RIA Services and Resharper

Wow that took a seriously long time, Vodafone customer service was the worst I’ve experienced in many years. This was a little gotcha I experienced while at “Expression For Arts Sake” and took me a bit to work out what was going wrong.

Web 09 and Expression for Arts Sake

So it's been a busy few weeks, last week I was at Web 09 a great conference here in Auckland. I was able to spend a day at a one day workshop with Tim Heur and Arturo Toledo going over some of the new features in Silverlight 3. Some excellent talks from a wide range of companies and parts of our industry. Iparticularly enjoyed the discussion of designer / developer workflow by Dan Rubin and Steve Smith. It was also good to see some of the developer tools coming out from Adobe (particularly Adobe Catalyst) and how they fare against the upcoming Blend 3, they're pretty much feature for feature.

Silverlight 3 Behaviors : Gotcha with Databinding

Sorry for the lack of posts but I'm currently moving house and trying to learn Silverlight 3. There's a lot of very interesting features coming with Silverlight 3. One of the first things I tried playing with was the behaviors built into Blend 3. The first behavior I looked to build was an ExecuteCommandAction, the idea being I could bind the ICommand of this behavior to my ViewModel. This way I could make use of the various triggers available to execute the command.

Silverlight Animation Part 4: Transforms

Silverlight has a pretty cool transform model that you can apply simple transforms (and if you're good at matrix math some complicated ones) to elements. You can apply atransform (or a group of transforms) by assigning to the elements RenderTransform property. We'll build a generic transform animation and then build on top of it for a RotationAnimation. As always there are examples on the Silverlight Animation Examples.

Failing Silently and the Contact page

It's come to my attention that the Contact page has been failing silently. The issue was around sending the actual email which the mail server had started timing out on rather than sending. The worst part of all was that default code for the contact page in Blog Engine doesn't do anything about it.  The actual SmtpException is caught and reported through an event, where as the UI code waits for an exception to report a failed send.