thinking-out-loud

Visual Studio 2005 or 2008? What's more risk? - <ChristophDotNet

One of my customers is still on Visual Studio 2003 and they are wondering whether to upgrade to VS 2005 or to VS 2008.

Visual Studio 2005 or 2008? What's more risk? -

In response to one of his customer's needs, my friend Christoph over at Microsoft posted a decent decision framework for VS 2005 vs VS 2008. We have three customers where we are using/have used VS 2008, and it has been very stable if you exclude the WPF designer. Most of the instability risk is mitigated assuming you build often, since by default, VS saves everything before build, so we have rarely found the glitch to be problem. Visual Studio starts right back up, and then we're off and going again. That's not to say, of course, that we don't want it fixed. We do. We really, really do. ;) It is to say that I think VS 2008 is largely stable, and because it makes it trivial to target down-level .NET versions like 2.0 and 3.0, that it is worth either a) just using the beta for free, or b) buying Software Assurance for the current version that you likely have. If you happen to be in the south central region, I know several people that would be happy to help you with the latter :)

 

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XmlnsDefinitionAttribute in Silverlight?

If you build a custom or user control in WPF, you can reference it in XAML using a custom xml namespace of

xmlns:your-prefix=

"clr-namespace:Your.Clr.Namespace;assembly=The.Assembly.In.Which.It.Lives.Sans.The.Dll.Extension"

or you can add an assembly attribute

[assembly: XmlnsDefinition("http://yourdomain.com/some/xml/namespace", "Your.Clr.Namespace")]

after which you may simply use xmlns:your-prefix="http://yourdomain.com/some/xml/namespace"

That's pretty cool. Unfortunately for Silverlight, XmlnsDefinition is in that part of the SDK that Silverlight isn't privy to. I would love to be able to experiment with applying XmlnsDefnition to some custom silverlight controls so that I could natively render things like SVG, HTML, and so on using Silverlight. Looking a little closer, there are actually two definitions of XmlnsDefinition, one for workflow:

Name: System.Workflow.ComponentModel.Serialization.XmlnsDefinitionAttribute
Assembly: System.Workflow.ComponentModel, Version=3.0.0.0

and one for WPF:

Name: System.Windows.Markup.XmlnsDefinitionAttribute
Assembly: WindowsBase, Version=3.0.0.0

(thank you reflector).

Architecturally, it seems apparent that there should be a core System.Xaml, and that the XmlnsDefinition should live there. Things are never that simple in an organization as big as MSFT or an SDK as big as .NET, but it sure would be nice.

Barcode fonts for use with WPF

Does anyone out there know of any good barcode fonts (Code 128C, UPC-A) that you've used natively in WPF?

Thanks in advance.

Vista Woes

I recently picked up a beautiful new MacBook Pro (17in hi-res mat screen, dual core 2.4GHz, 4G Ram, etc). Mmmm mmm. I love it. It is literally twice the computer of my previous Inspiron 9300 in half the form factor with basically the same screen real estate.

I boot camped it with Mac OSX and Vista. Vista runs *quite nicely*, for what it is worth. On the native hardware. I don't get the Aero glass, but I don't mind that too much. Visual Studio, Office apps, they all open instantaneously.

I'm using VMWare Fusion for virtualization, and I discovered the hard way that I needed to read the release notes more closely. http://www.vmware.com/support/fusion/doc/releasenotes_fusion.html#issues

Basically, Vista sees different hardware in Fusion than it sees running natively, and so it requires reactivation. Net? Vista will live only in a VM on my machine. :(

Nov. 10 - Dallas Silverlight DevCamp

If you have plans for Saturday, Nov. 10th, you might want to change them. We're partnering with Chris Koenig over at Microsoft to host the Dallas Silverlight DevCamp at our learning labs. For the Silverlight-curious, this will be a great chance to get hands-on experience with the tools and technologies for developing in Silverlight. Chris is pulling together a Virtual PC image containing Visual Studio 2008 beta 2, Silverlight 1.1 Alpha (September refresh), Expression, and so on. We'll also trying to get a decent set of sample apps or hands-on labs, but the core of the day is really intended for you to try out your ideas. We're going to load the VPC image on our training room computers, and we'll have some USB and network drives for you to copy from if you're bringing your laptop. The event is going to run from 8am to 8pm. We'll have a short kickoff to explain the logistics, we'll have a kick intro/overview by Tal McMahon, and then we'll dive straight into coding and trying it out. We're planning to stop dev around 6pm and have a lightening round of demos of what you built. I would love to see some good Flash people there to get some feedback on the technology.

The main registration is over at the msevents site. We've got a page over at barcamp where you can volunteer to help out. We're especially interested in finding proctors to help people who are completely, um, innocent of any Silverlight information. Please feel free to spread the love.

I am really looking forward to seeing you there. Space is limited, so please register now.

 

 

Technorati Tags: improving , silverlight , devcamp

Tulsa TechFest on Oct 19th & 20th

I was thinking about heading up to the Tulsa TechFest that's on the 19th and 20th, which is next weekend.  They are going to have a lot of cool technology presentations and they'll give away two rockin' quad-core HP Pavilions.  Unfortunately, it overlaps with my high school's 20 year reunion, for which I've already bought tickets. It'll be cool to see my old school mates, but I'm bummed to miss the famous TechFest.