November 2008 - Posts
Glenn Block recently did a great screen cast on the Managed Extensibility Framework. Show #130 | 11/26/2008 Glenn Block on MEF, the Managed Extensibility Framework Glenn Block shows you how to use MEF to allow a plugin architecture in your .NET applications. The framework is extensible enough to allow any type to be imported and exported as managed plugins, which are called parts. Read More...
All client-side template engines enable you to create HTML (fell free to go ‘duh’). What they don’t all allow is the creation of event handlers and components over the markup they generate. The general approach with those engines is to do a second pass of code over the markup to create handlers and components. This is quite unfortunate as this generally requires some knowledge of the markup (which plays against separation of concerns) or something like the introduction of marker CSS classes into the markup. For our own template engine, we wanted event handler creation and component instantiation to be first class scenarios, and we wanted both to be possible from imperative code as well as declarative code. Imperative code blocks Let’s start...
Download: VSSpellChecker.msi What's new in version 2.2: Spell checker now fully supports VS 2008 SP1 Content of <code>, <abbr> and <address> elements is ignored Setup no longer requires COM registration, it uses VS AddIn registration in XML file List of words to ignore (SpellChecker.ignore file) was moved from AppData to AddIns folder Fixed bugs: Add To Dictionary may corrupt Word custom dictionary file dictionary file was not in Unicode Windows update to MSXML may cause "Ignore" and "Add To Dictionary" command to disappear After word was added to dictionary it may continue to be flagged as an error until VS is restarted Note : There is no v2.2 for VS 2005 or VS 2008 RTM. From now on updates will be...
I am proud to announce we have released Silverlight 2 Tools localized in 7 languages! Please follow the links below to get the language of your choice. DMT page details: Chinese - China Bits: http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/1/8/218414F1-33DA-45B6-9007-18A1566D0D41/Silverlight_Tools.exe DMT page details: Spanish (Traditional Sort) - Spain Bits: http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/1/B/21BA7418-C2D7-4709-9F22-A2187FAE8153/Silverlight_Tools.exe DMT page details: German - Germany Bits: http://download.microsoft.com/download/E/2/2/E2251D3C-C03B-46F0-B392-D2C45DD7B4B5/Silverlight_Tools.exe DMT page details: French - France Bits: http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/E/4/8E4EDB7F-6002...
As HTML is becoming more and more semantic, at least in intent, and all styling is moving into CSS, one has to wonder what it is now representing. It seems like it is now a format for unstructured data (a.k.a. rich text), in the same sense that XML and JSON are formats for semi-structured and structured data and CSV is a format for tabular data. If that is the case, it should become commonplace that this data gets rendered by a variety of clients, not just browsers. This has already begun of course: an RSS feed reader for example consumes HTML, word processors can read and write HTML, e-mail clients use HTML for rich text. Naturally most of the times, these applications work by embedding a web browser but it doesn’t need to be the case. If HTML...
I am pretty excited to see MEF preview 3 ship on codeplex today! Please check out Glenn's post for all the details... This is a release where we really focused on getting in your feedback... We are 100% MSPL, we are shipping our own unit tests, we have made several design changes based on feedback around defaults, ExportProvider, etc. One thing I love about taking on a big customer such as Visual Studio , is you get good, real world feedback up front. In this CTP, we really focused on performance and performance best practices. Whether you use MEF directly or just use Visual Studio, you will appreciate this work! So grab the bits and let us know what you think! Read More...
There’s been quite a few blog posts and tweets lately around the following (slightly distorted) quote: “If you don’t know English, you’re not a programmer” The original quote was a little different but almost as offensive so I won’t dignify it with a link. The best discussion on this quote can probably be found on Scott’s blog . It quickly morphed into a discussion on whether you needed to speak English to be a *great* developer. I still disagree with this simply because I know several excellent developers who speak little or no English. Of course I won’t disagree that it’s harder, and that knowing English certainly is a (big) plus. But rather than rehashing various arguments I’d like to bring some perspective to this topic. Please try to imagine...
I'm going to blatantly steal Bill Staples words since they were so good :) "I’m excited to announce the availability of the Release Candidate version of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (Web PI). Web PI is a free tool that makes it simple to download and install the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including IIS, ASP.NET, Visual Web Developer Express and SQL Server, along with a lot of cool IIS extensions like URL rewrite and ASP.NET MVC . Web PI offers a simple experience for downloading and installing the entire stack through a single installer to help you obtain the software you need to build and run a complete Web solution on the Microsoft Web platform, whether you are using Windows XP, Windows...
Yesterday Microsoft released Web Platform Installer (WPI) to the web at http://www.microsoft.com/web/channel/products/WebPlatformInstaller.aspx . Betas have been available for a while, but the release version contains several new features. This is a one-stop-shopping installer for free Microsoft web development software; everything you need in one place. The web page contains everything you need, including a video walkthrough. Here’s an overview of what you’ll find: On the web page, just click “install now” to get started. You can run the installer directly from this link; there’s no need to save it to disk. The installer itself is light-weight and its payload is always downloaded separately. The Welcome Screen provides three choices; install...
Microsoft recently released a cool new ASP.NET server control - <asp:chart /> - that can be used for free with ASP.NET 3.5 to enable rich browser-based charting scenarios: Download the free Microsoft Chart Controls Download the VS 2008 Tool Support for the Chart Controls Download the Microsoft Chart Controls Samples Download the Microsoft Chart Controls Documentation Visit the Microsoft Chart Control Forum Once installed the <asp:chart/> control shows up under the "Data" tab on the Toolbox, and can be easily declared on any ASP.NET page as a standard server control: <asp:chart /> supports a rich assortment of chart options - including pie, area, range, point, circular, accumulation, data distribution, ajax interactive...
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