It has been a while now that Windows Azure got released and I have been exploring it for quite sometime too. Recently I had this burning desire to try Azure Blob storage and was going through some thoughts and then I decided- Would it not be great if I can compose a Deep Zoom image and deploy it in Azure Blob storage and access it from my Silverlight application. Since I went through a bit of digging myself in doing this, I thought I would just show this in a few short and simple steps for ... [Read more]

With the release of Azure, ScrumWall needed to be updated from the sample data access code to the new API. Cloud Storage Account The first change that we made was the addition of CloudStorageAccount to handle access to storage. Instantiating a storage account requires that a configuration setting publisher has been set. We do this with the SetConfigurationSettingPublisher method. It takes a single parameter, which is a wrapper delegate for the configuration reading and handling of the confi ... [Read more]

  Behaviors and triggers are two cool features in Silverlight 3. They allow to declaratively associate and action with an event or property value. It is implemented as a combination of a Component + an attached property. The framework provides the logic of attaching/detaching behaviors. The behavior exists as a separate piece of code and hence can be easily reused on similar components on which the behavior is authored.  Due to the integration of behaviors inside Blend, designers can easily app ... [Read more]

This post should really be title: “how we (could have) migrated ScrumWall to Azure in less than 20 minutes”. But I’ll come on to that later. I’ve been speaking about Azure at a number of events recently. As part of the talks, I have given a quick overview of the developer portal for Azure and the Visual Studio tools. I’ve wrapped this up in a demo using our ScrumWall product (http://scrumwall.cloudapp.net). Winding back time conveniently to about a year ago, I explain how we could have migr ... [Read more]

Along with using the out of the box Grid, StackPanel, Canvas etc. in Silverlight 2 you could create your own custom panel types to perform arbitrary layout. With Silverlight 3 you can combine custom panels together with the PlaneProjection to layout elements in 3D space. I’ll show you how. First, having 3D elements jump from position to position is incredibly disconcerting. Its difficult to track the objects and so destroys the 3D illusion being created. AnimatingProjectionPanelBase is the ... [Read more]

A few people have mentioned that Silverlight 3 still does not have print screen functionality. Here at Dot Net Solutions we don’t mourn this missing feature – no we revel in the opportunity. Silverlight 3 does now have a save file feature and this enables you to create far better solutions: You can create MS Office documents on the client – either from scratch or from a template. MS Office documents (.docx, .pptx, .xslx) are zip files with xml (document structure, text etc.) and binary (em ... [Read more]

Progressive zoom is a technology provided by Deep Zoom, available in Silverlight as a MultiScaleImage . This enables Silverlight developers to render images with very large resolution whilst addressing performance constraints imposed by the client / server delivery model. MultiScaleImage does not provide a reasonable way to navigate to an image and this makes implementation of many interesting design scenarios slow. We designed a MultiScaleSelection Control which is described here which addr ... [Read more]

The example I’ve taken is using WSS 3 and Silverlight 2. You need to install following pre-requisites to create and deploy your silver light application to SharePoint site •    .NET Framework 3.5 •    WSS 3.0 SP1 (and MOSS 2007 SP1 of you are using MOSS 2007) •    Visual Studio 2008 SP1 •    Visual Studio Extension for SharePoint 1.2 or latest •    Silverlight Runtime •    Silverlight SDK •    Silverlight Tools for VS 2008 STEP 1: Deploy Silverlight DLL to GAC This assembl ... [Read more]

Since we’ve deployed our ScrumWall application from a pure hosted solution to a cloud based application, I thought it would be appropriate to discuss how we went around moving and deploying the code to Azure.  As Marcus has discussed the architecture of ScrumWall (Part 1) we’ll dive straight into how we got ScrumWall up and running within a few hours. ScrumWall does have a web application that hosts the Silverlight control which does the necessary authorisation, authentication and hosts the ... [Read more]

Here at Dot Net Solutions, we have been developing a Silverlight version of a Scrum wall for a while now. We are advocates of both Scrum and XP for project delivery. You can read more about the project to date here: http://www.dotnetsolutions.ltd.uk/approach/scrumwall/. We are also keenly using the Azure Services Platform, most notably with our Wikipedia explorer, which was also ported to Azure. Read more about this here: http://www.dotnetsolutions.ltd.uk/evidence/wikiexplorer/. There are so ... [Read more]