andyBlog

Find my work blog on MSDN

Having now settled into the new job, I've now got my work blog up and running and it can be found here.

The designer developer workflow - The new iteration

A must read for anyone considering WPF/Silverlight design and development

Getting ready for asp.net MVC

So as ScottGu announced the public preview of the asp.net MVC is just around the corner it got me thinking. Now for the average asp.net developer there is certainly going to be a context switch in how you develop using the MVC framework, for example say goodbye to viewstate, postbacks and server controls, as well as default.aspx in its current known form and say hello to views, controllers, routing, view state and html fragments and <%%> in your html code. Now it all sounds pretty daunting however from my observations there are two key areas I've seen so far have that have been tripping people up. These are what routing is and how it works, and how you deal with html in the views.

So therefore if you're looking to start with the MVC framework I have 2 strong recommendations:

1. Read this piece from ScottGu on routing

2. Read this from Rob Conery MVC UI Helpers

If you can get your head around those bits, then you're well on your way to be able to play happily in the MVC world.

Moving onwards and upwards

This post is for those of you who have followed through from my Conchango blog, who up-until last week, were my employer. While it's sad to leave such a great place (and they're hiring so if you fancy replacing me go see Michelle and tell her I sent you ;-)) I'm pleased to say that I've accepted an offer to join Microsoft as a Consultant in the UK. - Exciting times ahead.

Anyway you'll be able to find all my thoughts and ramblings on .Net and more specifically Silverlight and asp.net here for the time being while the transition to becoming a blue badge takes place.

Silverlight 1.0: Applying a Render transform dynamically

Here is an interesting one. Typically with the Silverlight 1.0 object model you can access properties and methods directly...read more

CreateSilverlight.js and Silverlight.js

When you starting using Silverlight you will quickly become aware of these magic javascript files called...read more

Silverlight error codes

When working with Silverlight you can often come across cryptic error messages read more...

Deploying a Silverlight application to IIS and nothing shows up?

I'm currently working in the depths of Silverlight and we've recently come across a interesting issue when trying to deploy to a test environment...read more.

Good engineering practices breed good software

Seems obvious when you state it out loud, however it is quite amazing how many...read more

Facebook application - Hey! Help me out?

So there has been a great deal of buzz around Facebook and their f8 platform. I decided I was going to have a play with the facebook platform api and built the Hey! Help me out? application. The application is a simple questions and answers application that allows you to take advantage of the knowledge of your friends. That questions and answers are then archived and available for searching giving you a knowledge base to use again and again.

Anyway, I'd appreciate people checking it out, and giving me feedback on it.
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2367558981

For those aspiring facebook developers out there, I'd highly recommend checking out the platform documentation and the .net resource centre.

Understand your verbs when creating actions in your web applications.

Recently, I've been doing a fair amount of reading around RESTFul web services and applications...read more.

Javascript is not suitable for complex computation m'kay! Silverlight and the CLR is. Please use the right tool for the job in hand.

Live from Google Developer Day 2007 @ San Jose

I'll be posting updates here:

Offline toolkit announced from Google

Silverlight: Layout system and controls framework.