IttyUrl.Net

Nothing.

Friend of mine, and Silverlight MVP, asks me why I’ve become The Anti-Silverlight. I’m actually not on a crusade to bash Silverlight. My “issue” per say is not so much the technology but how it’s being sold.

Despite the recent outburst of Global amnesia, some of us recall how Silverlight, which originated from WPF/E, a subset of WPF, was about bringing rich user interfaces to the web. It was about, and I quote “lighting up the web”. Rich User Interface? Silverlight. Vivid user experiences? Silverlight. Video? Silverlight. And might I add, there was a lot of emphasis placed on video…

Of course, fast-forward to today, and things haven’t gone so much according to plan. And with recent changes, it looks less promising.

Now, some of us that have been doing web development for some time, and have suffered the pains of cross-browser compatibility, JavaScript (the copy/paste snippet joke language), CSS (the “crap, I moved a DIV and all hell’s broken loose” language), have also seen the advances in these fields. Not to sound repetitive, but jQuery for example has not not only made JavaScript fun, but opened our eyes in seeing how powerful this so called “joke” language actually is. CSS has become easy. I actually really dug into CSS after learning jQuery and realized how stupid I was to ignore it for so long.

Frameworks such as ASP.NET MVC (for context, I’m sticking to .NET), MonoRail and others are proving that the whole abstraction that WebForms provided didn’t work that well, and have made web development in .NET more productive, maintainable, testable, and consequently fun. 

There are many web sites now being developed using nothing more than HTML4, JavaScript and CSS and being done so very productively, and providing a very rich user experience. We have applications that work “offline”. We have applications that are keyboard centric. Cross-platform? If by platform we mean not only browsers but operating systems, yep, we have that too! Easy deployment? Yes sir! That one is actually inherent to the whole “web thingy”.

So we’ve managed to successfully create Consumer and Line of Business Applications. And now, with HTML5 coming, we’re also going to get video and more!

Yet despite all this, recent posts about what Silverlight is most suited for, are selling these same points as benefits of Silverlight, as if somehow implying that none of this can be accomplished with existing technology.

Some say “Sure, I can also program in Assembly and not use C#”, to which I reply "Open your eyes". Using HTML, jQuery and CSS is by no means less productive or harder to do than learning XAML, MVVM and asynchronous programming.

Now, having said that, if you prefer Silverlight, whether or not you’ve even tried alternatives, that’s great. I have absolutely no issue with people choosing to use Silverlight or any other technology for that matter. What I don’t agree with however is promoting technologies in the wrong way.

Of course, some now say that Silverlight was never about taking over the web, or lighting it up for that matter. It has always been about Windows Phone and Desktop applications. Wait?! Wasn’t this a subset of WPF?

Busy day ahead, need to get a few new views completed and tie in code coverage to the solution(something that has been on my todo list for awhile).  Also have a skype call this afternoon with the tech group in New Zealand … what what I do without skype?

Found a lot of interesting links to look at this morning.  Sara Ford’s PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2010 reminds me that I’ve been pretty happy with the Productivity Power Tools adding and need to explore more of what’s out there.

Other

• CQRS and MVC, Greg Young
• What is Functional Programming?, Christopher Bennage
• New five-part blog series on DFS Replication, josebda
• Self-Hosting Your Project Management Tools, Thursday Bram
• Perform Rolling Upgrade of Web Farm using Windows Network Load Balancer, Steven Smith
• Blend Bits 5: Paths Are Your Friend (1), Mike Taulty
• Power Commands for Visual Studio 2010 – Extension #8, Sara Ford
• Visual Studio 2010 and MSDN Licensing White Paper, Microsoft Downloads
• Hanselminutes Podcast 229 - OpenID and OpenAuth with DotNetOpenAuth open source programmer Andrew Arnott and Hanselminutes Podcast 230 - Continuous Deployment with Jon Tørresdal, Scott Hanselman
• MSDN Developer Centers at a Glance, JD Meier
• Software Engineering Radio, Magnus Christerson

Code to look at

• DataObjects.Net - ORM Framework for RAD – Introduction, Thomas Maierhofer
• Avoiding Data Loss in Thread Communication, Luis Vital

From CodePlex Feed

• Infuse - IoC Container for .NET
• Rubiks Cube for Coding 4 Fun

Data Access

• A gentle introduction to CouchDB for relational practitioners, Xaprb

Web

• Making Manual Edits to Dynamic DNS Zones, Scott Lowe
• Making asynchronous calls to web services during ASP.NET page processing, Gunnar Peipman
• How JSONP works (and some bits about implementing it in WCF), Scott Seely
• Tags Everywhere! YetAnotherForum.NET Now With Tagging, Dave Burke
• WebPagetest and PageSpeed join up via PageSpeed SDK, Dion Almaer
• Transitioning Existing Code to the ES5 Getter/Setter APIs, IE Blog
• Digital Certificates (part 2 of 2) and SSL Handshake, Jeffrey Muir
• Overriding a .svc Request With Routing, Phil Haack
• Posting Form Data to an ASP.NET ASMX AJAX Web Service with jQuery, Rick Strahl
• Introducing the Microsoft Web Farm Framework, Scott Guthrie

Database

• SQL 2008 R2 BPA Whitepaper and Microsoft SQL Server Protocol Documentation, Microsoft Downloads
• SQL SERVER – Find Row Count in Table – Find Largest Table in Database – Part 2, Pinal Dave

Security

• Strong passwords: deja vue all over again, David Harley
• Crazy Idea #10- Adopt Agile Mindset, Mark Curphey

Agile

• The role of an architect in an agile team, Tom Hollander

Cloud Computing

• SyncToBlog #14 Just a little more on cloud, Eric Nelson
• The master moves to the cloud, Simeon Simeonov
• Securing Your Connection String in Windows Azure: Part 1, Wayne Walter Berry
• AWS Management Console Support for the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, AWS Blog
• SQL Azure Portal Database Provisioning Outage on 9/7/2010 and It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again: Live Services Rejoins the Windows Azure Platform [Apparent Hoax] and Windows Azure and Cloud Computing Posts for 9/7/2010+, OakLeaf Systems

Career

• From Freelancer to Thought Leader in 5 Easy Steps, Jaime Mintun
• Mind Map Your Way to Successful Thinking, Marla Tabaka
• Online Workers Doing Fine, ODesk Passes One Million Hours A Month, Erick Schonfeld
• You Need To Step Out Of Your Comfort Zone, Davy Brion
• Interview with Featured Freelancer: Stef Gonzaga, Jason Finnerty
• Essential Skills for 21st Century Survival (Part 4), Venessa Miemis
• Goodbye Microsoft, David L

Business

• How to Manage a One-Person Sales Force, Donna Fenn

Innovation

• How efficient is your firm at commercializing ideas and IP? and Beware of These 10 Myths About Innovation and Survey reveals less than 25 percent of customer ideas become products and 5 Reasons You Don't Have the Time to Delay Innovation, Innovation in the News

Other link blogs

• Dew Drop – September 7, 2010 and Dew Drop – September 8, 2010, Alvin Ashcraft
• Link dump for September 7th, Jeff Schoolcraft
• Daily Cloud Feed - Sep 7, 2010, Cloud Feed
• The Morning Brew #681, Chris Alcock

Just put up http://cqrsinfo.com as many people have been asking for the information.

You will find there documents, 6-7 hours of video, and links to good material on the web.

Sixin has invited Gill Cleeren from Belgium to speak at our sixin meeting on September 14. Gill will be presenting two in-depth technical sessions about MEF and databinding. There's room for 50 and there are some seats left. Want to join our meeting? Register now at this link (dutch).

• Gill is a smart guy, if you want to learn a thing or two about Silverlight, you need to attend.
• It's free. Food and drinks are included.
• Be part of the vibrant and enthusiastic Silverlight community in The Netherlands. Do you have a question? Changes are someone in the room is capable of helping you out.
• Goodies; we literaly have thousands of euro's of software licenses to give away. Think Windows 7, Expression, 3rd party Silverlight libraries, Silverlight Spy :-) and more.

Gill is Microsoft Regional Director, MVP ASP.NET, INETA speaker and Silverlight Insider. He lives in Belgium where he works as .NET architect at Ordina. Passionate about .NET, he's always playing with the newest bits. In his role as Regional Director, Gill has given many sessions, webcasts and trainings on new as well as existing technologies, such as Silverlight, ASP.NET and WPF. He also leads Visug, the largest .NET user group in Belgium. You can find his blog at www.snowball.be

Sixin is the Silverlight & Expression User Group of the Netherlands. The user group was founded last year by Timmy, Rob, Antoni, Marc, Eric and Koen with the intent to share knowledge of Silverlight and Expression in The Netherlands with anyone interested.

Learn more about sixin. 

 Hi,

I captured the Chart image using Writable Bitmap. but image is not clear, could you please suggest me how to get the high quality image through writbale bitmap. or do we have any other way to capture the image from Silverlight rendered Silverlight Control?

Can we use any other dotnet code to capture the image from the rendered control.

Regards

Sekar C

I want to include multiple child windows in a single Page such that when i expand a child window it occupies major part of the screen and the reamining child windows get minimized and move to the right hand side corner .

The feature i want can be viewed as follows :

1.  Type this link in the Browser http://pjd.mscui.net/default.htm  .

2.  Launch the  Administration window .

3 . Minimize and maximise the windows to experience the effect .

Please let me know what silverlight control i can use to replicate these features. How should i approach this . Please help .

The other day I got a question about how to call an ASP.NET ASMX Web Service with the POST data from a Web Form (or any HTML form for that matter). The idea is that you should be able to call an endpoint URL, send it regular urlencoded POST data and then use Request.Form[] to retrieve the posted data as needed. My first reaction was that you can’t do it, because ASP.NET ASMX AJAX services (as well as Page Methods and WCF REST AJAX Services) require that the content POSTed to the server is posted as JSON and sent with an application/json or application/x-javascript content type. IOW, you can’t directly call an ASP.NET AJAX service with regular urlencoded data. Note that there are other ways to accomplish this. You can use ASP.NET MVC and a custom route, an HTTP Handler or separate ASPX page, or even a WCF REST service that’s configured to use non-JSON inputs.

However if you want to use an ASP.NET AJAX service (or Page Methods) with a little bit of setup work it’s actually quite easy to capture all the form variables on the client and ship them up to the server. The basic steps needed to make this happen are:

1. Capture form variables into an array on the client with jQuery’s .serializeArray() function
2. Use $.ajax() or my ServiceProxy class to make an AJAX call to the server to send this array
3. On the server create a custom type that matches the .serializeArray() name/value structure
4. Create extension methods on NameValue[] to easily extract form variables
5. Create a [WebMethod] that accepts this name/value type as an array (NameValue[])

This seems like a lot of work but realize that steps 3 and 4 are a one time setup step that can be reused in your entire site or multiple applications.

Let’s look at a short example that looks like this as a base form of fields to ship to the server:

The HTML for this form looks something like this:

The form includes a few different kinds of form fields including a multi-selection listbox to demonstrate retrieving multiple values.

The [WebMethod] on the server we’re going to call is going to be very simple and just capture the content of these values and echo then back as a formatted HTML string. Obviously this is overly simplistic but it serves to demonstrate the simple point of capturing the POST data on the server in an AJAX callback.

The key feature of this method is that it receives a custom type called NameValue[] which is an array of NameValue objects that map the structure that the jQuery .serializeArray() function generates. There are two custom types involved in this: The actual NameValue type and a NameValueExtensions class that defines a couple of extension methods for the NameValue[] array type to allow for single (.Form()) and multiple (.FormMultiple()) value retrieval by name.

The NameValue class is as simple as this and simply maps the structure of the array elements of .serializeArray():

The extension method class defines the .Form() and .FormMultiple() methods to allow easy retrieval of form variables from the returned array:

Using these extension methods it’s easy to retrieve individual values from the array:

or multiple values:

Using these functions in the SendRegistration method it’s easy to retrieve a few form variables directly (txtName and the multiple selections of lstSpecialNeeds) or to iterate over the whole list of values. Of course this is an overly simple example – in typical app you’d probably want to validate the input data and save it to the database and then return some sort of confirmation or possibly an updated data list back to the client.

Since this is a full AJAX service callback realize that you don’t have to return simple string values – you can return any of the supported result types (which are most serializable types) including complex hierarchical objects and arrays that make sense to your client code.

To call the AJAX service method on the client is straight forward and requires only use of little native jQuery plus JSON serialization functionality. To start add jQuery and the json2.js library to your page:

json2.js can be found here (be sure to remove the first line from the file):

http://www.json.org/json2.js

It’s required to handle JSON serialization for those browsers that don’t support it natively.

With those script references in the document let’s hookup the button click handler and call the service:

The key feature in this code is the $("#form1").serializeArray();  call which serializes all the form fields of form1 into an array. Each form var is represented as an object with a name/value property. This array is then serialized into JSON with:

JSON.stringify({ formVars: arForm })

The format for the parameter list in AJAX service calls is an object with one property for each parameter of the method. In this case its a single parameter called formVars and we’re assigning the array of form variables to it.

The URL to call on the server is the name of the Service (or ASPX Page for Page Methods) plus the name of the method to call.

On return the success callback receives the result from the AJAX callback which in this case is the formatted string which is simply assigned to an element in the form and displayed. Remember the result type is whatever the method returns – it doesn’t have to be a string. Note that ASP.NET AJAX and WCF REST return JSON data as a wrapped object so the result has a ‘d’ property that holds the actual response:

jEl.html(result.d).fadeIn(1000);

If you want things slightly cleaner you can use the ServiceProxy.js class I’ve mentioned here before. The ServiceProxy class handles a few things for calling ASP.NET and WCF services more cleanly:

• Automatic JSON encoding
• Automatic fix up of ‘d’ wrapper property
• Automatic Date conversion on the client
• Simplified error handling
• Reusable and abstracted

To add the service proxy add:

and then change the code to this slightly simpler version:

The code is not very different but it makes the call as simple as specifying the method to call, the parameters to pass and the actions to take on success and error. No more remembering which content type and data types to use and manually serializing to JSON. This code also removes the “d” property processing in the response and provides more consistent error handling in that the call always returns an error object regardless of a server error or a communication error unlike the native $.ajax() call.

Either approach works and both are pretty easy. The ServiceProxy really pays off if you use lots of service calls and especially if you need to deal with date values returned from the server  on the client.

Making Web Service calls and getting POST data to the server is not always the best option – ASP.NET and WCF AJAX services are meant to work with data in objects. However, in some situations it’s simply easier to POST all the captured form data to the server instead of mapping all properties from the input fields to some sort of message object first. For this approach the above POST mechanism is useful as it puts the parsing of the data on the server and leaves the client code lean and mean. It’s even easy to build a custom model binder on the server that can map the array values to properties on an object generically with some relatively simple Reflection code and without having to manually map form vars to properties and do string conversions.

Keep in mind though that other approaches also abound. ASP.NET MVC makes it pretty easy to create custom routes to data and the built in model binder makes it very easy to deal with inbound form POST data in its original urlencoded format. The West Wind West Wind Web Toolkit also includes functionality for AJAX callbacks using plain POST values. All that’s needed is a Method parameter to query/form value to specify the method to be called on the server. After that the content type is completely optional and up to the consumer. It’d be nice if the ASP.NET AJAX Service and WCF AJAX Services weren’t so tightly bound to the content type so that you could more easily create open access service endpoints that can take advantage of urlencoded data that is everywhere in existing pages. It would make it much easier to create basic REST endpoints without complicated service configuration. Ah one can dream!

In the meantime I hope this article has given you some ideas on how you can transfer POST data from the client to the server using JSON – it might be useful in other scenarios beyond ASP.NET AJAX services as well.

ServiceProxy.js A small JavaScript library that wraps $.ajax() to call ASP.NET AJAX and WCF AJAX Services. Includes date parsing extensions to the JSON object, a global dataFilter for processing dates on all jQuery JSON requests, provides cleanup for the .NET wrapped message format and handles errors in a consistent fashion.

Making jQuery Calls to WCF/ASMX with a ServiceProxy Client More information on calling ASMX and WCF AJAX services with jQuery and some more background on ServiceProxy.js. Note the implementation has slightly changed since the article was written.

ww.jquery.js The West Wind West Wind Web Toolkit also includes ServiceProxy.js in the West Wind jQuery extension library. This version is slightly different and includes embedded json encoding/decoding based on json2.js.

Thanks John :)