Hopefully that got your attention. But its not really the devils work. Simon has this theory about why video games and how its the devils work an opinion I do not fully share. Everything in moderation I say including moderation. Anyway I digress , The ninemsn crew has posted a fantastic video of the game QUAKE being ported to SILVERLIGHT yes SILVERLIGHT.
Adam Kinney has a interview with the developer Julien Frelat about the process. I hope we get to see more in the near future.
The Silverlight clr does not have a MD5 implementation so your on your own when it comes to “signing” calls to REST based web services, like Flickr. A quick google found a clean implementation written in managed code, targeting the compact framework. The managed MD5CryptoServiceProvider was created by GL Conseil/Flow Group SAS. It is available for download from their website, I have also made MD5CryptoServiceProvider Source file available for here for download.
So you want to add a Normal Class Library Project to a Silverlight application, you think to your self how hard could this be despite the Visual Studio Warnings. Well for the most part its fairly simple, however there are a number of problems that I faced when doing exactly that.
Thanks to Neil Mosafi’s post on converting class library project for Silverlight consumption, I found 2 methods of doing the conversion.
1.) Create a NEW Silverlight Class Library Project and then ADD your EXISTING code files to the project
2.) Hack the csproj file to change its signature (details are courtesy of Neil Mosafi’s post) VS.NET 2008 believes that its a Silverlight Project (don’t forget the changes needs to be made to both the DEBUG as well as RELEASE sections)
Initially I went about making these changes using method 2 however I kept finding a number of issues relating to duplicate references , especially with the HttpWebRequest object and a few other things.
I also needed to change all non generic collections to use their generic equivalents as all non generic collections are not included in Silverlight 2.0
The Serializable attribute is not part of the coreclr, therefore it has to go, XML Serialization is your friend. Rockford Lhotka has started work on an alternative to the Serializable attribute however its extremely limited at this stage, The Silverlight Serializer may suit your needs so do check it out.
The project I was playing with also used a little bit of XPath Navigation and some other System.XML namespace classes that are not part of the cut down version, so I have to change the code to use Linq to XML
There were a whole bunch of other things that I fixed up and was good to go when I realized that the project changes were not referencing the correct mscorlib and system.xml libraries, however the compiler did not seem to mind to much which baffled me. At this point I decided that the safer way was to go down option 1, simply because I thought it would give a much better jumping off point, lo and behold it has. I am pretty close to having it compile correctly for the Silverlight application which I intend to share.
At the end of this all my advice in converting is to go with method 1, as its just much more fool proof.
A few weeks back I took a guess at “What is Oslo?”in that post I suggested the following
I imagine it to be a tool that enables these Information Workers to use some of Oslo’s features much like using Visio, but instead of static elements there are dynamic objects drawn from the repository that perform a specific business purpose, when put together by the domain expert enables them to perform a task that would have required a developer to perform otherwise.
As it turns out I may not be that far from the truth, or some part of it. Ron Jacobs interviewed David Chappell at Tech.Ed just past and in that conversation David divulges a few interesting bit of information.
Two things that caught my attention was the “Lifecycle Manager” and the “Process Server”. But here are my two predictions about what these two things could be. (Yes I am going out on a limb)
The Lifecycle Manager – A long running workflow or Saga manager.
The Process Server – A Service Bus implementation.
The video of Ron Jacobs and David Chappell along with David’s loose timeline/ roadmap to Oslo is after the Jump » Read more: Oslo – More news and predictions
Based on Kavita and Wenlong’s posts (they work with Doug Purdy and Don Box) the .net framework v4 is going to be the building blocks for Oslo.
With .net 4 they are not touting it to be a additive release like 3.0 and 3.5. Wenlog says that 4.0 will be the next major release since 2.0,
But to get the full picture we are going to have to wait for PDC, when the first CTP bits should be available. I can only predict exciting times ahead, as always more things to learn, I guess its time to open Robert Pickering’s book Foundations of F#
Oslo has been shrouded in a lot of mystery. Most information on the about Oslo is still speculation. When people think Oslo they think
IMHO I believe it to be everything and more, but what proof did i have to support it? Well Doug Purdy announced on his blog about hiring for Emacs.net This raises the question of why another IDE/Text Editor when Visual Studio is very powerful, unless you have tried working with XAML. I digress.
Last night there was posts from Doug Purdy and Don Box that began to unveil bits of what make Oslo.
Doug Describes it as three simple things.
- A tool that helps people define and interact with models in a rich and visual manner
- A language that helps people create and use textual domain-specific languages and data models
- A relational repository that makes models available to both tools and platform components
and Don says that Olso is being created with a couple of intentions
1. We’re making it easier for people to write things down in ways that make sense for the domain they are working in – the common term for this in the wild is modeling.
2. We’re making the things people wrote down accessible to platform components during program execution.
Based on this I would take a punt and say that Oslo is going to create a platform for developers to create DSL’s that will be stored in a repository, this DSL is then retrieved and consumed by a visual tool to create on the fly mash-ups of their domain. The key part here is that the visual tool will be something that can be used by Information Workers, Business Analysts, and Project Consultants.
I imagine it to be a tool that enables these Information Workers to use some of Oslo’s features much like using Visio, but instead of static elements there are dynamic objects drawn from the repository that perform a specific business purpose, when put together by the domain expert enables them to perform a task that would have required a developer to perform otherwise.
This is something that is peeking my interest. Wow I can imagine every medium to large business needing something like this. I cant wait for PDC anymore, I just wish I could be there, then again that’s what a Webcast is for.
Doug calls this the “end of the beginning” of his vision of enabling everyone to be a programmer if they can pull something like this of then he may be correct. But I will wait and hold my judgement till I can play with the Bits that should be available at PDC08
Over on the Ado.net blog they have just announced that Devart have just released new Ado.net Data Providers that support the Entity Framework v1.
This is great news for the Entity Framework team. This added support for multiple database vendors is another big plus for choosing the Entity Framework over Linq To Sql.
Just recently I was listening to Steven Forte and Dan Simmons on DNR talking about what the EF, the show revealed a lot of what the Entity Framework team are doing to make this a really great platform. I look forward to seeing what they have for us in the future.
At least for now if you want to use the EF you are no longer restricted to using SQL Server for your data store. Below is a list of Data Providers that will work with the EF as of the 6th of September 2008
Oracle
MySql
PostgresSql
SQLite
Sybase SQL Anywhere
UPDATE: 23-10-08 Added Sybase SQL Anywhere
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