Silverlight

My upcoming Talk: Introducing PRISM/MEF for the Agile Developer - February 2012

Sam Abraham — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:35:01 GMT

I would like to share that I will be speaking at the Deerfield Beach Coders Café on February 7^th, 2012 6:30 PM on concepts behind PRISM and MEF including IoC Containers, Composition, Dependency Injection, Loose-coupling and Inheritance. We will be also adding a little Agile spin to the talk focusing on the importance and ideal use of the underlying design patterns in an Agile software shop.

I am also scheduled to present a similar topic at the upcoming South Florida Code Camp taking place on Saturday February 18th, 2012.

Look forward to meeting everyone either at Deerfield Beach or South Florida Code Camp.

More information on the upcoming events can be found at:

http://www.fladotnet.com/Reg.aspx?EventID=530

http://www.fladotnet.com/codecamp/

Below is the abstract and speaker bio:

Introducing PRISM and MEF for the Agile Software Developer with Sam Abraham

Join us as we highlight some increasingly popular design concepts that may come to good use when taking an incremental approach to delivering functional code. In particular we will be introducing PRISM and MEF, both provided as open source frameworks by the Microsoft Patterns and Practices Team (http://compositewpf.codeplex.com/), as an example of how concepts such as IoC, Dependency Injection and Composition come into play with parallel and incremental software development.

Speakers:

Sam Abraham is a Microsoft Certified Professional, Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS ASP.Net 3.5, 4.0 and Silverlight 4), Project Management Professional (PMP) and Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) striving to leverage proven technology solutions to produce cost-effective, quality software that meets customer needs, timelines and budgets. Sam is currently a member of the Software Engineering Team at SISCO Corp., the leader in maritime security solutions with customers including Princess, Carnival, and Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines as well as the US Coast Guard.

West Palm Beach .Net User Group 2011 Update

Sam Abraham — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 14:06:30 GMT

In the past few months, we at the West Palm Beach .Net User Group have been busy soliciting your feedback on topics you would like covered at our upcoming meetings. We have also been encouraging our members to step up and share on the projects they work on and the technologies they use. The result is the schedule below which we hope brings a good variety of today’s hottest topics. We look forward to seeing you at our meetings and to receiving your feedback as we continuously strive to improve the group.

Our upcoming July 26^th meeting features Shervin Shakibi on HTML 5. This meeting presents a good opportunity to get heads up on this new technology which is quickly capturing developers’ interest and market share.

For August, Ritesh Pahwa covers TFS 2010. There have been multiple questions on the new features introduced in TFS 2010 as well as on the upgrade process from older TFS editions. Ritesh, who managed the successful upgrade to TFS 2010 for Palm Beach County earlier this year, will be answering all our questions and sharing tips on leveraging the latest features in TFS 2010.

September brings our own Amir Liberman to share on his CodePlex LINQ Extensions Library and answer all our tough LINQ questions.

Other topics generating a big buzz today are Windows Phone 7 and the Kinect SDK. We are very privileged to have our esteemed Microsoft Developer Evangelist, Joe Healy, traveling all the way from Tampa to share with us the latest on Windows Phone 7 in October and Kinect in November. Joe’s back-to-back appearance at our group is bound to finish our year on a strong technical note.

Plans are already underway for 2012. Our focus continues on bringing you the latest technologies presented by a diverse group of speakers, but we also hope to kick it up a bit to increase your participation in “YOUR” group. We are recruiting new volunteers with the goal of bringing you value-added services and special events in addition to the regular FREE monthly meetings. Stay tuned for more announcements as plans get finalized.

Look forward to meeting and chatting with you at our upcoming meetings. Should you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please do not hesitate to contact me via my blog, www.geekswithblogs.net/wildturtle

Sam Abraham

Site Director - West Palm Beach .Net User Group

http://www.fladotnet.com/

All in a Day's Work: The Silverlight Navigation Framework

Sam Abraham — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 18:47:49 GMT

The Silverlight Navigation Framework offers great value when looking to map longer XAML page URLs to much shorter, friendlier and memorable ones. This feature is similar in nature to the ASP.NET MVC Routing engine. For instance, the following is a quick sample on how to leverage the Navigation Framework. For this to work, I had to:

1-Add reference to System.Windows.Controls.Navigation.dll in my Silverlight project

2-Add the following declaration in my App.xaml page:
xmlns:nav="clr-namespace:System.Windows.Navigation;assembly=System.Windows.Controls.Navigation"

I was then able to leverage URI mapping in App.xaml as following:

<Application.Resources>
    <nav:UriMapper x:Key="uriMapper">
	<nav:UriMapping Uri="/{ParamVal}"
		MappedUri="/Site1/TestPage.xaml?Param={ParamVal}" />
   </nav:UriMapper>
</Application.Resources>

The above example will be mapping the base URL of a site to the path /Site1/TestPage.xaml and will pass the parameter value supplied in the simplified URL to the more complex mapped URL.

That simple! J

Adding a Windows Phone 7 Panorama Control inside a Windows Phone User Control

Sam Abraham — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 06:50:14 GMT

I have been playing with the Windows Phone 7 Toolkit all day long (Saturday), all while reading Charles Petzold’s eBook brought to us for free by Microsoft Press.

Time for this 1013-page book couldn’t have been better as it provides us with insights into WP7 development right at the time WP7 phones are becoming available to consumers.

We greatly appreciate and acknowledge the cost Microsoft must have incurred and the big time sacrifice Charles must have made to get that high quality book publicly available in record time.

As I am working on our first Windows Phone 7 Application, we decided to encapsulate a functional area as a Windows Phone User Control and to include a Panorama control within. Online articles consistently demonstrated the Panorama control when defined in a Windows Phone Panorama Page. Additionally, the Panorama control is not available in the Toolbox for easy inclusion in a custom control.

In playing a bit with the Panorama control, I found a quick way to include it in our Windows Phone Control page without investing much effort:

1-Add a new Windows Phone Panorama Page to project. This will automatically add references to Microsoft.Phone.Interop, Microsoft.Phone.Controls in addition to the Microsoft.Pone DLL already referenced by default.

2-Copy the generated namespaces from Windows Phone Panorama Page to User Control XAML page.

xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"

xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"

xmlns:phone="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Phone.Controls;assembly=Microsoft.Phone"

xmlns:shell="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Phone.Shell;assembly=Microsoft.Phone"

xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008"

xmlns:mc=http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006

3-Copy the generated Panorama control XAML markup from the Windows Phone Panorama Page to the location desired within the Windows Phone User Control XAML.

<controls:Panorama Title="my application">

<controls:PanoramaItem Header="item1">

<Grid/>

</controls:PanoramaItem>

<controls:PanoramaItem Header="item2">

<Grid/>

</controls:PanoramaItem>

</controls:Panorama>

4-Delete the Windows Phone Panorama page created in step 1 since we didn’t need it in the first place.

5-Ask a friend to pat you on the back for being so efficient and quick.

--Sam Abraham

Experiences With Windows Phone 7

Sam Abraham — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 15:35:36 GMT

A couple of weeks ago, I took a four hour drive to visit Tampa where I got to meet our Microsoft Developer Evangelist Joe Healy (aka. Devfish). Present were (in alphabetical order) Scott Dorman, Nikita Polyakov, Bill Reiss, Ken Tucker, and Kevin Wolf.

If you have been following Windows Phone 7 news lately, you will notice the names above being quiet familiar. Joe Healy was recently featured in a Jessie Liberty YapCast discussing WP7 and the important role Florida plays in evangelizing the value this new mobile OS brings to developers. Furthermore, Scott, Joe, Nikita and Kevin are writing a book to teach us Windows Phone 7 Development in 24 hours (I would however strongly suggest you take a little more than 24 hours to read it). Additionally Kevin and Nikita are 2 of only 22 worldwide inaugural Windows Phone Development MVPs.

With all that love of Windows Phone 7 in the air, I got to play with at least 3 different prototype phones, two of which had QWERTY keyboards (one with the keyboard behind a sliding front panel and another with the keyboard on the front panel), while another device had a touch-screen keyboard. One prototype phone had an expansion SD Card Slot which cleared my initial misconception as I realized that WP7 can handle additional memory beyond the capacity of the built-in memory a phone ships with if the hardware supports a MicroSD Card.

I look forward to completing at least one WP7 application very soon, that of course if by then no similar application exists on AppHub :)

--Sam Abraham

Thoughts on HTML 5 for ASP.Net MVC 3, WebMatrix and Silverlight

Sam Abraham — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 13:16:27 GMT

With concerns of HTML 5 overshadowing or affecting the roadmap for Silverlight actively addressed in many blog posts, I decided to cover the value HTML 5 brings to another set of web-based Microsoft solutions: ASP.Net MVC 3 and WebMatrix.

A direction to embrace HTML 5 can already be clearly seen in ASP.Net MVC 3 with Unobtrusive Javascript leveraging the “data-“HTML 5 attributes. Additionally, WebMatrix Razor site templates are already HTML5 and CSS3 compliant while continuing to be backwards compatible for older browsers.

With HTML 5, ASP.Net Web Pages Helpers (for both WebMatrix and MVC 3) can evolve to produce elaborate out-of-the-box reusable components while maintaining their light-weight competitive advantage.

Both ASPX and the new Razor view engines enable complete control over a screen’s HTML markup and hence can immediately benefit from the new features of HTML 5 on both IE 9 and other HTML 5 supporting browsers such as Firefox 3.5

With developers doing “HTML 5 coding”, I foresee Razor gaining more popularity due to its efficient syntax and intelligent parsing mechanism that focuses on minimizing tag keystrokes.

In conclusion, HTML 5 might cause some strategy shifts for Silverlight with both technologies bound to co-exist and continue going strong. However one should not ignore the value and power HTML 5 brings to other Microsoft web technologies such as ASP.Net MVC3 and WebMatrix.

--Sam Abraham

Ft Lauderdale ArcSig Meeting with Sam Abraham 10/19/2010

Sam Abraham — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 12:35:25 GMT

Sam Abraham (Me) presented an introduction to MVVM for WPF/Silverlight at the Ft Lauderdale ArcSig on Tuesday October 19th, 2010. With 43 registered attendees of whom many made it to the event, MVVM was sure proven to be a hot topic of interest.

In a quick poll among the audience, many did develop WPF and/or Silverlight solutions, yet only one attendee had leveraged MVVM in code. A member of the audience reminded us that while our talk covered MVVM in the context of WPF, MVVM as a pattern is also applicable for AJAX and client side technologies.

We all enjoyed the healthy sandwiches brought to us by Dave Noderer, our Florida.Net founder and CEO of Computer Ways, Inc. Our meeting was hosted by Microsoft with Quent Herschelman, the ArcSig Microsoft sponsor present at the meeting.

Below are some photos of the event.

--Sam Abraham

Sam Abraham To Speak on MVVM at the Ft Lauderdale ArcSig on October 19th, 2010

Sam Abraham — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 12:30:30 GMT

Sam Abraham (Me) will be speaking on MVVM at the Ft Lauderdale ArcSig on October 19^th, 2010. We will be covering the concepts and architectural patterns behind MVVM then move to discuss the MVVM-friendly features of WPF/Silverlight including XAML, Dependency Properties, Attached Properties and Behaviors. We will also take a look at some of the available MVVM Frameworks that can help quickly create the necessary structure and setup for an MVVM project including Prism, Caliburn Micro and MVVM Light. Below is the abstract and speaker bio.

Hope to see you all there!

--Sam Abraham

Abstract

With the increasing adoption of Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Model-View-View Model (MVVM) is gaining ground as the architecture of choice for delivering modular, scalable and easily extensible solutions. In this talk, we will first go over a WPF sample using a "code-behind" development paradigm then move to explain what MVVM is all about along with its inherent support in WPF. All attendees will be invited to discuss and share their ideas, thoughts and comments on the subject.

Speakers:
Sam Abraham is a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) and Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS ASP.Net 3.5/4.0) He currently lives in South Florida where he leads the West Palm Beach .Net User Group (www.fladotnet.com) and actively participates in various local .Net Community events as organizer and/or technical speaker. Sam also serves as Director of Electronic Communications and as Mentoring Project Lead at the South Florida Chapter of the Project Management Institute (www.southfloridapmi.org). Sam finds his passion in leveraging latest and greatest .Net Technologies along with proven Project Management practices and methodologies to produce high quality, cost-competitive software. Sam can be contacted through his blog: http://www.geekswithblogs.net/wildturtle

Gold Coast .Net User's Group With Sam Abraham and Joe Homnick - The Open Data Protocol (OData)

Sam Abraham — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 04:09:00 GMT

I had the pleasure of speaking with Joe Homnick today about the Open Data Protocol. I presented an example on consuming OData in an MVC solution using jQuery. Joe presented on consuming OData feeds in SharePoint 2010/Silverlight 4.0 as well as a nice sample on setting up an OData service interface.

I appreciate the opportunity to speak at a user group known for consistently bringing in only the very best speakers and content.

At the end of the talk, I was presented with a certificate of appreciation for my speaking contribution at today’s event.

I look forward to returning to the Gold Coast .Net User’s Group on October 28th, 2010 as part of the SoFla PDC 2010 where I will be speaking on the latest and greatest ASP.Net MVC 3.

All the best,

--Sam Abraham

Florida .Net September 2010 User Group Meetings with Joe Homnick - SL 4.0 for SharePoint 2010

Sam Abraham — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 17:45:37 GMT

Joe Homnick, Microsoft Regional Director, was the speaker at both Florida.Net’s Ft Lauderdale ArcSig and West Palm Beach .Net User Group September 2010 meetings where he shared with us how to leverage Silverlight 4.0 WebParts in a SharePoint 2010 solution. We appreciate Joe’s time and look forward to his next visit which we hope would be in the near future. Below are some photos of both events.

--Sam Abraham

Site Director - West Palm Beach .Net User Group

Ft Lauderdale ArcSig- Silverlight 4.0 for SharePoint 2010 with Joe Homnick - September 2010

WPB .Net User Group- Silverlight 4.0 for SharePoint 2010 with Joe Homnick - September 2010