Just code - Tamir Khason : Microsoft, teched, Silverlight

New year – new blog or how to migrate Community Server to any other engine, supports XML-RPC

Tamir Khason — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 02:33:04 GMT

Please update your bookmarks, because the new url of this blog is http://khason.net/ (you have not update RSS feeds, it will be done automatically). Why I did it? Why I decided to go to “stand-alone”… Well. there are some reasons. Generally, I do not want to explain all those here, but trust me, there are some. The main reason is, that there is no responsible person in charge for this blog platform in Microsoft Israel. This why, if your blog is popular and you have a respect to your blog visitors, you cannot host it here… Take a look into new comments notifications in my inbox. Would you answer your readers with such “small amount” of SPAM and capcha, that cannot be fixed already for three years in this platform? This how my inbox looks like for last three years. So now, you should not ask me, why I not answered your email or comments. Aren’t you? :)

Currently, all comments in this blog are disabled, so if you want to comment, please use new url of posts (this will appear shortly in the beginning of each post). Also, this post will not be syndicated in RSS.

So, this post is the last. I loved this platform, and loved people started it. But, unfortunately, it seemed, that bloggers community is not important enough for new platform managers.

Also, If you want to learn how to use C# and XML-RCP to migrate from CS2007, used in this platform, visit my new home :)

Have a great year and, as always, be good people. This post marked with all possible tags automatically. Sorry.

TechEd preparation session + other announcements

Tamir Khason — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:19:00 GMT

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If you want to attend my preparations before TechEd, you’re invited to attend 27-Jul in Microsoft Ra’anana.

What is preparation session? This is the training for myself. I’ll present all four session (each one is an hour + one hour rep.) This is your chance to hear live my TechEd South Africa sessions, without paying the fee (ZAR 4,500 which is about $600)

Please note, that all lectures are in English (not in Hebrew)

Here the agenda for 27-Jul (Sunday). It will take place in Microsoft Israel building in 2, Ha'Pnina st. Ranana, Israel

Time	Session title	Conference room
8:30-10:30	Creating Rich Applications with Windows Presentation Foundation (300)	Media Center
11:00-13:00	WPF Performance (400)	Visual Studio
14:30-16:30	Game Development Using Microsoft’s Latest Technologies (300)	Vista
17:00-19:00	Understanding Reflection (400)	Vista

Also, be sure, you’re attending my session in Expert Days 11-14 August

12-Aug, Windows Presentation Foundation for fellow developers – 027
13-Aug, Mastering Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 – 020
14-Aug, Advanced .NET 3.5 SP1 – Windows Presentation Foundation – 011

And/or if you were not able to attend Silverlight 2.0 for building Rich Internet Applications event, you are welcome to book the next session at 23-Jul

That’s all for now, see ya…

Presenting at TechEd Developers South Africa 2008, Durban

Tamir Khason — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:23:27 GMT

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Save the date. TechEd Developers South Africa is around the corner (August 3rd through 6th). This year it will take place in Durban, the third most populous city in South Africa.

This TechEd, there are four sessions assigned to me:

Creating Rich Applications with Windows Presentation Foundation (300)

Completely new session about how to enrich user experience, by decreasing development efforts with WPF. In order to do this, we’ll try to take some application and completely recreate it, by using XAML only without any single code line.

Target audience: Developers and decide makers, who what to understand what can be done with WPF and how easy you can do it.

Understanding Reflection (400)

This is also new session for lazy developers. It’s not only about what reflection is or what’s new about reflection in latest frameworks (including .NET 3.5 and Silverlight), but also how to use it to make developer’s life easier. We’ll enter a bit into IL to understand what’s going on under the hoods, but most of session is about appliance of this technology for everyday developers’ tasks and challenges.

Target audience: Developers, have an experience with .NET programming

WPF Performance (400)

Session very similar to one, I had in Dev Academy 2. However this time it will focus on performance enhancements in .NET framework 3.5 SP1. I’ll speak about virtualization, parallel processing, DX surface direct access and more…

Target audience: Developers, have an experience with WPF development.

Game Development Using Microsoft’s Latest Technologies (300)

Fun session, I had in TechEd Israel with very complicated setup. Here the sneak preview of how it looks like. It listed as a 300 level, because the fact, that except this session’s fun, you can learn a lot of new there.

Target audience: Everyone, who love technology and want to have fun hour in the morning before advanced sessions will begin.

If you’re reading my blog, and you’re going TechEd Africa. Come and say me hello, ‘cos it would be really nice to see the faces of the people I’m writing to in this blog :)

More information about other sessions in this TechEd can be found in Ahmed Salijee blog, who is developer evangelist in Microsoft Africa and arranges this event.

See you there.

Quick note: New TechEd downloads

Tamir Khason — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:25:15 GMT

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There is TechEd in Orlando, and this means, that there are a lot of new announcements. Let’s fill up our download managers with expensive fuel and start.

New WM 6.1 images (both standard and professional) – absolutely required if you’re programming Windows Mobile
Managed Extensibility Framework – I blogged about it a little in the past. Really cool approach for adding extensibility features to your applications. Krzysztof explains new features there.
Windows Live Writer new CTP + new SDK – the best tool to post into your blog.
New CTP of Microsoft Project Codename “Velocity” – great approach for development applications, using high performance in memory cache. Here the deep explanations in the team blog + quick start and samples.

Silverlight 2.0 beta 2 + Microsoft Expression Blend 2.5 June preview will be available for download very soon. Keep watching. Meanwhile, you can start learn about new TabControl, VisualStateManager, new templating system and cross-domain policy from Tim Heuer’s blog. Also there are some news about event bubbling in beta 2 in Jesse’s blog.

Silverlight accessibility and CEO support for beta 2

Tamir Khason — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:01:39 GMT

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Yesterday, beta 2 of Silverlight was officially announced in TechEd Orlando. There are a lot of interesting changes. One of most significant changes, I want to notice and accessibility support in Silverlight. See yourself (if you do not know what this image about, see this post)

What should you do in order this to happen? Absolutely nothing. This is build in feature in Silverlight 2.0 b2. It’s not like WPF, where you should use Automation namespace boundary. This just works. You can read the Silverlight content with screen narrators. Great respect to dev team.

Why this CEO friendly? Come to my Silverlight half day session at July, 30 to learn why.

Regarding other features, there is new templating model in Silverlight, named VisualStateManager. It can save your time in controls development. Do you remember me speaking about State oriented programming in Silverlight, rather, then KeyFrames oriented programming in Flesh? That what is it.

if (SomethingHappened) {
VisualStateManager.GoToState(this, “SomeState”, true);
}

Also, there is TabControl, text wrapping and scrollbars for TextBox. Regarding DataGrid it become much faster and enhanced by Reordering, Autosize and Sort capabilities.

There are also some security enhancements for Cross-Domain networking and duplex communication. If you not sure about what is it, see this and this post.

Also now you can work with LINQ-to-JSON, ASO.NET DS and SOAP-based data sources.

In additional, there is new XML-based format for DeepZoom MultiScaleTileSource and MultiScaleImage controls.

Have a nice day and be good people.

My TechEd ‘08 presentation slides download

Tamir Khason — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 23:10:45 GMT

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I do not know why, but for some reason in development section of TechEd website there are only two recording and no presentations. I do not want to wait for them to upload (we sent all presentations a while ago), so here it comes. My TechEd presentation DEV335 - Game Development Using Microsoft’s Latest Technologies. I have no recordings by now (so pity), so you’ll have to wait for Microsoft to encode and upload it. Upon it will be done, I’ll publish it here.
There is no real reason to upload samples – they will not work without all environment we had there.

Download full slides from my TechEd presentation (PPT 7,165 KB) >>

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me by using contact form or LinkedIn profile. You also can send me a message by twitter

Networking and sockets in Silverlight 1.0 (mobile to?)

Tamir Khason — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 14:08:05 GMT

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Well, well, well. Two days ago, we spoke about using sockets within Silverlight 2.0 and WPF. Today, we’ll make a step ahead and will use TCP or UDP client-server connection within Silverlight 1.0. Yes, 1.0 (the one with JavaScript only and no sockets). So, let’s start Rock ‘n Roll.

Oh, baby – it cannot be done! Just kidding :) Silverlight 1.0 itself cannot use sockets, however ASP.NET can. We’ll reuse our socket library (from the previous post) and reference it to the ASP.NET page, that hosts our Silverlight 1.0 application.

So, on page load we’ll create our client channel and fully reuse the way we worked within WPF and WinForms. The only difference is that we’ll have three static web methods within our ASP.NET C# code

[System.Web.Services.WebMethod]
    public static string GetHoursAngle()
    {
        return ((msg.Hours * 30) + (12 * msg.Minutes / 60)).ToString();
    }

    [System.Web.Services.WebMethod]
    public static string GetMinutesAngle()
    {
        return (msg.Minutes * 6).ToString();
    }

    [System.Web.Services.WebMethod]
    public static string GetSecondsAngle()
    {
        return (msg.Seconds * 6).ToString();
    }

Those methods can be used (almost) from client side. In order to do it we should register ScriptManager and enable PageMethods on the page

<form id="form1" runat="server">
<asp:ScriptManager ID="manager" EnablePageMethods="True" runat="server" />
</form>

Then, create simple Javascript to call to our web methods

<script type="text/javascript">
        function UpdateHoursHand(angle)
        {
            updateClockHand('hTransform',angle);
        }
        function UpdateMinutesHand(angle)
        {
            updateClockHand('mTransform',angle);
        }
        function UpdateSecondsHand(angle)
        {
            updateClockHand('sTransform',angle);
        }
    </script>

There is no problem to access Silverlight from the hosting webpage, so we’ll add following method to the Silverlight javascript

<script type="text/javascript">
if (!window.Silverlight1Client)
{
    Silverlight1Client = {}
}

Silverlight1Client.Page = function()
{
}
Silverlight1Client.Page.prototype =
{
    handleLoad: function(control, userContext, rootElement)
    {
        this.control = control;
        canvas = rootElement;
    }
}

var canvas;     // the root canvas

function updateClockHand(element, value)
{
hand = canvas.findName(element);
hand.Angle = value;
}

if (!window.Silverlight)
{
    Silverlight = {};
}

Silverlight.createDelegate = function(instance, method) {
    return function() {
        return method.apply(instance, arguments);
    }
}

</script>

Now, we have prototype, that can access our Silverlight control, we have web methods, that can bring us information from the server side the only thing we should do is to enable server-side (where we actually receive update notification) to call client side javascript in order to update layout. And this cannot be done due to the nature of client-server web architecture.

But who told, that we cannot force client side to tickle server side upon the event? We can – not very nice solution, but it works – set timer.

function UpdateClockHands()
        {
           PageMethods.GetHoursAngle(UpdateHoursHand);
            PageMethods.GetMinutesAngle(UpdateMinutesHand);
            PageMethods.GetSecondsAngle(UpdateSecondsHand);
            setTimeout("UpdateClockHands()",1000);
        }

We add timer recursively to call client side javascript one a second and how it works.

At the end the small diamond for upcoming DEV335: Game Development Using Microsoft’s Latest Technologies…

Running WPF on gas pump (or other Windows CE devices)?

Tamir Khason — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 20:06:07 GMT

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What do you think, is it possible to run WPF on Windows CE enabled devices (e.g. gas pumps, GPS systems, robots, game or automatic teller machines or, even, scientific calculators)? Let's see following code:

StackPanel panel = new StackPanel(Orientation.Horizontal);
            Ellipse ellipse = new Ellipse(10, 10);
            ellipse.Fill = new SolidColorBrush(Colors.Red);
            ellipse.Stroke = new Pen(Color.Black);
            Rectangle rect = new Rectangle();
            rect.Width = 40;
            rect.Height = 40;
            Line l = new Line(20, 20);
            Polygon polygon = new Polygon(new int[] { 0, 0, 20, 0, 20, 20, 0, 20 });
            panel.Children.Add(ellipse);
            panel.Children.Add(rect);
            panel.Children.Add(l);
            panel.Children.Add(polygon);

            panel.AddHandler(Buttons.ButtonUpEvent, (ButtonEventHandler)delegate
            {
                panel.Orientation = panel.Orientation == Orientation.Horizontal ? Orientation.Vertical : Orientation.Horizontal;
            }, false);

Or even this code

void OnButtonHeld(object o)
{
    Button b = (Button)o;
    Dispatcher.Invoke(TimeSpan.FromTicks(10), (ButtonHeldDelegate)delegate(Button btn)
    {
        while (Buttons.IsButtonDown(btn))
        {
            switch (btn)
            {
                case Button.Left: p.X--; break;
                case Button.Up: p.Y--; break;
                case Button.Right: p.X++; break;
                case Button.Down: p.Y++; break;
                case Button.Select: p.X = mainWindow.Width / 2; p.Y = mainWindow.Height / 2; break;
            }
        }

        moveMouse();
    }, b);
}

void moveMouse()
{
    host.DrawRectangle(Colors.Black,2,p.X,p.Y, 100, 100,0,0,Colors.Red,0,0,Colors.Blue,100,100,255);
    host.Flush();
}

This code will run on any Windows CE device. And it is not WPF :) It's .NET Micro Framework. Actually, when we're looking for it's syntax, it looks like WPF/Silverlight and .NET Micro Framework have the same architect. However, it cannot use hardware acceleration and has very limited number of objects. All this because of it's purpose "platform to devices that do not need the fuller functionality available in the .NET Framework and the .NET Compact Framework". I would add Windows Presentation Foundation as well.

The application model of .NET Micro Framework is very similar to WPF. It has native CLR/PAL and HAL and managed libraries.

Sufficient number of components in CLR - types, threads and timers, reflection, serialization, GC, networking, other connectivities etc., enables you to create, even games, that will run on even Heart Device.

Other words, cool technology and possible cool appliance for your programming skills.

How to start? First of all, download .NET Micro Framework v2.5 (VS2005, you can also add Microsoft.SPOT assemblies into your regular VS2008 project) and start programming. It's really simple (I build snake game for less, then hour)

See your applications, running on embedded devices. BTW, I'll probably present something, developed with this framework in my TechEd session aside with WPF, Silverlight and XNA... Keep tuned and have a nice day