June 2007 Blog Posts

WPF Training Course - Part3 - Controls

Originally published on my old Charteris blog This is part 3 of the training course originally described here with part 2 available here. From this part onwards the course tends to concentrate more on labs and classroom interaction than on plain slide content. This worked great in a classroom scenario but it may make it hard otherwise. I have edited some of the downloadable slides to make them easier to read in isolation. Again if anyone wants to contact me for clarifications or to talk over part of the course just use a Comment or the Contact...

Beware the ASP.NET Ajax assemblies from the future

Originally published on my old Charteris blog We were deploying some assemblies last week that were built in the UK on Friday afternoon and were being copied immediately to a US server. Some of these assemblies contained ASP.NET Ajax components and some of the pages in the website used these and some of the AjaxControlToolkit. Preliminary tests showed that something was up and requests for Javascript files being served out of the previously mentioned assemblies were being returned with a HTTP 500 status code(internal server error). Looking at the response in Firebug I could see the call stack was pointing towards ...

WPF Training Course - Part2

Originally published on my old Charteris blog This is part 2 of a training course I originally put together for the Charteris team and am now posting online. See here for the original Post and details on Part1 Part2 2D Graphics Colour and RGB Brushes SolidColorBrush VisualBrush ...

WPF Training Course - (Free)

Originally published on my old Charteris blog Back in April I was asked to put together a training course on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) for the Charteris team. The course was well received here and it was agreed that after a bit of time I could release it publically. So I am going to make most the course available here. I will post it in parts and I am happy to take questions, clarifications and comments about each part. Each one will include the relevant powerpoint slides and relevant labs, with code to start you off. Part1 ...

DIV over a SELECT in IE - ASP.NET Ajax Style

Originally published on my old Charteris blog First things first I am using a technique that I learnt from Bertrand Le Roy's blog. I take no credit for realising that if you place an IFRAME at the same place that you are putting your DIV you will be able it will stop the SELECT from showing. As Bertrand points out SELECT elements are Windowed elements and it is this reason that they display through Windowless elements such as a DIV. Anyway you can check out Bertrand's post for more detail here The one thing I have to add is my implementation of this technique using the ASP.NET Ajax...

Microsoft Surface: Behind-the-Scenes Video

Originally published on my old Charteris blog http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4217348.html I realize that Surface has been done to death in the blogosphere but it was not until yesterday that I saw this excellent behind the scenes video. It isn't one of the Surface demo videos that are hosted up on http://www.microsoft.com/surface/ so you may well not have seen it. More importantly it gives some behind the scenes information on how the Surface devices work.

Creating validatable CompositeControls

Originally published on my old Charteris blog I have recently had to create some custom ASP.NET Validators for some CompositeControls that we wrote a couple of month's back. Now I have written plenty of my own validators before so it was not long before I had a class inheriting from BaseValidator. It was when I was trying to connect my new MyControlValidator to an instance of MyControl on a page that I came across an interesting problem. The control that would hold the value for validation was not my CompositeControl but the TextBox inside it. In ASP.NET validators are connected to...