Archives
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Creating a Line Chart using the HTML 5 Canvas
The HTML 5 canvas is capable of rendering lines, shapes, images, text and more without relying on a plugin. Although the canvas element isn’t supported by older browsers, the latest version of all major browsers (IE, Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Opera) now support the canvas making it an option for rendering charts, graphs and other types of visual data. In cases where a browser doesn’t support the canvas, a fallback can be provided that renders data using Silverlight, Flash or another type of plugin.
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Using IIS Express to Secure Silverlight and WCF Applications
I’ve been using IIS Express lately with Silverlight and WCF services and have learned to appreciate the “real-world” advantage it gives you versus the built-in Visual Studio “Cassini” server. Although I’ve always preferred to use IIS whenever possible, sometimes that’s not an option when you’re first starting a project and working on a machine that doesn’t have IIS installed. By using IIS Express you can identify security, configuration and other issues that may occur as you move an application to a real IIS 7+ server upfront rather than finding out about the issues after you move an application to a dev/staging server. In this post I’ll walk-through some of the lessons learned and walls encountered when I started working with authentication in IIS Express. It’s easy to work with once you know a few fundamentals. If you don’t already have IIS Express installed (it comes with Visual Studio 2010 SP1) you can get it through the Web Platform Installer or here.
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Integrating Security Roles into Silverlight Applications–TechEd 2011 Talk
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Getting Started with the HTML 5 Canvas
Rendering complex graphs or designs to the Web has always been a challenge that has typically been solved by using images, server-side processes or plugins such as Silverlight or Flash. Although drawing charts with straight lines has never been a problem (with some creative CSS), rendering different types of shapes and gradients in the browser such as ellipses, bezier curves and other custom shapes has always been a problem. With the addition of the HTML 5 canvas in the latest version of all major browsers, a lot can be done with only JavaScript and HTML tags now.
