Vince Blasberg's Blog

Chris Rajczi and Michael Perry worked very hard on the Sea Turtle application for the last few Dallas XAML User Group meetings. The application can be reviewed on the Marketplace at http://windowsphone.com/s?appid=c1ccc254-5735-471e-96c0-88a0d89d3a80.

Sure I have a blog, but all of my time is spent working on cool work or contributing to the Dallas XAML User Group.  I write the newsletters and maintain everything including the momentum, hopefully.

My name is Vince and I'm a technical packrat.  ( Hello Vince.... )

After several attempts, I finally got my Windows Phone 7 updated to the Mango release.  It kept failing and reported an error C1010007.  That error indicates that the cable is bad or not the original cable.  I finally tried again and kept touching the phone every minute or two.  The upgrade continued and finally finished.  I suspect the phone goes to sleep during the upgrade. 

This is a mention of the event that came and went last weekend for the .Net Micro Framework here in Dallas at the Improving Enterprises offices.  Shawn Weisfeld worked on the event for the last 6 months.  Shawn pushed the moderately priced package from FEZ that proved to be an excellent product.  We all met last Saturday and went through some exercises to understand how to develop most of the basic tasks to interact with the plug and play hardware.  When the day was over, we all had a great understanding of how to create .Net application with Visual Studio 2010 and deploy to this device.  It's so much easier than the Windows CE deployments. 

The Entity Framework can help us create an efficient Data Access Layer or a horribly inefficient one. 

In a typical Silverlight line-of-business application we have Lists, Grids, DataGrids, and StackPanels.  We populate a list and it flows down and off the browser page.  When we have a ScrollViewer, it will scroll the whole page including edit controls and graphics and not just the list that's tall and flowing off the page.  The good news is that we can easily contain the list in the viewable area with the few simple steps listed below.

Dallas GiveCamp came and went this last weekend.  It was my second GiveCamp and was very rewarding.  Our team created a site for the Tarrant County Birth Network.  Jon and I quickly explained the resulting web site and sat down, but I forgot to present and thank the team.  So this is a very weak attempt to thank them after the event.

Shawn Weisfeld has recorded several presentations that I've been fortunate enough to present at various times.  Shawn also stalks other active community speakers with that camera of his.  Check out the complete list on the INETA Champs live site at http://newlive.ineta.org/.  That's more than enough video content to fill a Saturday night or skip the Monday night football.

Isn't it great when the answers are out there?  I finally got a Google hint and overcame this one.  So here are a few reasons that I encountered and overcame this error.  We can easily reproduce (and often fix) this error.  This occurs on the asynchronous return from a Silverlight 4 to RIA services.  It's as if for any of the few reasons it fails, the call just gets aborted and we get a head-scratching "Not Found".  We can sometimes even hit a debugger breakpoint in the Domain Service that gets the IQueryable call and wonder why the server appears to work in the debugger.

I’ve been looking at the Silverlight Out-Of-Browser support and the easy update feature.  In the current version, we’re given the method, CheckAndDownloadUpdateAsync().  This method does a lot for us but is rather limited.  With an asynchronous method and no parameters, what can we expect?  With a huge team in Redmond working for us and trying to meet deadlines, we get what we get.  In the spirit of sharing, here’s what I see so far.

Teresa Burger and Chris Koenig are heading up a great event on Jun 18th and 19th called the DFW Silverlight and WP7 DevCamp.  It is two full days (Friday and Saturday) of Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 fun.  Yes - I said fun.  I'll be one of the available on-site mentors both days. It will be at our favorite hang-out, the  Microsoft headquarters in Dallas.  There will be prizes and lots of experience to be gained.  So if you want to join in the fun and learning, please register now before it is filled.  After two days of Silverlight and WP7, there’s still a Sunday left to ride the motorcycle.  So it definitely will be a great weekend.

The Dallas XAML User Group is holding their second meeting on April 6th 2010.  We will be spending most of the time on our laptops practicing data binding techniques for WPF and Silverlight.  The completed samples are uploaded and ready to review before the meeting.  The theme for samples is a GoldWing reseller.  Can you guess which sweet Orange motorcycle that I own and love to ride around Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas with my wife?

Recently, the WPF question of the day for me was how to bubble up a toggle button event through several layers with less code.  In WPF we can easily add layers without worrying about wiring up delegates for each level.

Just a note to the blog to say that my current contract has been going well.  I'm working on contract direct from with own company, FreshMetrics, LLC.  I get to have lunch with Rob Vetter (C# MVP) from next door.  We get to catch up on user group stuff more often now.  The work is great and the team is very serious about the art of software.  It's much more silo'd and quiet than what I'm used to, but that can be a good thing.  I've been heads down with systems analysis, user interviews, and plenty of documentation before building the final application.  It's refreshing to actually have the license to discover instead of hack and go, then wonder when unit tests come into the picture if at all.  I've been pushing myself to do things right with analysis, peer review, and now I'm almost done with unit testing.  Yes - true TDD.  It's been hard not hitting the WPF and WCF services first, but the application is much better already.

Today was my last day on the extended Intuit contract.  Now I’m off to find the next great team to work with.  If anyone has projects that can be outsourced or new contracts, I’m looking.

My current contract at Intuit is ending in a few weeks.  I'm heading into a possible slow period so it's a good time to catch the blog up a little.  If nothing else but to remind myself what I've been doing through this year since leaving Notion Solutions.