New Blog Title

Test new RSS feed for new blog. Simplicy is not simple

Getting Data Into Silverlight

Having good success with the pre-built Silverlight control SlideShow, implementing a custom http handler (ashx) to serve the control with dynamic XML data. However, the missing ingredient in all of the basic Silverlight demonstrations is examples of how to fill the client-side control with server side data.

Here are two demonstrations of the recommended WCF technique. I haven't tried them out yet, and the decision makers still require Microsoft to move this software out of Beta before having public web apps which use it. However, better to get a head start, because this stuff will improve usability significantly.

Not sure if the Maersk guys are still reading this feed, but hope all is well with you. Hear you might have to wait a little longer for your 2007 performance bonus. Good luck to you guys. Probably need to adjust the name of this feed, but will leave the address the same. I don't guess anyone is reading anyway, just a diary for my ideas.

Are Video Games Evil, and Are We There Yet?

What we found with Isaac once, is let him design his own video game.

Always Simplify User Interface

I found myself struggling with the design of a new project until finding this cartoon. Must remember the most successful comercial designs have a over-simplified interface.

Likewise, let the simplicity of the design bleed over into the database tier. Consider implimenting hash-table like key-value table designs. This will facilitate the search type interface with a fast, flexible, tag-based backbone.

Zen Quote of the Day

Here's an interesting quote of the day for our aspiring students.

There are grammatical errors even in his silence. Stanislaw J. Lec

Custom Image Control

While creating a custom document reader for the historical document project, I required an image control which will allow conversion of tiff files to jpeg. The default .NET image control does not render tiff images, and will only allow output directly from an ImageURL property. This restriction limits a simple interface for the image control when image manipulation is necessary before rendering, or when embedding the image control in a data bound list type control.

With inspiration from this control designer, Peter Bromberg, I have re-written his custom image control in visual basic and added inheritance directly from the asp:image control. The custom control has a bitmap property set at run time, outputting a Jpeg image directly to the control. As noted, this additional functionality enables the image control to receive an image directly from a data bound list control, and allows any sort of server side image conversion before rendering.

Here are the two classes used to compile the new control (ImageControl, ImageHandler). At runtime, any GDI+ image conversion is done on the server, then the image is set to the bitmap property of the control.

While progressing with this project, I hope to encapsulate this custom control inside of a Visual Studio 2008 ListView control, which is bound to a database or XML datasource. This will eventually make a document viewer for historical documents.

As Scott Guthrie says, "Happy Coding!"