how to use Silverlight with DotNetNuke that makes this book worth reading just for that! Anyway, this is not meant to be an advertisement, just an excited post that the book is officially completed and now available! Writing the book was a neat experience and the fact that both of the authors are OpenLight Group founders made it that much better.

If you are interested...

I just wanted to post a thank you to all that attended the talk Monday night and ask for any feedback that you might have. That was my first time speaking at the user group and am sure there is a lot of room for improvement. So please feel free to add comments to this article with suggestions on how I can improve or email them to me directly (ian at openlightgroup dot net).

Also, I was hoping to provide a quick summary of links to some of the resource I mentioned.

Project Resources:

CodePlex Project for Silverlight SEO: http://silverlightseo.codeplex.com/ Use the discussions and issues on CodePlex for questions / bugs etc. Example site: http://silverlightseo.openlightgroup.net Helpful SEO Tools

SEO Toolkit: http://www.iis.net/expand/SEOToolkit  This requires IIS7 Lynx Browser (Text based browser): http://home.pacific.net.sg/~kennethkwok/lynx/...

So this is not a full post (hence the Preview suffix to the title), but wanted to put something out there to let everyone know that I will be posting an update to the Silverlight SEO stuff sometime next week. Monday I am speaking at the St. Louis .Net user group meeting on this topic. After the talk I will be posting my notes and code used for the demo. The code provided will approach this topic from the standpoint of building a new site as opposed to the previous posts, which focused more on upgrading a current site. Currently you can view the demo online here: http://silverlightseo.openlightgroup.net . This site is all data driven content that is shared between Silverlight and ASP.Net. In the near future the site will be filled with all of the details of how it is built and how to incorporate the same strategies in your sites to improve search engine indexing for sites using Silverlight. Keep an eye out over the next few days as the content will start...

This is a very short and sweet post about dynamically switching the ItemTemplate property of a Silverlight ListBox at runtime. First we will start with a little background of what led to this article.

I am currently working on an application that contains a list of pediatric patients and their parents. I was recently given a requirement to display a parent name to one group of medical professional and the patient name to another group. However, either group should be able to toggle this display to allow searching on either the parent or patient.

Knowing that in Silverlight, simple is usually the correct answer, I figured this should in fact be simple. Thankfully, I was correct and after only a few minutes I had the following solution working.

If Me.SearchByParent.IsChecked Then Me.PatientListBox.SetValue(ListBox.ItemTemplateProperty, _ Me.Resources("PatientParentListBoxTemplate")) Else Me.PatientListBox.SetValue(ListBox.ItemTemplateProperty,...

Like many other developers I have been excited to see that WCF RIA Services has gone beta and now comes with a Go-Live license. After this release my team at Wash U began developing a few applications using the new RIA Services bits. We have been very impressed with the productivity increase as well as several other features that RIA provides over the previous straight up WCF services have offered in the past.

All was going well, until it came time to publish the first application to the staging (user testing) server. Upon deployment the application started displaying the “Initializing Application” progress control for close to a minute.



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In college my instructor taught us that it is not always knowing the answer but knowing where to find it. In the mindset, this post is simply a list of other blogs, twitter accounts \ lists and books that I have found helpful in the recent past. Hopefully these will point you to information that you need to build great software, enjoy your work (or at least experience less stress), and keep up on the latest news regarding development.

Admittedly I have been almost 100% focused on Silverlight development, so most of these resources will reflect this. However, there are a few in the list are are more general. Also, for some of the more experienced developers, I realized that a few of these links are may have you wondering why they are including. Like the MSDN site, doesn’t everyone know about that? Well, maybe, but necessarily. So I included them for the new developers or people looking to get started.

(…these resources are in no particular order…)

Favorite Blogs (other than the OpenLight Members...