November 2007 Entries

Reticulating splines

I am testing the Mozy backup service that was praised by many lately. It's not bad so far, but I am a bit disappointed that it doesn't work when I am either in the office, or connected to the VPN. Also, it's really slow for the moment. I am tweaking my firewall to try to expedite things, I hope I succeed because the service sounds like a good idea. BUT: Who created the status messages? What is the spline, and why would I want to have them reticulated? :-) ...
Print | posted on Posted On Friday, November 30, 2007 7:52 AM | Comments (43)

Silverlight 2.0, Visual Studio 2008, new Alpha tools for Silverlight... hot winter!

The community is buzzing with the news about Silverlight 1.1 being re-versioned to 2.0; I really think it makes sense, given what will be added to the platform until next year. Like others, I wish that the marketing message regarding Silverlight and the "big sister" WPF gets a little clearer, and that WPF really gets more of the attention it deserves. It's a great technology, but it still has a few rough edges. Let's hope that the huge progresses made to the version 2 of Silverlight will contribute ...
Print | posted on Posted On Thursday, November 29, 2007 9:52 AM | Comments (1)

Creating animations in code with Silverlight 1.1

I didn't write here in quite some time, due to a hectic work schedule and a private Silverlight project taking all my time. It's going great and in the course of realizing it, I stumbled upon something I think I should post about: In the current version of Silverlight 1.1, creating animations in code by creating a new Storyboard and one or more new (for example) ColorAnimation(s) is not possible. In WPF, you can do this, but Silverlight doesn't have this ability yet. Thankfully, there is a workaround ...
Print | posted on Posted On Saturday, November 24, 2007 5:46 AM | Comments (0)

Silverlight: Bug with RadialGradientBrush OpacityMask

Update: Just posted this at http://silverlight.net/foru... I stumbled upon a bug in Silverlight today related to the way it handles OpacityMasks with a RadialGradientBrush. Try the following code: <Canvas Background="Red" Canvas.Top="0" Canvas.Left="0" Width="320" Height="240"> <Canvas.OpacityMask> <RadialGradientBrush> <GradientStop Offset="0" Color="#FF000000"/> <GradientStop Offset="1" Color="#00000000"/> </RadialGradientBrush> </Canvas.OpacityMask> ...
Print | posted on Posted On Tuesday, November 06, 2007 2:02 AM | Comments (0)

Silverlight: There's more to it than "just" video

As I was listening today to the new Foo Fighter CDs I bought a few days ago, I realized that I love one of the tracks: "But, Honestly" (on "Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace"). In fact, I especially like the second part of the song, with an incredible progression in energy, Dave Grohl's great voice and guitar and the bass and drums bringing the whole crescendo to an harmonic explosion (I feel like a poet today...). It is so good that I thought "I should really mention this on my blog", and I ...
Print | posted on Posted On Monday, November 05, 2007 7:42 AM | Comments (0)

Expression Blend: Template loops (no problems in Cider, though)

In one of my side-projects, I wanted to create a kind of lightweight treeview, as simple as possible: An item can contain a list of items; each item is simple represented by a string. In OO design, it's rather easy: You crate a DataItem class, which contains a Description and a collection of DataItems (children). Wanting to take advantage of ControlTemplates and DataTemplates, I thought I would create the following structure in WPF: - Window - Grid - Control - Template "MyControlTemplate" (ControlTemplate) ...
Print | posted on Posted On Sunday, November 04, 2007 2:27 AM | Comments (0)

Silverlight: A jump back in time

Hilarious experience today: I happened to stumble again on Tim Sneath's announcement of Silverlight in April this year. I spent a moment reading the comments, and it was really funny! I especially liked the Linux crowd saying (in essence) that there would obviously NEVER be a support for Linux. Also funny, the statements that Microsoft is bad for trying to compete with Adobe Flash's omnipresence. You got to love that, especially when the next message says that Microsoft is bad because of their past ...
Print | posted on Posted On Friday, November 02, 2007 6:03 AM | Comments (0)

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