Next week I’m giving a 2-day seminar on HTML 5 in Stockholm, covering not only semantic extensions of HTML 5 but also:
This will be 2 fun days
Christian
It took some time until I received my newest book, but now it’s here - Real World .NET, C#, and Silverlight – Indispensable Experiences from 15 MVPs:
With this book I’ve written just one chapter – as all the other authors did. Great content fairly partitioned across different topics from 15 MVPs. I’m giving you my summary what I’ve seen covered in this book.
ASP.NET and jQuery gives from David Giard gives some Information on new features from ASP.NET Web Forms 4.0, an introduction to ASP.NET MVC, and a glimpse into jQuery.
ASP.NET Performance from Bill Evjen is about state management, caching, performance counters, content delivery networks, compressions to get performance out of ASP.NET Web Form applications.
Ethical Hacking of ASP.NET from György Balássy is a chapter you should read to secure your Web site. With this chapter you get Information about tools such as Fiddler, Firebug, IE9 Developer Toolbar, Lens, how session management works, attacking ASP.NET authentication, CSRF attacks, attacking the ASP.NET session, view state hacking… and what you need to protect against attacks.
How to Build a Real World Silverlight 5 Application from Gill Cleeren gives a good introduction to SketchFlow before showing data binding features of Silverlight, using WCF RIA services, applying MVVM, and customizing of controls.
Silverlight – The Silver Lining for Line-of-Business Applications - Jeremy Likeness takes a different route to Silverlight. He starts by giving an overview of the different Silverlight project types and explains the Interfaces IApplicationService and IApplicationLifetimeAware to hook into startup, shutdown, and exception handling events. Next he compares MVC, MVP, and MVVM patterns, explains dependency injection and demonstrates how MEF can be used. In this chapter you can also read a comparision of MVVM Frameworks such as Prism, MVVM Light, nRoute, Calburn.Micro, and Jounce.
Tips and Tricks for Designers and Developers is a very short chapter from Daron Yöndem just covering 9 pages. This chapter mentions “importing assets from Photoshop”, “Using sample data for a better design experience”, “using behaviors to make things easier”. I just would hope to read more Information about importing from Photoshop, what are the issues, how can it be solved; sample data not only created from code with DesignerProperties.GetIsInDesignMode, but also Information about designer specifications in XAML, and much more Information on behaviors and not only two pages.
MVVM Patterns in Silverlight by Kevin Grossnicklaus is a big chapter again. It comes back to MVVM and explains how an MVVM Framework can be created. This chapter goes that far to build composite screens, displaying dialogs, and communication between views. In the last part of the chapter exisiting MVVM Frameworks Prism, MVVM Light, and Caliburn Micro are compared to each other.
Windows Phone “Mango” for Silverlight Developers from Alex Golesh goes into specific Windows Phone 7.5 issues and covers the Camera API, Sensors API, Silverlight/XNA Hybrid applications, using a local database, fast application switching (FAS), Background agents, notifications, contacts/appointments data access – things a Siverlight developer needs to now creating apps for the phone.
Pragmatic Services Communication with WCF is from Christian Weyer, a thinktecture colleague. As expected from Christian, this is a chapter of 63 pages (and this without security – this is in the next chapter). At the first page of this chapter Christian explains that this is not a beginner’s introduction – and not a full reference as well. It still starts with basics of WCF (ABC), but already adds some real world experience to the introduction (e.g barely using message contracts nowadays). Soon Christian steps into several topics such as validation, mapping, tracing, hosting services, sharing contracts, async calls, the Web programming model, and much more.
The next chapter is from another colleague at thinktecture: Dominick Baier – Securing WCF Services Using the Windows Identity Foundation (WIF). Dominick is the security specialist from thinktecture and gives a whirlwind tour through WCF security, claims-based identity, and federation. If you are knowledgeable of traditional security models like principals, identities, and roles, you should read this chapter to get the idea of security Tokens and claims. Dominick goes into the Windows Identity Foundation and explains the WCF security stack.
Chapter 11 from Jeffrey Juday is about Applied .NET Task Parallel Library. Jeffrey covers the .NET 4 library within 38 pages, both data parallelism as well as task parallelism using the Task class, showing exceptions, cancellation, and concurrent collection classes of .NET 4.
Vishwas Lele goes into Windows Workflow Foundation with the chapter The WF Programming Language. This chapter starts with a simple workflow, explains XAML in the focus of WF, explains several activities for control flow, exception handling, Transactions and compensation, parallel execution, and also explains how custom activities can be implemented. Hosting workflows and using persistence is explained as well.
My chapter has number 13 and is about Practical WPF Data Binding. Back to MVVM from previous chapters, but here I’m just using MVVM with a lot of data binding aspects. This chapter goes into various data binding concepts, showing multibinding, using the CollectionViewSource, implementing data templates, grouping, hierarchical data binding, virtualization, editing data, validation, error display…
Chapter 14 is the longest chapter over 79 pages. Driving Development with User Stories and BDD by Scott Millett. Scott gives a short introduction to user stories, explains the shortcomings of Test-Driven Development (TDD), and gets into the advantages of Behavior-Driven Development (BDD). Next, Scott introduces some BDD Frameworks before going into an application that is done with BDD in mind. User Stories are captured for the Tic-Tac-Toe game, and then BDD is used to until all behaviors of the application are implemented. Showing all the BDD aspects within a full application should be the best Approach to learn BDD.
The last chapter of the book is from Caleb Jenkins about Automated Unit Testing. Caleb introduces unit testing with the three A’s Assign, Act, Assert, covers various testing frameworks, explains Continuation Integration (CI) servers, talks about fakes and mocks, covers testing on using MVC, MVP, and MVVM…
As you can see, there is a lot what’s covered by this book. Silverlight, WPF, parallel programming, BDD, unit testing, security, WCF, WF, ASP.NET, hacking… Of course this is not a beginner’s book. However, I think nearly every .NET developer will find interesting Topics within this book – this is a must-read.
Christian
The Windows 7 taskbar is one of the great improvements of Windows 7. Users can pin applications to the taskbar so the application is fast accessible. The application need not to run, the application is accessible with the click of a button and thus replaces the quick launch. With the task bar the application can also offer some tasks that can be accessed from the user directly, instead of starting the application first and accessing the specific feature of the application. The .NET 4 version of WPF got an improvement that integrating the application with the task bar becomes an easy task. Starting with IE9, this is also an easy task to do with Web applications as this article demonstrates.
First, I’m adding a custom icon to the Web application. This icon is shown with IE9 in the taskbar and with the address link as the following figure shows.
If the Web application is pinned to the taskbar, the icon is displayed on the left side as well, and the back and forward buttons are colored. There’s a way to specify the color of the back and forward buttons. If the color is not specified, the color is taken automatically from the icon.
The icon can be specified in the header section of the HTML page with a link to an icon as shown. The meta elements named application-name, msapplication-tooltip, msapplication-starturl, and msapplication-window are used to configure the settings for the taskbar.
<link href="/Content/Icons/favicon.ico" rel="Shortcut Icon" type="image/x-icon"/> <meta content="CN innovation" name="application-name" /> <meta content="Information about CN innovation" name="msapplication-tooltip" /> <meta content="http://www.cninnovation.com" name="msapplication-starturl" /> <meta content="width=1024;height=768" name="msapplication-window" />
Selecting the context menu of the application pinned to the taskbar you can see information about the application as well as some links for fast access as the figure below demonstrates. This is the jump list.
The icon of the application is shown in the lowest section above the unpin and close options. These options as well as the menu to start in private browsing cannot be changed with IE9. The name of the application that was set with the application-name meta tag is shown beside the icon. With the application here I’ve also added two tasks for fast access which are Training and Books, and a custom section that lists the latest blog entries. How this is done is shown next.
Adding tasks to the task list is just a matter of adding meta tags msapplication-task. The content of this tag lists the name that is shown in the jump list, the link that should be opened on activating the item, and the icon.
<meta content="name=Training;action-uri=http://www.cninnovation.com/Home/Training;icon-uri=/Content/Icons/training.ico" name="msapplication-task" /> <meta content="name=Books;action-uri=http://www.cninnovation.com/Home/Books;icon-uri=/Content/Icons/books.ico" name="msapplication-task" />
The items that should appear above the task list can have custom section names. I’ve created a Blog section and display titles of the last five blog entries that link to these. Adding such items to the jump list is done with JavaScript. First it is verified if the Window is pinned. This can be done with the function window.external.msIsSiteMode. If it is not, and if the site is opened from a different browser, the script doesn’t need to run. A new section is created with the function msSiteModeCreateJumpList. Items to the jump list are added with msSiteModeAddJumpListItem. The parameters of this method are the name that should be displayed with the jump list, the URL that should be opened, and the link to the icon that should be displayed.
<script type="text/javascript"> try { if (window.external.msIsSiteMode()) { ext = window.external; ext.msSiteModeClearJumpList(); ext.msSiteModeCreateJumpList("Blog"); ext.msSiteModeAddJumpListItem("Sharing Assemblies between Silverlight and .NET", "http://weblogs.thinktecture.com/cnagel/2011/07/sharing-assemblies-between-silverlight-and-net.html", "/Content/Icons/blog.ico"); ext.msSiteModeAddJumpListItem("Real World .NET 4 and C#", "http://weblogs.thinktecture.com/cnagel/2011/08/real-world-net-4-and-c.html", "/Content/Icons/blog.ico"); ext.msSiteModeAddJumpListItem("BASTA! 2011 in Mainz", "http://weblogs.thinktecture.com/cnagel/2011/08/basta-2011-in-mainz.html", "/Content/Icons/blog.ico"); ext.msSiteModeAddJumpListItem("WPF ListBox Postioning using a Canvas", "http://weblogs.thinktecture.com/cnagel/2011/08/wpf-listbox-postioning-using-a-canvas.html", "/Content/Icons/blog.ico"); ext.msSiteModeAddJumpListItem("Reserve the date! Developer Day 2011", "http://weblogs.thinktecture.com/cnagel/2011/09/reserve-the-date-developer-day-2011.html", "/Content/Icons/blog.ico"); ext.msSiteModeShowJumpList(); } } catch (exception) { } </script>
It will be interesting to see what features Web applications will get from Windows 8. This taskbar feature from Windows 7 is limited in the way that there is not enough place for all my important applications. Let’s see how Windows 8 changes this using Metro, and what other features Web applications can use from Windows 8.
Christian
How to use WPF 4 to integrate in the Windows 7 taskbar is shown in my book Professional C# 4 and .NET 4.
Information on programming Web applications in my Web programming workshop.
