Die, AJAX!

It looks like Microsoft has found a new victim in their continuing onslaught of consistently excellent, impromptu developer interviews. This time Adam Kinney puts the spotlight on Tyler Ballance, an employee of the picture slide show company, Slide (if you’ve read any number of MySpace profiles and bulletins, then you’ve definitely seen their logo). This young man, seemingly reluctant at first, but opening up once the technical questions started flowing, discusses the San Fransico SilverlightDevCamp and gives his opinion on how programming in Flash compares to Silverlight. Read the rest of this entry »

A week ago, I went to the September MSDN event in Atlanta, held at the AMC Parkway Pointe theater. The itinerary included presentations on LINQ (Language Integrated Query), WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) and Silverlight. Having seen live presentations on LINQ and WCF before, I hoped to justify the experience by seeing a dazzling Silverlight presentation, in the flesh.

Unfortunately, “dazzled” I was not. However overall, the experience did satisfy. Read the rest of this entry »

Clearly, the creators of JavaFX Script want to make it a great MVC programming language. Nothing says this more than baking triggers and binding into the language as first class concepts. According to the documentation, JavaFX triggers operate in the same manner as SQL triggers, allowing you to handle data modification events in an aspect-like fashion. And, the bind keyword allows bidirectional binding between two variables so that when one receives an update the other also gets updated. Using these concepts, its easy to remove some of the tedium in handling modification events of UI elements and variables that other languages and frameworks require developers to slog through. Read the rest of this entry »

I started writing this post as two separate summaries, however these videos contain so much overlapping information, I decided to just combine them. If you want to watch the videos yourself you can find Dr. Sneath’s video here and Scott Guthire’s video here. Read the rest of this entry »

My last Silverlight tutorial walked through manipulating a Silverlight control using managed code. So today, we will learn how to access that managed code from JavaScript in an HTML page. The blandness of my last tutorial (a blue rectangle, whoopie) inspired me to spice things up for this tutorial and give you: animated, multi-color rectangles! Blows your mind, doesn’t? Lacking the desire or the time to create the necessary XAML myself, I “borrowed” it from one of the samples embedded in the absolutely awesome SilverlightPad application.

Man, I hope that code is open source.

In addition to snazzy animations, the application for this tutorial will also contain a couple of form controls that will manipulate the Silverlight content at runtime. The first control, a simple drop down, will allow the user to select the number of rectangles displayed on the screen. The second form control will act as a pause/resume button for the animation.

Okay, let’s get started! Read the rest of this entry »