Rants
Something I never noticed before is the Document Outline window in Visual Studio (2008?). When editing large XAML files this is particularly useful to help navigate the tree of elements.
If you've never noticed it like me, you can make it show up by using the menu's when a XAML file is open: View->Other Windows->Document Outline. Alternatively, the default key command is Ctrl-Alt-T.
This is *not* a Silverlight specific feature. It works with WPF as well (but not ASP.NET pages). Nice....
As announced at TechEd today in Orlando, Silverlight 2 Beta 2 is going to be released later this week.
Now that its been announced, we can verify that starting with the June 16th class, the Silverlight Tour will now be teaching the workshop based on the Silverlight Beta 2 bits. If you've been waiting for Beta 2 to attend a class, the Washington, DC stop of the Silverlight Tour (only a couple weeks away) is the right class for you. Sign up soon as we only have a handful of seats left for that stop.
I've been using a LINQ for SQL model for a project for a few months now. The project has been compiling fine forever now. Suddenly it was failing to build the .dbml file for no apparent reason. A quick search for the problem turned up an issue with Regionate and LINQ for SQL. Uninstalled Regionate and its back to compiling.
I like the tool but until they fix the issue, i'll have to live without it for a while.
Interestingly, Microsoft has released a new tool that they've used for years internally to analyze code in their code base. Its been informally called "StyleCop" and differs from FxCop in that it analyzes source code, not compiled binaries.
If you are interested in consistency in your code base, you should take a look!
There is a bug in the current ADO.NET Data Services that ships with .NET 3.5 SP1 Beta 1. The problem involves saving related data. If the child object requires the relationship to the parent object, the update fails.
For example, if you have a Customer with a list of Orders. The relationship between the Customers and Orders is 1...* (0 or 1...* doesn't cause this bug). If you create a Customer and an Order to be updated with the ADO.NET Data Services client library at the same time, the current code attempts to save both the Customer and Order and then update the link between them separately. Of course if the relationship really is 1...*, then you can't save an Order that doesn't have a customer so the update fails. Unfortunately this can update the Customer and just ignore the error with the Order not saving.
The only way to make this work is to relax the relationship so you can create the unrelated child object.
This is a bug in the server code and will be fixed in future builds of ADO.NET Data Services.
HTH
Now that .NET 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 have been Beta'd, I've been spending a lot of time digging deep into the ADO.NET Data Services in that release. Because of this, i've been very quiet. Look for this blog to get very loud in June after TechEd (no, I won't be there).
I will be releasing a new version of my Silverlight Sample Site (www.silverlightdata.com) with ADO.NET Data Services and Forms Authenticaiton support in the next few weeks. Keep your eye here!
For the upcoming San Francisco stop of the Silverlight Tour starting May 28th, there are only five seats left. If you want to spend days with me discovering Silverlight 2, Beta 1, your time is running out.
You can see a full outline of the three day course here:
http://silverlight-tour.com/outline.aspx
I've known Julie Lerman (or is it Julia these days ;) for a long time now. She's an excellent resource for everything data related. In particular she's been keeping up with the Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services (formerly Astoria) updates in .NET 3.5 and VS SP1 Beta that was just released this week. If you are upgrading projects (like I am), she has two excellent blog posts about how to upgrade your projects:
New Entity Framework Changes
New ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) Changes
I was teaching the Silverlight Tour this week and a student asked me some advice on how to implement uploading status messages using Silverlight. The question stuck in my brain last night and I came up with a quick example but quickly hit the 4MB upload limit of standard ASP.NET Requests. I knew I could create a web-service or web page that could handle chunking the larger pieces but I was concerned about the problem of incomplete transfers and leaving a mess on my web server's disks.
It seemed to me there had to already be a solution that I could adapt for Silverlight. After a quick Twitter plead, Jon Galloway had a great link for me that had already done it in Silverlight (though it might be Silverlight 1.1). Wilco Bauwer had a good example using Silverlight and a HttpHandler to do uploads to ASP.NET. Follow the link above for a solution. I suggest getting the code and reading it. What he is doing is pretty interesting and informative.
JavaFX was announced at JavaOne this week. What is it? Its a RIA platform for creating compelling in-browser applications. Certainly this looks like its a competitor for Flash and Silverlight. Interestingly, instead of being able to write Java (at least from the quick look I had), it looks like they created a new script language (called JavaFX Script) for it. Seems like a step backwards...but that's just me.
What it does have going for it that Silverlight doesn't is interoperability with NetBeans and tools for the Mac. I don't think NetBeans interoperabilty is important, but tools for the Mac is IMHO. What do you think?
