WPF Databinding Overview (via RoMiller.com)

Over the last 4 years, I continuously come back to this one blog post by Rowan Miller to remind myself how to create an ItemTemplate for a ListBox. It is the best cheat sheet I’ve found online.

Introduction Data binding in WPF seems to be much like skinning a cat (although hopefully a lot less painful… for the cat at least), there is usually more than one way of achieving the result you want.   The purpose of this blog is to quickly detail some of the many ways you can bind data to a WPF application. If you want to go into more detail about the concepts behind WPF data binding and it’s inner workings here are a couple of great articles; … Read More

via RoMiller.com

By David Burela

Tip: Silverlight page authorization with the navigation framework

I came across a  way to easily secure any Silverlight application, and thought I would share it with the list. It is a simple combination of 2 controls that can be found here http://www.davidpoll.com/2010/01/01/opening-up-silverlight-4-navigation-authenticationauthorization-in-an-inavigationcontentloader/

To secure your application you only need to put around 15 lines of xaml into MainPage.xaml
The syntax is similar to the page authorization config in an ASP.Net application

<authLoader:NavigationAuthRule UriPattern="^/Views/About\.xaml\??.*$">     <authLoader:Deny Users="?" />     <authLoader:Allow Users="*" /> </authLoader:NavigationAuthRule> <authLoader:NavigationAuthRule UriPattern="^/Views/RegisteredUsersPage.xaml\??.*$">     <authLoader:Allow Roles="Registered Users" /> </authLoader:NavigationAuthRule>

There are two controls:

• AuthContentLoader will check that the user is allowed to access the page. If they aren’t then an UnauthorizedAccessException is thrown.
• To automatically redirect the user to a login screen, the AuthContentLoader control is wrapped in an ErrorPageLoader control. This is configured to catch the Unauthorized exception and redirect the user to the login screen

Hope this helps someone

By David Burela

New Windows Azure Training Kit & 1.4 SDK available

There is a new release of the Windows Azure training kit, and also an update (and subsequent refresh) of the Azure SDK available.

New training kit

The training kit in my opinion is always the best way to learn the newest features that are available in SDKs. This latest update brings a new hands on lab explaining how to authenticate users from a Windows Phone 7.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2011/04/28/now-available-windows-azure-platform-training-kit-april-update.aspx

 

Windows Azure SDK 1.4 released

A new version of the Azure SDK is now available. The biggest feature is a new way for developers to push out new development builds to an Azure server, without having to repackage and waiting for it to be spun up on new machines. The feature is called “web deploy” and details can be found in the update link below
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2011/04/15/now-available-windows-azure-sdk-1-4-refresh-with-webdeploy-integration.aspx

There was an issue with the 1.4 release which has been fixed. If you downloaded the SDK before April 25th you will be required to download the new version. If you are installing it for the first time then you are fine
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2011/04/27/windows-azure-sdk-1-4-refresh-issue-resolved.aspx

By David Burela

I’m presenting at DDD Melbourne – New development workflows

*UPDATE* The video of my presentation is now online http://davidburela.wordpress.com/2011/06/02/video-of-my-ddd-melbourne-talk-new-development-workflow/

http://dddmelbourne.com (Developer Developer Developer)is one of the larger non-Microsoft .Net conferences in Melbourne. I am happy to announce that I have been accepted as a speaker there for the May 28 conference.

My talk will be on “New development workflows”

In the last few years there have been a number of new technologies released, which when used together can greatly simplify a developer’s life. For this session, I explore what kind of workflow we could create for the modern .Net developer. The session will show an end to end example of creating a new project: Modern ways of using source control, managing assemblies, testing, pushing to the cloud, etc.

The session will be structured like this:

• What is Mercurial, what are DVCS (Distributed Version Control System)
• How to add 3rd party assemblies into a project seamlessly with Microsoft NuGet
• Unit test the project by using Ninject & nSubstitute (installed via NuGet)
• Push all the source code to the cloud, meaning your source code is safe (Bitbucket.org)
• Have all of this automatically built and deployed to the cloud for us (AppHarbor.com)

David Burela works as a Senior .Net consultant at http://Hazaa.com.au and has a strong focus on Windows Phone 7 and Windows Azure. He is a active member in the developer community and frequent speaker at events. He is currently writing a book on ‘Enterprise integration of Silverlight 4 and Azure’

Register for the conference now before all the tickets are sold out. The full day event is only $25! http://dddmelbourne2.eventbrite.com/

By David Burela

Community report–Melbourne SDDN April

I am now in charge of organising the speakers for the Melbourne http://sddn.org.au group (Silverlight Designer and Developer Network).

This month I arranged for three speakers to present:

• David Glover (@dglover) – Windows Phone 7 social View Template
• Cristian Prieto (@cprieto) – Creating plugins for Expression Blend
• Chris Walshie (@ChrisWalshie) – Upcoming features in Windows Phone 7 Mango update

David Glover showed a new Windows Phone 7 template that has released on codeplex. It allows anyone to very quickly put together a Windows Phone 7 app that aggregates data feeds (RSS, Twitter, etc.). This means that you can create an application that displays the latest news from your business, or perhaps a sports team. The template is available at http://socialviewer.codeplex.com/

David’s session was recorded and can be viewed below (8 minutes)

Glover also created a screencast after the event that can be viewed here

 

Cristian Prieto’s session explained the basics of creating a plugin for Expression Blend. The session was recorded but not online yet. Here is a link to an old blog post of mine that explains how to get started and configure Visual Studio for creating plugins. https://davidburela.wordpress.com/2010/02/02/guide-to-creating-expression-blend-3-addins/

Chris Walshie gave a slideshow presentation explaining the new features that are in the upcoming Windows Phone 7 update, codename Mango. He attended Mix11 so was able to tell us all about

• Background workers
• Multiple live tiles
• Deep linking into your applications
• Changes to the push notifications
• etc.

By David Burela