At the MVP Summit, we were shown this cute video of a 5 year old girl talking about Visual Studio 2008:

And yesterday, I saw this Microsoft ad on TV:

<a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=533e05d2-9f12-4a86-bdda-efd0455fcd36" target="_new" title="Video: Kylie uses Windows Live Photo Gallery">Video: Kylie uses Windows Live Photo Gallery</a>

How cute!

More “Rookies” videos here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/rookies/

Using a proper MVC pattern to stream an image from Microsoft Chart controls for the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5.

The gauntlet has been thrown down. It's duelling laptops as John Bristowe and I square off at the Kawa Expresso Bar in Calgary this Friday and bring you the Cowtown version of Coffee and Code (with a little Ultimate Fighter Championship thrown in for good measure).

Last month Joey “Accordion Guy” deVilla, a Microsoft Canada Developer Evangelist, realized his vision. It’s called Coffee and Code and basically you sit around a coffee shop, outfitted with computers and a wireless connection, and work all day. Yeah, that’s right. Work all day in a coffee shop always connected to the big series of tubes, never having to serve an double chai latte mocha half fat with whipped cream to anyone.

My good buddy John Bristowe is hosting the first Calgary Coffee and Code at the Kawa Expresso Bar on Friday, March 13. He’ll spend the day lounging around while James Kovacs and I actually provide the code. I’m sure John has some purpose. Maybe we’ll get him to show off his Barista skills or drag and drop some demo for onlookers. In any case it’s going to be blast. John will be there most of the day (9AM to 4PM) and I’ll hang out for as much as I can bear. I’m bringing a few goodies to help answer any questions and perform geek tricks including one of my virtual SharePoint rigs, my XNA development setup (sorry, no XBox), and my Facebook development in case anyone wants to look at icky PHP code.

Basically come on down, hang out, have some coffee, bring your laptops and chat it up. James has promised to be the ALT.NET guy (although I’ll be there as his understudy in case he breaks another wrist) and John, well, John will have pretty PowerPoint slides to show you about Windows 7 and other mythical products from Microsoft.

Also, be sure to get there early to see our Interpretive Dance version of “Watchmen, The Live Motion Comic”. John will be playing The Night Owl, James will take on Rorschach, and I’ll be doing all the other roles.

Check out this link for a map to the Expresso Bar and see you there!

How to create dynamic Silverlight controls with animation binding with XML data.

This month’s Wired Magazine has an interesting article on Netbooks and their impact on the major laptop manufacturers, Microsoft and most importantly, on how we use software and the trend toward Cloud based apps.

You can read the article online for free here:
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/magazine/17-03/mf_netbooks

View State allows you to retain your page property values between postbacks. You may also use View State to store your class objects, the same as you do your string and numeric types. To store an object in View State, you must first add the Serializable attribute, so that ASP.NET can add it as a hidden field on the page. If you do not add the Serializable attribute, you will receive this error when trying to add the object to View State: Type 'SuchAndSuch.ThisAndThat' in Assembly 'SuchAndSuch, Version...(read more)

In my last post I showed you how to use Validation attributes on your model for validation. Today I will show how you can create your own attributes that can provide custom validation for you.

To accomplish this we need to inherit from ValidationAttribute. We'll create an attribute today that will only allow a "Yes" or "No" value to be entered. A pretty bad example however it will still suffice.

Click here to see the how its done.

Adam

Web Deployment has taken a huge stride in Visual Studio 2010.   I have started a blog series where I have written about web deployment, you can read more about them below: Web Deployment with VS 2010 and IIS Web Packaging: Creating a Web Package Read More......(read more)

MultiMap is similar to .Net Dictionary collection type, but accepts duplicate Key,Value pairs during addition. This collection can be used in Web as well as Windows App projects.

The objective behind writing this article is to make use of Ajax Control Toolkit in implementation.

It’s time to re-examine where things stand in our little niche.

This should be interesting, if enough people answer – so please answer (you need flash).

 

More professional ASP.NET c# search with proper document summary, query highlighting and RIA display options.

Full-fledged ATL Windowless ActiveX Container. Ideal for hosting Windows Media Player, Transparent Flash and Silverlight Animations.

Build a GMail like web based chat using ASP.NET Ajax that can handle several requests and simultaneous users

The task of familiarizing programmers with the sphere of developing parallel applications is getting more and more urgent. This article is a brief introduction into creation of multi-thread applications based on OpenMP technology. The approaches to debugging and optimization of parallel applications

I recently worked with one of my customer who when clicking on the "Design" view of an ASPX page, the designer window doesn't appear - blank page appears. And if you minimize the VS window, and maximize it again - we will see the desktop background in the place of the Designer surface. Verified that neither the "Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Component" nor "Microsoft Web Designer tools" was installed on the machine (Control panel --> Add/Remove window...(read more)

Silverlight 2 in Action is a great book to get you started with Silverlight development.  At 371 pages, it’s a short book that has enough info to get you going and act as your jumping board into Silverlight.  I like the fact that each chapter is rather small but gets to the point immediately.  I also like the short code snippets and the fact that relevant code is never buried into pages of code filling.  Highly recommended for .NET devs looking for a Silverlight 2 jumpstart.