In a recent post Jamie Kosoy, who I believe is a flash developer, posted his thoughts on his first Silverlight project. I’m also green to Silverlight and just finished my first project. I’ll save the post about my thoughts for another day; but I wanted to add my two cents regarding Jamie’s observations.

Timeline animation is different.

Flash uses a key frame based animation framework, Silverlights animation is based on time. Seems simple, and as someone coming from jQuery heavy development it was, but I can see how it would take a second too understand.

Silverlight is the better videoplayer solution

Adaptive streaming is amazing. The power to stream a single feed (HD) and have it chunked up into bit size bits for clients of all connection speeds to render with as much bandwidth/gpu power they have can’t be overstated.

XAPs aren’t fun to load…

Building even the simplest of applications without Prism, and soon MEF, is like coding with one hand. Yeah; you can do it but its hard, painful and frustrating. I hear parts of Prism are being pulled into SL4, I’ve voting for regions, modules, and events.

Classes can get really messy

C# is powerful; with great power comes great responsibility.

Building on OS X is critical.

I believe you can use MonoDevelop and Moonlight to develop silverlight applications on a mac. (Alpha)

Learning C# and Blend is empowering

C# Yes, Blend Yes, Declarative Programming in XAML – Big Fat No – Web ASP.NET Webforms. It causes more problems then it solves.

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1. Silverlight, Actions and Prism When using Prism for composition in Silverlight how do...
2. ESRI Silverlight Map vs. Prism Regions After a day or so of working with Silverlight it...

I’m done. Here is how to disable DEP

1. Right Click on Command Prompt
2. Click on Run as Administrator
3. Click the Allow button if it asks you for permission
   bcdedit.exe /set {current} nx AlwaysOff
4. Enter and: Operation Completed Successfully
5. Reboot

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<Image Height="40" HorizontalAlignment="Right" VerticalAlignment="Bottom" Width="40" Source="/SilverlightDemo.MainToolbar;Component/Images/i_chart.png" Stretch="Fill" Canvas.Left="222" Canvas.Top="55">                <i:Interaction.Triggers>                        <i:EventTrigger EventName="MouseLeftButtonDown">                                <Actions:ToggleCollapseAction

                            TargetName="HERE:/SilverlightDemo.Modules.TargetModule;Views/TargetModuleView"                             CollapseHorizontal="False"                             CollapseVertical="False"/>                        </i:EventTrigger>                </i:Interaction.Triggers>            </Image>

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After a day or so of working with Silverlight it became quite apparent that you can’t, no you Shouldn’t build Silverlight LOB (Line of Business) applications without Prism.

Prism offers a way to break down your application into modules. And it uses Regions as a way to put it all back together again. Its very similar to the ASP.NET MasterPage/Content area approach.

Unfortunately for me; the control toolkit I’m using (I work for GISi now; its a mapping company…more on that in a future post) is from ESRI but none of the ESRI samples use Prism. When I got down to the nitty gritty I ended up tearing out my hair over my inability to make the map control do two things.

1. Live in a module (a module is a separate project)
2. Take up 100% of the height and width of the shell. – Its a prism term – long post and screencasts coming soon.

I could make the map do 1 or 2 but not 1 and 2…that is until I got some help from @sharpgis

http://forums.esri.com/Thread.asp?c=158&f=2455&t=290394&mc=4

So, the key is to use

 HorizontalContentAlignment="Stretch" VerticalContentAlignment="Stretch"

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2. Thoughts on Silverlight In a recent post Jamie Kosoy, who I believe is...

LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework don’t support the geometry data type…

boo…

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This month the top search keyword that brings people to my blog is “eric polerecky”

That’s all I got.

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Case studies were conducted with three development teams at Microsoft and one at IBM that have adopted TDD. The results of the case studies indicate that the pre-release defect density of the four products decreased between 40% and 90% relative to similar projects that did not use the TDD practice. Subjectively, the teams experienced a 15–35% increase in initial development time after adopting TDD.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/q91566748q234325/?p=7fd98b01480f49e2925f36393c999a72&pi=3

http://blog.agiledad.com/2009/07/cost-of-bug.html

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Scenario; you have to pass wildcard requests to a controller for processing. Think myspace.com style vanity names.

Solution: Not as nice as .htaccess but it works; and I think I’m doing it write.

Step 1: Add Routes to Global.asa

   1:  routes.MapRoute(

   2:      "Default", 

   3:      "{controller}/{action}/{id}", 

   4:      new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = "" },

   5:      new { controller = new Constraints("Account", "User", "Home") }

   6:  );

   7:   

   8:  routes.MapRoute(

   9:      "User", 

  10:      "{id}", 

  11:      new { controller = "User", action = "Index", id = "" }

  12:  );

Step 2: Create Class that implements IRouteConstraint

   1:  public class Constraints : IRouteConstraint

   2:      {

   3:          private string[] _matches = null;

   4:   

   5:          public Constraints(params string[] matches)

   6:          {

   7:            _matches = matches;

   8:          }

   9:   

  10:          public bool Match(HttpContextBase httpContext, 

  11:                              Route route, 

  12:                              string parameterName, 

  13:                              RouteValueDictionary values, 

  14:                              RouteDirection routeDirection)

  15:          {

  16:            bool foundMatch = false;

  17:            foreach (string match in _matches)

  18:            {

  19:                if (String.Compare(values[parameterName].ToString(), match, true)

  20:                        == 0)

  21:                {

  22:                    foundMatch = true;

  23:                }

  24:                 

  25:            }

  26:            return foundMatch;//not matching!

  27:          }

  28:      }

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From smashingmagazine.com comes a must ready comic about XHTML and HTML5!

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First; When I pushed to GitHub I decided to rename the project to AutoDeploy.NET.

In the hopes of keeping my sanity and in the context of working in an organization that strictly follows a 50+ page “release management handbook” I started working on AutoDeploy.NET; a deployment automation tool.

As with all my personal projects I took an academic approach to the design and implementation. Instead of building an entire application I created a class library (dll) and used a few 3rd party libraries that I was either unfamiliar.

Class Library

My thought here is that by just creating the class library I would have a chance to create a fluent interface and if I did that well enough, creating a UI would be a trivial task. I have not hit a brick wall with this decision but messaging and logging might soon bite me in the…end.

Sharp SVN

SharpSvn is a binding of the Subversion Client API for .Net 2.0 applications contained within a set of xcopy-deployable dll’s

Working with source control should be part of every deployment, build process, or continuous integration. I use SVN for my source control and so did organization. As I, along with what seems like the rest of the world, move to Git I might find time to write a Git service for AutoDeploy.NET

Html Agility Pack

The Html Agility Pack is an agile HTML parser that builds a read/write DOM and supports plain XPATH or XSLT (you actually don’t HAVE to understand XPATH nor XSLT to use it, don’t worry…). It is a .NET code library that allows you to parse "out of the web" HTML files. The parser is very tolerant with "real world" malformed HTML. The object model is very similar to what proposes System.Xml, but for HTML documents (or streams).

Instead of using Sharp SVN or simple the .NET webclient I used the agility pack to parse the html that is returned when browsing a SVN repo. This is done to monitor the repo for new tags and kick off deployments based on the tag convention x.x.x.

The use is purely academic and limited in scope. It could easily be removed in order to cut-down on the number of 3rd party libraries required.

MEF

The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is a new library in .NET that enables greater reuse of applications and components. Using MEF, .NET applications can make the shift from being statically compiled to dynamically composed. If you are building extensible applications, extensible frameworks and application extensions, then MEF is for you.

Extensibility! The decision to use MEF at such an early stage was purely academic but the result is perfect. I only wanted to code for the common scenarios.

In the environment I worked the process was very manual with SharePoint forms being touted as progress…I planed on writing a class library that implemented ICustomTask and called WaitN to fill out the endless, mind-numbing, pointless, wasteful, costly, wow….sorry..off track.

Unity

The Unity Application Block (Unity) is a lightweight extensible dependency injection container with support for constructor, property, and method call injection.

I choose unity because I am familiar with it. I should have used ninject or autofac or StructureMap or .. well you get the point.

Fluent Interface

A fluent interface is a way of implementing an object oriented API in a way that aims to provide for more readable code.

It started off as a way to work with the buzz word of the day…but the first time I wrote an AutoDeploy.NET parent application using the fluent interface I was hooked!

Point In Time

I made, what I consider, significent progress on AutoDeploy.NET before parting ways with said organization. And while I hope to never ever need such a tool I feel for those solders I left behind. Seriously; we’ve identified many different scenarios where automating one or more of the common deployment tasks would be helpful to any developer.

Logging, Auditing and Messaging are the missing pieces at this time.

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