Introduction to Windows Workflow

I created an Introduction to Windows Workflow presentation for the team and thought I’d share it here:

Windows Workflow Foundation – An Introduction

"Introducing Microsoft® Silverlight™ 2" – Book review

I asked for MS Press to send me a copy of Lawrence Moroney’s Introducing Microsoft® Silverlight™ 2 book, so that I can review it. The idea was to give it away at the next SDDN user group meeting as a door prize.

To start with, I was a bit disappointed that the book was still for the beta edition, rather than the release version of Silverlight 2. But there aren’t any radical changes between SL 2 Beta and Release, so I guess it is not too bad. (Lawrence Moroney has since made online updates to the book for the release version in his blog and has also been working on updates to SL 3 beta (which can be found here)

As the title of the book suggests, it is an introductory book, but even people with some knowledge of Silverlight will still find this useful.

The book itself is divided in to two parts – The first part covers the introductory topics and starts off by covering Expression Blend. After giving a thorough introduction to Blend, Lawrence moves on to Silverlight development using Visual Studio. Being an introductory book, I feel that Lawrence could have started off with a much simpler example (like a “Hello World”) – but he jumps right into a sliding block game. The book also assumes knowledge of C# and there aren’t any VB.NET examples. Being a C# person, myself. I didn’t mind this at all , but others may. The book then moves on to XAML and Lawrence does a good job talking about XAML shapes, brushes, transformations etc. and the last chapter in the first part – "Silverlight Browser" is particularly good.

The second part of the book is on Programming in Silverlight and Lawrence starts off talking about all the Silverlight controls including DataGrid, and the now defunct WatermarkedTextBoxControl. I haven’t had a look at Lawrence Moroney’s updates in his blog, but I would imagine that it addresses this and other breaking changes that were caused when Silverlight moved from Beta 1 to 2 and eventually to Release.

There are a couple of great chapters in Part 2 – “Building Connected Applications with Silverlight” and “Media, Ink and Deep Zoom”. Although I liked these chapters, they were probably a bit advanced for an introductory book. To add to it, there has been some changes to things like Deep Zoom composer. The “Building connected Applications..” chapter also includes some interesting sections on generating XAML using PHP and Java.

The chapter on Styles and Templates was a bit light on, particularly the section on templates. There could have also been a section on how to do some of these things using Expression Blend. The book finishes off with examples of creating Silverlight apps using dynamic languages such as Python and Ruby.

Although I’ve pointed out a few negative things as part of the review, the book on the whole is actually quite good and really worth a read and own for anyone wanting to start development in Silverlight 2.

Summary: A very good introductory book on Silverlight. Need a bit of knowledge on C#, but if you have any programming knowledge, you should be able to get by.

Rating: 4/5

Pros: Good strong introduction, Covers some advanced topics like using Silverlight with Java, PHP and dynamic languages

Cons: Does not have VB.NET examples. Very light on some topics like Data binding, Templates and Visual state manager.

Silverlight in a day – Update

We’ve had an overwhelming response for the “Silverlight in a day” event. Unfortunately, there are only a limited number of seats available. If you have been successful, you should be getting mails soon. If you haven’t been successful, we’ll let you know as well. Hopefully, we can run the event again and those who couldn’t find a place this time around can get one then.

The training will be facilitated by Philip Beadle, Jordan Knight and myself. As the trainer presents the lessons, the attendees will follow along on their own machine.

The following topics will be covered on the day:

• Introduction to Silverlight
• Introduction to XAML
• Introduction to Expression Blend  / rest of Expression Suite
• Layout controls
• Advanced XAML concepts – Binding, Templates / reuse, Overview VSM / Parts + States Model
• Networking
• Media

Check out http://www.sddn.org.au for updates.

Silverlight in a day

Jordan, Phil and I have been working towards running a full day community event in Melbourne to promote Silverlight as part of the Silverlight Developer and Designer Network (SDDN) and I am happy to announce some of the details:

The Event: Silverlight in a day

The SDDN invites you to come along and get your hands dirty with Silverlight 2! Learn how to build Silverlight Applications using Visual Studio and Expression Studio.

In this instructor led one day course the attendees will be able to work their way through hands-on labs and gain invaluable insight into the technology and how they can use it to create Rich Internet Applications (RIA).

Gain an understanding of varied Silverlight topics such as XAML, animation, data binding, communication and more and get the start you need to create great Silverlight applications!

Get in fast as spaces are limited…

When: Saturday 21st February 2009

Where: Cliftons on Collins St, Melbourne

Cost: $0. Nothing. Nada. FREE! (And we are trying to squeeze in a free lunch too – Whoever said there was no such thing as  free lunch?)

Contact: info @ sddn.org.au to reserve your spot!

I will provide more details about the event as and when they become available. A big thanks to ShaneMo, Joerg and the guys at Microsoft for making this event possible.

Expression Blend for Silverlight Developers

That’s the title of my talk for RDN and here is the write up -

You don’t have to dress in black or wear turtle neck jumpers to use Expression Blend!

In this ReadiDepth session, Mahesh will show how developers can use Expression Blend to create rich Silverlight 2.0 user interfaces.

When and where is it on? Here are the details -

Sydney:

Wednesday 22 October, 6:00pm – 8:00pm
Cliftons, 190 George Street, Sydney

Melbourne:

Thursday 23 October, 6:00pm – 8:00pm
Cliftons, 440 Collins Street, Melbourne

Friday 24 October, 8:00am – 10:00am
Microsoft, Level 5, 4 Freshwater Place, Southbank

It is free to attend, but you need to register for the event first.

PhotoSynth and the Goddess of Wealth

PhotoSynth was released last week and I’ve been meaning to play with it, but just didn’t find the time to do it. So, finally today after my 1 year old went to bed, I thought I’d have a quick look at how to create one.

I just took a few photos of a sculpture of Lakshmi – the Hindu Goddess of Wealth, that sits at the entrance of my house. I fired up PhotoSynth, added the photographs, hit the Synth button and then, that was it. Done. within a matter of minutes, I had created my first Synth. I couldn’t believe how simple it was.

Here is the link to it:

http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=4fd0e29a-5495-4af8-8cf0-804e22da9415

The Synth I created isn’t that great, but I put it together in a matter of minutes…This really is great technology.

IE Style Tabs in Html

Lot of web applications I’ve worked with have some kind of navigation that is implemented as Tabs. When I first started using tabs in Web Apps, I implemented them in tables, with the left hand side image of the tab in one cell, the middle part in another cell and the right hand side of the tab image in another cell.

That was before I discovered the beauty of CSS. The last few years I have been evangelising table-less design to every project/client that I go to and pretty much wherever I go, I take my “Tab” design with me. I cannot claim any originality to it, though. I first read about the Sliding door technique at “A LIST apart” a few years ago and I’ve been using it ever since.

Here is my implementation of it that resembles the IE 7.0 style tabs.

To do this, I created 6 images -

Image	Description
	tab-background.png: The background on which the tabs are present
	tab-left.png: The left side of an unselected tab
	tab-right.png: The right side of an unselected tab
	current-tab-left.png: The left side of the selected tab
	current-tab-right.png: The right side of the selected tab
	hover-tab.png: The image when you hover the mouse over the tab

The html markup used to define the tabs is a very simple unordered list -

<div id="primaryNavigation">
    <li><a href="#">Tab One</a></li>
    <li id="current"><a href="#">Tab Two</a></li>
    <li><a href="#">Tab Three</a></li>

    <li><a href="#">Tab Four</a></li>

</div>

The markup is simple, because all the presentation information is present in the css file:

body
{
    background:#fff;
    margin:0;
    padding:0;
    color:#000;
    font:10pt Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}
#primaryNavigation {
  float:left;
  width:100%;
  background: url( 'Images/tab-background.png' )
		repeat-x 100% bottom;

}
#primaryNavigation ul {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 2px 10px 0px 3px;
    list-style: none;
    height: 36px;
}
#primaryNavigation li {
    float: left;
    background: url('Images/tab-left.png' )
		no-repeat left top;
    padding: 0px 0px 0px 3px;
    height: 36px;
}
#primaryNavigation a {
    float: left;
    background: url('Images/tab-right.png' )
                no-repeat right top;
    padding: 6px 15px 0px 6px;
    text-decoration: none;
    color: black;
    white-space: nowrap;
    height: 36px;
}
#primaryNavigation a:hover {
    color: black;
    background: url('Images/hover-tab.png' )
                no-repeat right top;
  }
#primaryNavigation #current {
    background:url('Images/current-tab-left.png' )
		no-repeat left top;
    float: left;
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0px 0px 0px 2px;
    height: 36px;
  }
#primaryNavigation #current a {
    background-image: url('Images/current-tab-right.png' );
    color: black;
    white-space: nowrap;
    height: 36px;
    padding: 6px 15px 0px 6px;
}

Pretty simple, huh? This should work in most browsers, although I’ve tested in only on ID 7.0.

Reporting Services Tips and Tricks

Here is the link to the presentation I gave at Wagga Wagga. During the presentation I promised to upload a few relevant links. I’ll be doing the uploads in a couple of days, so watch this space…

Whinges about InfoPath 2007

InfoPath 2007 is great. But I have a few gripes about it -

• When I tried to set a data connection to a WCF service, it only accepts HttpBasicBinding
• If the web service has complex types as parameters, passing values to it is not trivial
• Absence of a label control (that renders as a span, maybe)? I could then set properties like conditional formatting to it.

Twitter

I signed up to twitter recently. This seems to be far easier to do than blogging. Wonder how successful it is going to get.