Showing posts with label identitymine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label identitymine. Show all posts

Monday, July 13, 2009

Silverlight 3 - Whats Next?

of course all the latest bits for Silverlight can be downloaded off of Silverlight.net but a few other sites have changed that might be important to check out. This site if your familiar with Silverlight you might know of:
 



http://www.microsoft.com/Silverlight/

rumor has it Dr. WPF might have helped? maybe? but in any case the guys from IdentityMine, Inc. built the silverlight part.
 


Another good resource is the new IM syncated blog site that aggregates the sites of the best and brightest at IM:.
 


http://www.identitymine.com/forward.
 


you'll find rock starts like Smitty, Laurent, Kurt, Jobi, Devin, me and more.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Silverlight? what about the hard ware geeks?

So Silverlight is cool, and working around here where everything is WPFish, or Surface-ish or Win 7-ish or Silverlight etc. or even stuff I can't talk about, I tend to forget about the geeky side of the hard ware we use. At IM there are lots of super cool, super smart poeple. Its a company of rock stars, that being the case however that turns out is true even of our IT guys. I finally got turned on to our IT guys blog... very geeky... :)

http://teknation.squarespace.com/

very geeky. One idea we had for the office is he likes this skelton case that looks like its out of a borg movie or something. we thought we could have one floor that has these cases and their uber cooling fans and other either steam punk or borgs sorts of things and then have all the cables drug up to the next floor so we don't hear the cooling fans...

Anyway if your in to hardware geekyness his blog is the bomb...

Monday, May 18, 2009

Routed Events in Silverlight

Andrew the local uber genius at IM, likes to take on simple tasks... some of his recent accomplisments including, writing aber 3d physic's engine for surface, writing a UX gesture engine for fun and hey while he is at lets add Routed Events for Silverlight... So anyway Andrew posted his current little project on Codeplex for everyone and I'm certainly going to use it as the latest cool hack. :) So I'm going to include it in the HSL library but only the SL related bits. If you go out to Andrews codeplex project you can see that it is simple to use and extends Silverlight that much more. Its pretty click and lets you define and event, subscribe to events and they even get raised.

check it out at:

http://sl3routedevents.codeplex.com/

Friday, May 8, 2009

WPF Blendables controls

a new drop of the WPF blendables control was released. not strickly silverlight but still cool.

http://blendables.com/blogs/blendables/archive/2009/05/07/new-blendables-versions-now-available.aspx

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Silverlight Automated UI Testing

Working with alot of larger clients at IdentityMine we frequently work with teams that use automated testing and deployment systems. I did a post last year on deployment with msbuild and build environment deployments etc and today I'd like todo a quick post on wiring up a Silverlight application for automated UI testing. This is a great way to tied into existing test structures but keep in mind there is a Unit test framework off MSDN that is a great place to start.

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/silverlightut/

and

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/04/02/unit-testing-with-silverlight.aspx

So quick and dirty this method is kind of a hack to expose bits to existing web testing systems that can only talk to the DOM. with that... I'm going to focus on showing you alot of code...

To start with we have this simple application using this xaml keeping in mind I excluded the extrensous stuff...

<grid>
<grid.columndefinitions>
<columndefinition>
<columndefinition>
<columndefinition>
</Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
<textbox name="inputhere" height="30">
<button name="Btn1" content="process input" click="Button_Click" column="1" height="30">
<textbox name="Output" height="30" column="2">
</grid>

and in the code we add the following C#


private string ProcessString = "complete with [{0}]";

private void Button_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
Output.Text = string.Format(ProcessString, inputhere.Text);
}

this works great but pretend it is much more complicated... So then we add the following code to our code behind...:

[ScriptableMember]
public void SetTextField(String InputValue)
{
inputhere.Text = InputValue;
}

[ScriptableMember]
public void ClickButton()
{
Button_Click(new object(), null);
}

[ScriptableMember]
public string GetValue()
{
return Output.Text;
}

and then we add the following to our page constructor:


HtmlPage.RegisterScriptableObject("MainPage", this);

and we add this #include er I mean 'using' statement:

using System.Windows.Browser;

from here we have exposed the key elements so any testing system that can talk to the Browser DOM can then wire up to what appear at JavaScript objects like this:

//simulates input:
top.document.getElementById('Silverlight1').content.MainPage.SetTextField("test");

// simulates a click
top.document.getElementById('Silverlight1').content.MainPage.ClickButton();


//gets a value.
alert( top.document.getElementById('Silverlight1').content.MainPage.GetValue() );

I know quick and dirty but now our automated UI web app infrastructure can 'test' our Silverlight application easily.

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Silverlight 3 LOB Apps

I did this email interview about building LOB apps in Silverlight 3. I think its worth a read if your interested in the topic. My main point is/was 'yes' its ready :) so check it out.:

http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/David-Kelley-on-Is-Silverlight-3-ready-for-business.aspx

"Silverlight 3 is on its way with tons of new goodies. But each technology has to be well accepted from the business users in order to be successful. But what can help the business to take such a decision? We, at SilverlightShow.net, think that sharing experience is a good start.

This article is a part of our “Shared Experience” initiative that aims to give a place to every person or company that has experience in a commercial Silverlight product or project to share that knowledge. If you are one of them and you are willing to participate, download and answer our questions. In return, we will publish not only your answers, but a white paper of the Silverlight solution you have.

Let’s take a look at what David Kelley from IdentityMine has shared..."

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Multi-Touch Gesture Engine

One of the cool things about Silverlight 3 is the new multi-touch support. From a UX stand point this is just awesome to provide this kind of functionality. I know this guy Andrew that works at Identitymine that wrote a gesture engine for Surface that is just awesome. He was showing me this on his tablet at MIX at one of the many dinners. Its just amazing in part as he is just a supper genious :) really but also the kind of UX this provides for Windows 7 apps and more is just amazing. anyway check out the press release :

http://cs.identitymine.com/blogs/im_news/archive/2009/03/19/identitymine-introduces-the-identitymine-gesture-engine-to-support-advanced-multi-touch-development.aspx

its pretty slick and hoping he will port this to Silverlight 3 :)

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Twitter and Social Networking

I went to this exclusive dinner party at MIX tuesday night. at the table was a number of luminaries from Mark Brown (CEO IdentityMine) to John Stockton (Author, Acentium, SD2IG). The conversation evolved around UX and eventually into Twitter... I have stayed away from that digital crack but after falling on the side of the converstation for twitter I have decided that if I believe what I was saying I needed to use twitter...

http://twitter.com/DavidJKelley

So that being said Twitter allows a user to kind of plug into the community. It can be a collaboriation tool and almost a collective intelligence sort of tool, so that when I have a question I can post it and it gets answered quickly. Its like a big instance chat room that is open all the time. The power of the group mind to solve problems is clearly where I want to go and this tool among others allows us to get closer to this nervana of one ness.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Xaml Guidelines, Part 1

Check out Jonathan, Jared and Nathan on Xaml Guidelines on Channel 9. I know this is focused alot of WPF but as suggested on their post it applies to Silverlight AND wpf.

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Continuum/XAML-Guidelines-Part-1/Default.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

SCRUM in 10minutes

Jobi sent me this link to a video this guy made that teachs SCRUM in under 10 minutes. We use this methodology alot at IM, with a little Crystal clear and some custom IM methodologies mixed in. For Agile dev I think this is a really cool resource Hamid put together. Don't get me wrong I'm not an expert but I have used lots of different methodologies from CMM/SDLC waterfall stuff on huge shrink wrapped products over the years to SCRUM and SCRUM seems to be nice, simple and effective for most project work we do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5k7a9YEoUI&fmt=22

Friday, November 7, 2008

Crossfader Goes Live

Crossfader is the largest most complicated Silverlight application to date. After a years work finaly is live. Yesterday afternoon in secret the url was changed to point to the real application. most of the dev team spent all day playing with it. Dan the business owner and Darak (Editor In Chief) are working on closing all the artist deals so hopefully all the music content will get all the real artist content loaded over the next few weeks.

As to Silverlight I went through the application and counted 54 distinct screens, dialogs and views currently in the system. Some of these are amagalmations but remember the whole things is one xap. I'm impressed it runs. :) 10 years ago a web application like this even if it wasn't all together was more likely then not going to lock up your computer. Crossfader certainly is next gen stuff and about the experience. Remember this is still just a beta but facebook will have some catching up todo :)

http://www.crossfader.com/

Friday, September 5, 2008

Silverlight 2 Custom Cursors

Check out Josh's post on Custom Cursors in Silverlight. nice and simple

http://blog.dobaginski.com/josh/?p=38

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Blenables Labs

Kurt has been hard and work on blendables and got my book on the labs list, including some other cool stuff but mainly its cool because my book is on it.

http://blendables.com/labs/default.aspx

Desklighter Live

Hmm... more on Silvelright on the desktop. One of the guys at IM did this wonderful little tool that turns xaps into desktop applications... very very cool hack this tool makes it so you don't ahve to use the hack I posted a while back for every single xap as this does all the work for you.

http://blendables.com/labs/Desklighter/Default.aspx

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Monday, August 18, 2008

Dynamics Duo talk about CRM and Silverlight

check out this video of a Silverlight app that was mostly built by Jobi. I helped with the drag and drop but Jobi's work is really the bulk of the application. Its a great example of Silverlight LOB application developement and of the cool work Jobi does with Silverlight and WPF.

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/benriga/The-Dynamics-Duo-talk-about-CRM-and-Silverlight/

Friday, August 15, 2008

Dev Teach 2008 Toronto Canada

I'm doing at least 3 sessions at DevTeach Dec 1-5th in Toronto Canada so far the 3 sessions I'm doing are:

Building Silverlight Controls
David J Kelley - SLV467
Designed primarily for Developers. This technical presentation walks through a number of senerios for building Silverlight Controls including user controls and custom panels. The usage of properties, dependency properties, events, reusability, and encapsulated control architecture is reviewed in detail. In the presentation we will build a custom chart control based on a user control and built custom panels and review dispatch timer and multi threading in the context of controls.

Hacking Silverlight 2 - For Designers and Developers
David J Kelley - SLV469
Designed for Designers and Developers. This engaging presentation gets the audience involved in bridging the gap between design teams and software development using Silverlight and the Silverlight toolablity story. The presentation is full of audience participation and skits that get audience members up out of their seats and excited about Silverlight. The basics of team work using Microsoft tools for design and development are used and the audience is shown some of the coolest Silverlight hacks that can make Silverlight applications really shine. With the “Coming out of the closet” skit the audience is shown sexy UI using Silverlight, learning about speed of development and why we care about Sexy engaging Web 2.0 experiences.

SilverLight 2.0 Achitectural Best Practices
David J Kelley - SLV421
Designed Developers and Architects or people wanting to understand Silverlight archtecture. This presentation startings with a detailed technical review of Silverlight control, application architecture and design patterns. Design patterns as applied to Silverlight application development and general best practices are reviewed in detail. The presentation includes learning from the trenchs of building Silverlight apps on a large scale including horror stories and ‘Anti-Patterns’ or things ‘not to do’ are reviewed.

check out http://www.devteach.com/Session.aspx for more information

Thursday, August 7, 2008

Robby's New Blog Face

Robby got a new blog face writen in Silverlight you you should check out. Its pretty cool. :)

http://nerdplusart.com/

Friday, August 1, 2008