• Thread synchronization: Wait and Pulse demystified. By Nick Butler.
• Use a shortened GUID for file names and request strings. ShortGuid – A shorter and url friendly GUID class in C#. By Dave Transom.
• Top Ten Tips to Using XPath and XPointer. By John E. Simpson.
• Client-side caching for script methods access in ASP.NET AJAX, by Jeffrey Zhao.
• A very nice two-part introduction to jQuery, by Rick Strahl.
• A COMPARISON OF MICROSOFT’S C# PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE TO SUN MICROSYSTEMS’ JAVA PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE. By Dare Obasanjo.
• Silverlight
  • Silverlight 2 End to End Tutorial: Building a Digg Search Client, by Scott Guthrie.
  • Fluid Canvas in Silverlight, by neo.
• WCF
  • Performance Improvement for WCF Client Proxy Creation in .NET 3.5 and Best Practices. By Wenlon Dong.
  • A comprehensive guide to using MsmqIntegrationBinding with MSMQ 3.0 in WCF. By Simon Evans.
  • If your WSE 3.0 Mutual Certificate Authentication web service runs very slowly, try setting establishSecurityContext to true.

PowerShell

• PowerShell Community Extensions has very useful cmdlets such as Get/Set-Clipboard, Write-GZip, Start-Process, Select-Xml and many others.
• John D. Cook’s PowerShell Cookbook has lots of useful PowerShell recipes.

Apps and Tools

• Microsoft Windows SteadyState (free) is great for maintaining public-access computers.

Other Stuff

• Anatomy of a malware scam – The evil genius of XP Antivirus 2008. By Jesper M. Johansson. If you’ve had to help your relatives and friends clean up after XP Antivirus 2008/2009, read this very detailed analysis of the malware.

Instead of the traditional and simple display of a string, this Hello World application uses animation in code to say “hello”.

Pre-requisites

You will need to have the following installed:

• Visual Studio 2008 with Service Pack 1
• Silverlight 2.0 Runtime
• Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1

Create a New Silverlight Project

• In Visual Studio 2008, choose File/New/Project and select Visual C#/Silverlight/Silverlight Application. The Silverlight project type is added when you install the Silverlight Tools.
• Give your project a name and choose OK.

  

• On the next dialog window, accept the default “Add a new ASP.NET Web project…” and choose OK.

Silverlight Project Files

Since we will be drawing objects, we need a Canvas control instead of the default Grid. Change your Page.xaml file to read like this:

<UserControl x:Class="SilverlightHelloWorld.Page"

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

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

    Width="520" Height="140" Loaded="UserControl_Loaded">

    <Canvas x:Name="MyCanvas"/>

</UserControl>

Press F7 when you have Page.xaml opened to switch to the code-behind file Page.xaml.cs, and replace the code there with this code:

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Linq;

using System.Net;

using System.Windows;

using System.Windows.Controls;

using System.Windows.Documents;

using System.Windows.Input;

using System.Windows.Media;

using System.Windows.Media.Animation;

using System.Windows.Shapes;

using System.Windows.Threading;

namespace SilverlightHelloWorld

{

    public partial class Page : UserControl

    {

        // private Storyboard _timer = new Storyboard();

        private DispatcherTimer _timer;

        private List<Cell> cells = new List<Cell>(); // list of all cells

        private int _xSize = 26; // width of the grid, in number of cells

        private int _ySize = 7; // height of the grid

        private int _numCells; // total number of cells

        private int _cellIdx = 0;

        /// <summary>Represents a cell on the grid</summary>

        private class Cell

        {

            public double X; // x-coordinate of cell

            public double Y; // y-coordinate

            public bool On; // True if cell is "on"

            public double Order; // Display order

        }

        public Page()

        {

            InitializeComponent();

        }

        private void UserControl_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)

        {

            // Assign a random value to each cell 

            Random rnd = new Random(Environment.TickCount);

            _numCells = (int)(_xSize * _ySize);

            string template = "                          "

                + " x  x xxxx x    x     xx  "

                + " x  x x    x    x    x  x "

                + " xxxx xxxx x    x    x  x "

                + " x  x x    x    x    x  x "

                + " x  x xxxx xxxx xxxx  xx  "

                + "                          ";

            for (int y = 0; y < _ySize; y++)

            {

                for (int x = 0; x < _xSize; x++)

                {

                    Cell cell = new Cell();

                    cell.X = x * (this.Width / _xSize);

                    cell.Y = y * (this.Height / _ySize);

                    cell.Order = rnd.NextDouble();

                    cells.Add(cell);

                }

            }

            for (int i = 0; i < template.Length; i++)

            {

                cells[i].On = template[i] == 'x';

            }

            // Sort the cells by the random values

            cells.Sort(

                delegate(Cell c0, Cell c1)

                {

                    return c0.Order.CompareTo(c1.Order);

                }

            );

            _timer = new System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherTimer();

            _timer.Interval = TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(1);

            _timer.Tick += new EventHandler(timer_Completed);

            _timer.Start();

        }

        void timer_Completed(object sender, EventArgs e)

        {

            if (_cellIdx < _numCells)

            {

                // Get the next cell

                Cell cell = cells[_cellIdx];

                // Draw the cell

                Rectangle r = new Rectangle();

                r.Stroke = new SolidColorBrush(Colors.DarkGray);

                if (cell.On)

                {

                    r.Fill = new SolidColorBrush(Colors.Red);

                }

                else

                {

                    r.Fill = new SolidColorBrush(Colors.LightGray);

                }

                r.Width = this.Width / _xSize;

                r.Height = this.Height / _ySize;

                r.SetValue(Canvas.LeftProperty, cell.X);

                r.SetValue(Canvas.TopProperty, cell.Y);

                MyCanvas.Children.Add(r);

                _cellIdx++;

            }

            else

            {

                _timer.Stop();

            }

        }

    }

}

Save the file. Right click on SilverlightHellowordTestPage.aspx and choose Set As Start Page, then run the app.

Hosting the Application

To host the application on your web site, just copy the following files:

• Silverlight.js
• SilverlightHelloWorldTestPage.html
• ClientBin/SilverlightHelloWorld.xap

Click here to see the application in action.

• ReSharper 4.0 is released.
• Andre Loker shared a very cool trick available with C# 3.0: Getting rid of strings (2): use lambda expressions.
• Official Guidance: New Recommendations for Strings in .NET 2.0. By Dave Fetterman, BCL Team Blog.
• Scott Guthrie announced availability of Silverlight Beta 2. Looks like there are a ton more controls.
• Sending SMTP Email Asynchronously with SmtpClient.SendAsync().
• Igor Ostrovsky gave an easy-to-digest summary of concurrency in .NET Framework 3.5.
• Tools And Techniques to Identify Concurrency Issues. By Rahul V. Patil and Boby George, MSDN Magazine. Lots of good information on concurrency issues, how to analyze/detect problems, and pointers to tools.
• Did you know about AppDomain::UnhandledException Event? I didn’t, until my Windows Service started to die without even leaving a nice goodbye… stacktrace. Well there was this mysterious looking entry in the Events Log. MSDN.
• Add color to your Console apps with ConsoleColor. MSDN.
• Exceptional Performance : Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site. Yahoo! Developer Network.

General Development

• 15 Tools to Help You Develop Faster Web Pages by Jacob Gube (Six Revisions).
• Nick Beradi showed you how to Turn Google App Engine into your own Personal Content Delivery Network (CDN). App Engine costs nothing to get started. Sign up for a free account, and you can develop and publish your application for the world to see, at no charge and with no obligation. A free account can use up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month.
• An interesting look at Gmail client-side code: Gmail Client Side Architecture Part 1. By Sajith .M.R.

Software, Tools, etc.

• FireFox 3 is out. To get the most of of it, check out lifehacker’s Power User’s Guide to Firefox 3.

Gaming

• Jeff Atwood discussed Physics Based Games.
• If you are a PC gamer, don’t miss Is the Market for PC Gaming Finished? by Aaron Stannard (Aaronontheweb).

Something Different

• Battle at Kruger (video).

.NET

• Just in case you have not heard, Visual Studio 2008 has been released (ScottGu). I installed the released version earlier this week and everything looks good so far. The first thing I noticed was the very quick load time compared to 2005.
• Silverlight 1.1 is now 2.0. By Tim Sneath.
• Dan Fernandez listed the top 15 things to love about Visual Studio 2008 Express.
• Service Pack 1 for .NET Framework 2.0 is available. By Guy Barrette.
• Aaronontheweb shared 5 Hot ASP.NET Tips and Tricks for the week of 11/20/2007. By Aaronontheweb.
• bloggingdeveloper wrote a nice article on how to compress ViewState.

Software and Tools

• Odiogo can make your blog talk. By Mads Kristensen.
• I have been a long-time user of MSN Money Porfolio and stock charts but lately I really liked the stuff Yahoo! has been adding to their Finance section. Their new Flash-based stock chart is the best in its class. My favorite feature is the ability to drag left/right to go back/forward in time. Also their quotes are now streaming (AJAX)… meaning anywhere you see a price quote, it will be automatically refreshed. Real time quotes are available for as an optional service as well.

  

• To track disk space usage, my tool of choice is Windirstats. Windirstats is Open Source.

  

Tech, Windows Mobile, Gadgets

• Google has just released the beta version of My Location, a service that allows GPS like functionality with Google Maps on your mobile device without a GPS. It doesn’t work for me on my Samsung i760 though. I always get this error message: “Your current location is temporarily unavailable”.

  

  Looks like many others are getting the same error as well.

And Now, Something Different

Be careful where you put your cellphone.

Here are the finds for this week:

.NET

• Parallel Performance: Optimize Managed Code For Multi-Core Machines; by Daan Leijen and Judd Hall; via MSDN Magazine. In a few years' time, I predict that most new PCs will be multi-core. This article talks about the new Task Parallel Library (TPL) and provides code samples.
• document.f.q.focus(); The Billion Dollar Line of JavaScript (by gst, via blogstorm.co.ok) talks about how many people use the Search Box on their browser to navigate to various web sites, instead of typing in a URL, and how this practice translates into revenue for Google. Interesting read.
• alessandro pointed out that and IMG element with an empty src attribute will call the browser to make a request to the default document (usually default.aspx).
• Understanding Windows Workflow Foundation (by razi bin rais, via Codeproject.com) is a nice overview of Windows Workflow Foundation.
• Where are the basic controls in Silverlight 1.1? When I started experimenting with Silverlight recently (see my Silverlight Hello World application), the first question that came to my mind was: where are all the basic controls such as button, checkbox, textbox, etc?

  

  Don't worry! Apparently, they are not there because it's still an Alpha release. According to this post from Tim Sneath, the following controls are planned to be included in the released version of 1.1: Button, TextBox, Scrollbar, Slider, ListBox, CheckBox, RadioButton, ComboBox, and UserControl (no TreeView, RichTextBox, or DataGrid).

Tools

• Probably old news to most CSS pros, but just in case you have not heard, FireBug is a very useful extension for FireFox/CSS development. Highly recommended if you ever work with CSS. I could have saved countless hours debugging HTML/CSS issues with this tool.
• Notepad++ is a new addition to my toolset. Supports syntax highlighting, regular expression search/replace, Unicode, Macros, and is light-weight.

Windows Mobile / Pocket PC

• Windows Live Search for Windows Mobile now includes voice recognition.

Blogs

• Sara Ford's WebLog is a treasure trove full of cool Visual Studio tips and tricks.

Miscellaneous

• I am pretty bad with keeping in touch with people, and I have found that LinkedIn makes it fairly easy to keep in touch with past colleages. Last week I had some free time so I decided to look up old colleagues on LinkedIn. It was great to hear from many people I worked with years ago. I found many people by simply searching on the name of the company we worked for.

And Now, Something Different

Check out the Windows Live Maps Bird's Eye view below. See the black car entering the cul-de-sac? That's me and my car.

How do I know that’s my car? Well, for one thing, my car is black. But the real reason I know it’s me is that a moment later, my garage door opened half-way… as I was about to drive into the garage:

At first glance, it seems to be an amazing coincidence (like one-in-a-million amazing). What is the chance that Microsoft’s Bird’s Eye low flying plane would fly across my house and snap pictures just as I am about drive into my garage? However, after further calculations, it turns out that the real probability is around 1/8640 (5-second window over 43200 average seconds of day-light). Still a very small chance, but certainly not lottery-winning “amazing”.

Imagine being able to author rich Internet applications in your .NET language of choice, without having to mess with Javascript, cross-browser compatibility issues, or ActionScript. That’s the promise of Microsoft Silverlight 1.1. In this article, I will document my attempt at creating a Silverlight 1.1 “Hello World” application. My Hello World application is a little bit more fancy than the typical one… this one involves some animation, and drawing a few shapes from code.

If you are new to Silverlight, Silverlight 1.1 (currently in Alpha) is the version that will include the .NET CLR and allow you to write Silverlight code with .NET languages such as C#.

Most Silverlight 1.1 C# examples I found on the web use the XAML file to declare and set object properties. In my example, I am going to create and draw most objects from the code behind c# class.

Installing Visual Studio 2008

If you don’t have Visual Studio 2008 already installed. You can download it from here. Downloading and installing Visual Studio 2008 to my Virtual PC took about 3 hours (1 for the download and 2 for the install).

Note: It’s possible to
develop Silverlight 1.1 applications with Visual Studio 2005, but the process is not integrated as with Visual Studio 2008

Installing Silverlight Runtimes and Tools

Install the following runtimes and tools from here. I am linking to the main page instead of the individual downloads just in case the download links change.

• Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 Runtime.
• Microsoft Silverlight 1.1 Alpha September Refresh
• Microsoft Silverlight Tools Alpha Refresh for Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 (July 2007)

Create a New Silverlight Project

• In Visual Studio, choose File/New/Project and select Visual C#/Silverlight/Silverlight Project. The Silverlight project type is added when you install the Microsoft Silverlight Tools above.
• Give your project a name.

Silverlight Project Files

After the project has been created, you are presented with the default Page.xaml file:

Your Solution should now have the following files:

The two files that you will be working with are Page.xaml and TestPage.html. Page.xaml stores the markup for the design elements (for more info on XAML, see this MSDN article). TestPage.html is the regular HTML page that will host the main Silverlight object. Silverlight.js is the Javascript helper file for Silverlight applications.

For our example, we will be adding code to Page.xaml.cs. This is what Page.xaml.cs looks like initially:

Add Some Code

Ready to write some code (complete source code at the end of the article)? First, we are going to add a Storyboard element to our Page.xaml. This Storyboard element serves as a timer for the animation we are going to display.

<Canvas.Resources
 class="kwrd">>
    <Storyboard x:Name
        class="kwrd">="mainTimer" Duration="00:00:00"
            class="kwrd">/>
</Canvas.Resources>

Then, we add some code to the Page.xaml.cs file (click here

for simple “Hello World” version… if you just want a simple Hello World app):

using System;
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Controls;
using System.Windows.Documents;
using System.Windows.Ink;
using System.Windows.Input;
using System.Windows.Media;
using System.Windows.Media.Animation;
using System.Windows.Shapes;
using System.Collections.Generic;

namespace CdoHelloWorld
{
    public partial class Page : Canvas
    {
        /// <summary>Represents a cell on the grid</summary>
        private class Cell
        {
            public double X; //
                x-coordinate of cell
            public double Y; //
                y-coordinate
            public bool On; //
                True if cell is "on"
            public double Order; //
                Display order
        }

        private List<Cell> cells = new List<Cell>(); 
            class="rem">// list of all cells
        private int xSize = 26; 
            class="rem">// width of the grid, in number of cells
        private int ySize = 7; 
            class="rem">// height of the grid
        private int numCells; //
            total number of cells
        private int cellIdx = 0;

        public void Page_Loaded(
            class="kwrd">object o, EventArgs e)
        {
            // Required to initialize variables
            InitializeComponent();

            // Assign a random value to each cell 
            Random rnd = new Random(Environment.TickCount);
            numCells = (int)(xSize * ySize);

            for (int y = 0; y < ySize; y++)
            {
                for (int x = 0; x < xSize; x++)
                {
                    Cell cell = new Cell();
                    cell.X = x * (this.Width / xSize);
                    cell.Y = y * (this.Height / ySize);
                    cell.Order = rnd.NextDouble();
                    cells.Add(cell);
                }
            }

            string template = " "
                            + " x x xxxx x x xx "
                            + " x x x x x x x "
                            + " xxxx xxxx x x x x "
                            + " x x x x x x x "
                            + " x x xxxx xxxx xxxx xx "
                            + " ";

            for (int i = 0; i < template.Length; i++)
            {
                if (template[i] == 'x')
                {
                    cells[i].On = true;
                }
                else
                {
                    cells[i].On = false;
                }
            }

            // Sort the cells by the random values
            cells.Sort(
                delegate(Cell c0, Cell c1)
                {
                    return c0.Order.CompareTo(c1.Order);
                }
            );

            mainTimer.Completed += new EventHandler(mainTimer_Completed);
            mainTimer.Begin();
        }

        void mainTimer_Completed(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            // Get the next cell
            Cell cell = cells[cellIdx];

            // Draw the cell
            Rectangle r = new Rectangle();
            r.Stroke = new SolidColorBrush(Colors.DarkGray);
            if (cell.On)
            {
                r.Fill = new SolidColorBrush(Colors.Red);
            }
            else
            {
                r.Fill = new SolidColorBrush(Colors.LightGray);
            }
            r.Width = this.Width / xSize;
            r.Height = this.Height / ySize;
            r.SetValue(Canvas.LeftProperty, cell.X);
            r.SetValue(Canvas.TopProperty, cell.Y);
            Children.Add(r);
            cellIdx++;

            if (cellIdx <= numCells)
            {
                // restart the timer
                mainTimer.Begin();
            }
        }

    }
}

Here’s the simple version of the code:

TextBlock t = new TextBlock();
t.Text = "Hello world!";
Children.Add(t);

Firefox Bug and Workaround

There is a known problem that causes the Silverlight object to not show up in Firefox. To fix the problem, remove the DOCTYPE declaration from the HTML file. See this MSDN forum thread.

Deploying Silverlight Applications to Your Web Server

To deploy my application, I simply copied the files including the ClientBin directory to my web server. Any web server will do (the server that hosts my Hello World application is an apache server).

And Now, Ladies and Gentlements, My Hello World Silverlight App

Click here.

Source Code

Download complete source code for this article.