Category

Development

• Development

  How to switch Silverlight UserControls

  03.11.08 | Permalink | 2 Comments

  One of the guys on the official Silverlight community forums posted an interesting question, namely how does one change the currently visible UserControl in a Silverlight 2.0 application. To put things in context the new Silverlight 2.0 project template creates two classes for you: a System.Windows.Application derived class named App with the associated App.xaml and […]

• Development

  The pain of SQL Server and working with dates

  02.08.08 | Permalink | 1 Comment

  How many times have you tried to design an efficient database table design in SQL Server only to stumped with the problem of storing pure date values. Yes the currently released versions of SQL Server (up to 2005) don’t support a pure date only data type. Note that SQL Server 2008 add the new DATE […]

• Development

  SQL Server 2008 Compression

  11.16.07 | Permalink | Comment?

  Jonathan Allen and Chad Boyd have interest blog posts on the new SQL Server 2008 compression features.

  Row level compression drastically reduces the meta-data needed for variable length columns. Instead of storing the length of each field in 2 bytes, it now takes a mere 3 bits. Fields themselves are also smaller. Storing a 1 in […]

• Development

  Juval Lowy to present WCF for the South African community

  11.14.07 | Permalink | 2 Comments

  Thanks to Dariel Solutions who are bringing Juval Lowy out to South Africa to present a 5-day master class. Juval is recognised by Microsoft as a Software Legend and one of the world’s top .NET experts. For those that are not so lucky to be able to make it to the 5-day course will […]

• Development

  Net60 Beta 1 released

  11.14.07 | Permalink | Comment?

  Local mobile innovation company, Red Five Labs, has today released a beta 1 build of their of implementation of the .NET Compact Framework 1.0 which runs on Symbian S60 3rd edition devices like the Nokia N95 series of mobile phones. This is an important product for enterprise developers that would like to deploy on […]

• Development

  Windows Live Tools CTP

  11.08.07 | Permalink | 2 Comments

  Angus Logan, Senior Technical Product Manager for Windows Live, just announced on his blog the first CTP for a cool set of add-ins for Visual Studio 2008 (formerly code-named Orcas) for getting started with Windows Live in your own applications.
  Windows Live™ Tools for Microsoft® Visual Studio® are a set of control add-ins to make […]

• Development

  Expiring VS2008 beta 2 VPCs

  10.30.07 | Permalink | Comment?

  Sometimes Microsoft knows how to screw things up. Not only were the Visual Studio 2008 (code-named Orcas) Beta 2 Virtual PC (VPC) images rather excessively large for the average South African developer to download and too big to fit onto a single DVD for community distribution, but now they are expiring on the 1st of […]

• Development

  Tab controls on web pages

  10.07.07 | Permalink | 1 Comment

  With the recent surge in AJAX enabled web sites I have to wonder if web user interfaces are still as intuitive as they were when we simply had to fill in a form and press the Save or Submit button. Nowadays user interfaces, like the one pictures below from Community Server 2007, are relying more […]

• Development

  Silverlight 1.1 UserControl C# template code does not follow best practices

  09.20.07 | Permalink | 3 Comments

  Why does the Microsoft Visual Studio team not follow the best practices internally? When creating a Silverlight 1.1 UserControl under Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 it generates the following code by default.
  System.IO.Stream s = this.GetType().Assembly.GetManifestResourceStream(“Project1.UserControl1.xaml”);
  this.InitializeFromXaml(new System.IO.StreamReader(s).ReadToEnd());

  Most developers would realise that this is not good code. Why do […]

• Development

  Building data interfaces for .NET

  09.07.07 | Permalink | 1 Comment

  Just a quick reminder for the free SA Developer .NET event tomorrow, the 8th September 2007, on building .NET data interfaces. The talk will be held in the Microsoft auditorium in Bryanston and presented by André van Rensburg.
  There are tons of resources available on how to access data from a .net application. How is […]

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