Programming – Ioan Lazarciuc's Weblog

Debugging Silverlight Sidebar Gadgets from Visual Studio

Posted on 28 July, 201028 July, 2010| By Cretz

Ever since I started working with Windows Sidebar gadgets I’ve been debugging them the same way: enabling script debugging in the IE options (for JavaScript based gadgets) and then using the “Attach to Process” command from Visual Studio. When I created a template (posts here and here) that speeds up development of Silverlight Sidebar gadgets, I wanted to offer the smoothest development experience possible. Ironically, that in itself has been

Custom Parameters in Multi-Project Templates

Posted on 25 April, 201025 April, 2010| By Cretz

Visual Studio project templates offer two ways of specifying template parameter values: In the .vstemplate file, using a CustomParameters section, as described here. Using a template wizard in order to specify run-time values in the IWizard.RunStarted method, as described here. The problem is that these mechanisms don’t work as one would expect in the case of multi-project templates. The parameters specified in the root template are not picked up by

Update for Silverlight Sidebar Gadget Project Template

Posted on 9 April, 201018 December, 2011| By Cretz

For the past few weeks I’ve been working on fixing a number of bugs signalled about the Silverlight Gadget Template I created a while ago. I’ve had to work around some strange issues and try everything I could to make the gadget development experience as pleasant as possible. I’d like to thank Kiran Bachu for his valuable support in finding bugs and testing the gadget template. Version 1.8 of the

WCF Contract Limits?

Posted on 28 May, 2009| By Cretz

Today I’ve hit the size limit for a WCF service contract. It might seem unbelievable, but it’s almost true.

XNA Streaming – Part4

Posted on 23 March, 2009| By Cretz

In the previous parts of this articles I’ve talked about the service components of the XNA Streaming system. In this part, I’m going to talk about the Communication Broker. The role of the Communication Broker is to cover the communication with the Streaming Service. By doing so, the code required of client applications is simplified, and less duplicate code will be generated for each application using the system. the broker

XNA Streaming – Part 3

Posted on 27 February, 200927 February, 2009| By Cretz

After quite a long break, I resume the series of articles on my XNA Streaming project by describing the actual Stream Service component. This component is responsible for transmitting the broadcast information to all connected users. The information is encoded in (<property name>, <value>) pairs. All serializable data types are supported for values. Users register with the Stream Service either as Broadcaster or as Observer. After this step, the Broadcaster

XNA Streaming – Part 2

Posted on 26 October, 200826 October, 2008| By Cretz

In part one of this article, I did an overview of the XNA Streaming project. In this part I’m going to describe the File Transfer Service. The main responsibility of the File Transfer Service is to provide access to streamable games. The service stores the game files in a database table, together with their relative file paths. This way the file system structure can be recreated when downloading the game.

XNA Streaming – Part 1

Posted on 21 September, 200827 February, 2009| By Cretz

Introduction As I mentioned in my previous post, at this year’s Microsoft Community Bootcamp I entered in the demo competition together with Adi. We’ve had some issues in the past with (cheap) broadcasting of presentations. There are plenty of professional tools out there that accomplish this goal, but that’s not my point. My point is that I have not yet found a cheap (free) utility that will allow me to

Creating a Vista Sidebar Gadget Using Microsoft Silverlight

Posted on 2 August, 20089 November, 2009| By Cretz

Introduction Some while ago I did a post on how to create a Vista Sidebar gadget using JavaScript. I also mentioned that I tried to create the gadget using XBAP or Silverlight, but due to the limitations in those technologies at that time, I decided that I had to give up on too much of the Sidebar gadget specific functionality (flyouts, cross domain data retrieval). More than 6 months have

Auto Complete for Textboxes in WPF

Posted on 1 June, 200823 March, 2009| By Cretz

Introduction It is very common when entering a search string in a textbox to get a small list of valid search results that match the search string entered so far. This feature is called auto complete and it has been widely used in web pages and desktop applications alike. From the developer’s point of view, the auto complete feature has been implemented as part of the TextBox control in Windows