Here is a quick walk through of setting up your Silverlight 4 development environment. The first assumed step is that you have Visual Studio 2010 already installed and any appropriate patches. Then download the following in order and install each. Silverlight 4 Tools RC2 for Visual Studio and Silverlight 4 RTW Expression Blend 4 Release Candidate Silverlight Toolkit - Not necessary, but lots of good bits in this download. WCF RIA Services - This is also not necessary, but you should grab it just...

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Started a new Sketchflow Prototype in Expression Blend recently and documented each of the steps. This blog entry covers some of those steps, which are the basic elements of any prototype. I will have more information regarding design, prototype creation, and the process of the initial phases for development in the future. For now, I hope you enjoy this short walk through. Also, be sure to check out my last quick entry on Sketchflow. I started off with a Sketchflow Project, just like I did in my...

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In this entry I just want to cover some examples of how to connect to Webtrends DX Web Services. The DX Web Services use REST as the architecture, providing simple URI based end points to connect to. With the Webtrends SDK you can connect to these services with your account information. Here are the basic steps to retrieve a profile list, the reports from one of those profiles, and then the report you want from that report list. First step is to create a Webtrends User. WebTrends.Sdk.Account.User...

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I wonder if anyone has had issues with running MSCharts with MVC 2? I have tried a couple of different issues, but still have not got them to render correctly. In the end I always end up with broken image links. Has anyone seen this? I have no errors displaying in my MVC 2 Application build or anything, nothing specific that leads me to any explanation. If anyone has any ideas, please leave a comment or shoot me an e-mail; adronhall at gmail dot com. I would greatly appreciate any insight you MSChart...

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So again, the #altnetseattle Conference easily was one of the most useful events of the year for me. The amount of ideas, thoughts, and conversations that happen in just those two days often outweigh all the presentations I see at other conferences throughout the year. The reason is simple, they are directed, to the point, and done with the ideal of open spaces. This makes each session exhaustive on a particular topics. Throw together some of the smartest people in the field and you have a bang up...

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The first two sessions on Sunday were Collaboration and why it is so hard and the following, which was a perfect following session was on Kanban. While in that second session two online Saas Style Tools were mentioned; AgileZen and Leankit. I decided right then and there that I would throw together some first impressions and setup some sample projects. I did this by setting up an account and creating the projects. Agile Zen Account Creation Setting up the initial account required an e-mail verification,...

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The two main concepts of Kanban is to keep the queues minimum and to maintain visibility. Management/leadership needs to make sure the Kanban Queue doesn’t get starved. This is key and also very challenging, being the queue needs to be minimal but also can’t get too small during the course of work. This is to maintain maximum velocity. Phases of the Kanban need to be kept flowing too, bottlenecks need removed ASAP when brought up. Victory Wall – I dig that idea. Somewhere to look to see the success...

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The session convened and we began a discussion about why collaboration is so hard. To work together in software better us engineers have to overcome traditional software approaches (silos of work) and the human element of tending to go off in a corner to work through an issue. It was agreed upon that software engineers are jack asses of jack assery. Breaking down the stoic & silent types by presenting a continuous enthusiasm until the stoic and silent types break down and open up to the group....

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I dived into the MEF session with Glenn Block, Sourabh Mathur, Brian Henderson, and others. Glenn covered the basic architectural ideas of MEF and then dived into a few examples. Is a framework around decoupling components. Built around the idea of discoverable type systems. Traditional extensibility mechanisms have a host and the respective extensions, commonly linking these two aspects with a form of registration. MEF removes the need for the registration part of the architecture and uses a contract....

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This is a topic I know nothing about, and thus, may be supremely disparate notes. Have fun translating. : ) . . .and coolness that the session is well past capacity. Separates things form the UI and everything that needs populated is done through commands. The domain and reports have separate storage. Events populate these stores of data, such as "sold event". What it looks like, is that the domain controls the requests by event, which would be a product order or something similar. Event sourcing...

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Below are the notes I made in the REST Architecture Session I helped kick off with Andrew. RSS, ATOM, and such needed for better discovery. i.e. there still is a need for some type of discovery. Difficult is modeling behaviors in a RESTful way. ?? Invoking some type of state against an object. For instance in the case of a POST vs. a GET. The GET is easy, comes back as is, but what about a POST, which often changes some state or something. Challenge is doing multiple workflows with stateful workflows....

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SOLID came up again in discussion. What is SOLID? Well, glad you asked, because I am going to elaborate on the SOLID Principles a bit. Initial Concept S Single Responsibility Principle O Open/Closed Principle L Liskov Substitution Principle I Interface Segregation Principle D Dependency Inversion/Injection Principle The Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) is stated that every object should have a single responsibility and should be entirely encapsulated by the class. This helps keep cohesion. Here...

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Time to rock the ALT.NET scene and head up to the conference this weekend. I must say, out of all the conferences I have been to the ALT.NET Conference is by far one of the best. Great minds, great attitudes, awesome chances to learn, awesome changes to expand on one's ideas with others that hit on the same hurdles! All in all, last year was great and I am expecting it to be a great conference this year also. For more information check out the ALT.NET site: http://2010conf.altnetseatt... To get...

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