On second thought

Flash vs Silverlight revisited

2010-02-09T14:07:06Z

I've corrected only the Silverlight aspects, because that's what I know. People with significant knowledge of Flash are welcome to contribute corrections and updates. Silverlight Flash My analysis Silverlight is missing Linux support, so people using Linux machine cannot run it on their machines and will have to stick to Windows and MAC OS. This limitation doesn’t exist with Flash. Microsoft is deliberately ignoring all six Linux users. Silverlight will (naturally) be using the WMV and Silverlight...(read more)

Web service auto-config

2010-02-09T03:28:29Z

If you put a web service in the host web for your Silverlight application and discover it then when you create the reference the URI is obtained from the debug web server. You can configure this with the ServiceReferences.ClientConfig file but you have to do so prior to building the XAP file. To change things after the fact, you can rename the XAP to ZIP, extract the ServiceReference.ClientConfig file, edit it, update the ZIP file and rename it back to XAP. Tedious but possible with tools intrinsic...(read more)

EF4 and getting your priorities right

2010-02-08T05:46:40Z

The world is not waiting on EF directly handling spatial data types. You don’t need them. Just use Lat and Lng columns typed as float, and set up a trigger so that whenever the Lat column is updated the trigger updates the Geography column. Most data sinks use separate latitude and longitude values, so you have to handle them like this anyway. The trigger keeps the geography column in synch so stored procedures can use spatial indexes. Sure you can’t use a spatial index directly in a Linq expression...(read more)

Why Avatar was a dead cert for a blockbuster

2010-01-24T03:32:28Z

It’s basically Dances with Wolves in space, and it has Spaceships Aliens Boobs Giant robots Soldiers Horses Dragons Energy weapons Exotic wildlife Exciting chase scenes Lots of explosions State of the art CG Noble savages Elves (the noble savages are tall and slender with pointy ears, and run around communing with nature) A soppy doomed-love story Resurrection themes All the good-guys are attractive and smart. All of the annoying characters get killed....(read more)

Binding, lookups and BusyIndicator

2010-01-21T02:36:20Z

BusyIndicator is your friend Let me begin by stating the obvious: if you bind your UI to one or more DDSs (DomainDataSources) then when the UI renders it will fetch values from those DDSs. Now let me ask you a question: if you hover the mouse over a grid, will that cause data to be fetched? You can guess that it does, from the mere fact that I’ve posed the question. But how can this be? With the default stylesheet, and indeed most stylesheets, the DataGrid and other widgets are thoroughly littered...(read more)