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Vista SP1 now available!
· 2008-02-14 21:45 by Thijs Kroesbergen for Brokenwire.NET

A few days ago we were all sad that we had to wait until march for Vista SP1 RTM . But now we can be happy. Because SP1 is HERE (take a look at the top-downloads list) !

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silverlight rss feed displayer
· 2007-05-22 22:30 by Thijs Kroesbergen for Brokenwire.NET

Tonight I built a small silverlight application which reads this site’s rss feed and displays it in a “nice” format.

See SilveRSS in action!

Getting the animation done was quite simple too, but I did some fine-tuning inside the XAML code myself. Probably because I don’t know Expression Blend well enough yet.

The biggest challenge was to have the Silverlight applet decypher the rss-xml layout. But actually all that is very basic .NET programming.
The code to retrieve the rss data and parse the XML looks like this:

    Uri uri = new System.Uri("http://www.brokenwire.net/bw/rss");
    BrowserHttpWebRequest request = new BrowserHttpWebRequest(uri);
    HttpWebResponse response = request.GetResponse();
    StreamReader responseReader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream());
    string rawvalue = responseReader.ReadToEnd();
    XmlReader xr = XmlReader.Create(new StringReader(rawvalue));
    while (xr.ReadToFollowing("item"))
    {
         //RssItem is a struct to contain the data for one item
         RssItem item;
         xr.ReadToFollowing("title");
         item.title = xr.ReadElementContentAsString();
         xr.ReadToFollowing("description");
         item.description = Strip(xr.ReadElementContentAsString());
         xr.ReadToFollowing("link");
         item.link = xr.ReadElementContentAsString();
         // Add items to a list
         _rssItems.Add(item);
    }

Controlling the animations is just a matter of catching the Storyboard “Completed” events.

Other examples I found on the web are using the power of the webserver to create XAML code on the server, and displaying that on the client. But I didn’t want to and didn’t need to write any server-side code in this example.

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Popfly
· 2007-05-21 12:36 by Thijs Kroesbergen for Brokenwire.NET

While playing with Silverlight I also bumped upon this nice new Microsoft project: Popfly
(The url also has the new Microsoft TLD .MS

Microsoft Popfly

Popfly enables non-developers to quickly build sites and mashups. It allows users to re-use each others work.

The whole Popfly project was built on Silverlight and AJAX technology, and built in just 6 months!

It also looks like it’s possible to work on Popfly projects using Visual Studio as well, cool!

There is a demo video here

I applied for my own popfly account, but you’ll have to get invited by Microsoft at the moment.. so I can’t login, yet.
(In the meantime we I’ll just have to suffer looking at the low-res wallpapers)

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Playing with Microsoft Silverlight
· 2007-05-20 22:06 by Thijs Kroesbergen for Brokenwire.NET

This weekend I spend some time playing with Microsoft’s “Flash-Killer” named Silverlight.

It’s very interesting to see how they brought the .NET CLR to the browser!
With only my knowledge of the .NET framework, C# and a bit of basic knowledge of Windows and Web programming I could easily create a small app!

I wrapped up an (unfinished!) attempt to mimic my Pong-Clock

You should be able to see it here (Warning: Pre-alpha 0-quality demo!)

I hope to write a bit more about this soon…
But if you’re interested in seeing more about silverlight yourself you can visit the Silverlight website

To create your own “hello world” application; you need the following ingredients:

Oh and I almost forgot about the coolest thing: Silverlight runs cross-browser (IE – Firefox – Opera – Safari) and cross-platform (Windows – Mac). I also heard some rumours about a linux version.

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OpenGl + Ati + Vista
· 2007-01-30 09:18 by Thijs Kroesbergen for Brokenwire.NET

I just noticed that Ati has published the new ATI Catalyst Software Suite Version 7.1 for Windows Vista

This version is supposed to support native OpenGL support on Windows Vista (which happens to be released today as well)

Other features that this driver version supports:

download (39MB)

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Upgrade your certification from MCAD to MCPD
· 2007-01-06 12:17 by Thijs Kroesbergen for Brokenwire.NET

This paper guides you to the MCPD: Enterprise Applications Developer certification starting from the “old” MCAD certification

Option 1: First finish MCSD, then upgrade to MCPD: Enterprise Applications Developer

Requirements :
Exam 70-300: Analyzing Requirements and Defining Microsoft .NET Solution Architectures
And one of
Exam 70-229: Designing and Implementing Databases with Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition
Or
Exam 70–431: TS: Microsoft SQL Server 2005 — Implementation and Maintenance

Then upgrade from MCSD to MCPD: Enterprise Applications Developer

Requirements :
Exam 70-553: UPGRADE: MCSD Microsoft .NET Skills to MCPD: Enterprise Applications Developer by Using the Microsoft .NET Framework: Part 1
And
Exam 70-554: UPGRADE: MCSD Microsoft .NET Skills to MCPD: Enterprise Applications Developer by Using the Microsoft .NET Framework: Part 2

By taking this route, you’ll need to pass 4 exams, and you will have the following certifications:

Option 2: Upgrade your MCAD to both MCPD: Windows Developer and MCPD: Web Developer

Requirements:
Exam 70-551: UPGRADE: MCAD Skills to MCPD: Web Developer by Using the Microsoft .NET Framework
And
Exam 70-552: UPGRADE: MCAD Skills to MCPD: Windows Developer by Using the Microsoft .NET Framework

Then finish with MCPD: Enterprise Applications Developer

Requirements:
Exam 70-529: TS: Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 – Distributed Application Development
And
Exam 70-549: PRO: Designing and Developing Enterprise Applications by Using the Microsoft .NET Framework

By taking this route, you’ll need to pass 4 exams, and you will have the following certifications:

If you know which route is the “best”, or if you know a better route then please leave a comment!

Online Resources:
MCAD
MCSD
MCPD: Web Developer
MCPD: Windows Developer
MCPD: Enterprise Applications Developer

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