Passing dates in XAML

Recently I had the need for an encapsulated, reusable 'About Box' control that I could use throughout a number of Silverlight applications. I then wrote a user control that would serve this purpose. The AboutBox displays application releases that are grouped by the application version, and a list of changes/updates included in that version. An example of this can be seen below:

Although the use and implementation of the AboutBox user control is beyond the scope of this article, one of the features of the AboutBox was to enable the developer to specify a date for a product release item. I made provision for this by creating a DateTime property called Date in the VersionInformation class. However, I encountered a problem when trying to specify a value for this property in the XAML of the page consuming the AboutBox user control

I realized that XAML natively does not know how to convert a string to a DateTime value, and setting the Date property as Date="12 January 2009" would result in an AG_E_UNKNOWN_ERROR XAML parser error when running the application.

Thankfully, there is a way to resolve this. The answer lies in TypeConverter, and the full article can be found at CodeProject

Microsoft announce Visual Studio 2010 dates

Microsoft have announced that Visual Studio 2010 will officially launch on the 22nd of March 2010, and is promised to be "the most significant release" Microsoft's had of the tools suite and framework "in a number of years."

New features include Windows 7 and SharePoint 2010 tools, drag-and-drop bindings with Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation, the inclusion of the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) for programming with scripting languages, and support for parallel programming.

Read the full article here.

Apple versus Microsoft: The top 20 stolen ideas

Both Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard contain features that originated in the other Operating System. Some features were stolen so long ago that they've become part of the computing landscape, and it's difficult to remember who invented what.

Full article available at InfoWorld.

Silverlight ported to Linux

Intel and Microsoft have announced a new port of Silverlight to Linux, specifically for the Intel-sponsored Moblin operating system running on Atom-powered devices such as netbooks. The port enables Intel to include Silverlight as a supported runtime in the Atom Developer Program, which will feed an iPhone-like App Store.

Microsoft has already provided Intel with Silverlight source code and test suites. Intel will build an optimized Moblin version of Silverlight, which Microsoft will supply to OEMs.

Read the full article here.

.NET development on the iPhone

A kit for developers to build Apple iPhone and iPod Touch business applications using Microsoft's .Net Framework instead of the Apple-designated C or Objective-C languages is available from Novell.

Read the full article here.

The kit is available from the MonoTouch site.

Silverlight Message Box

On the date I launched my blog, I wrote an article on how one might use the Silverlight Toolkit to implement pop-ups.

I have since taken this a step further and written a Message Box pop up user control for Silverlight using the very same framework mentioned in that blog.

An article on how I did this can be found at The Code Project.

PS. Don't forget to vote for the article.

Microsoft WebsiteSpark

Check out the new WebsiteSpark program from Microsoft. According to Scott Guthrie's blog:

"WebsiteSpark is designed for independent web developers and web development companies that build web applications and web sites on behalf of others. It enables you to get software, support and business resources from Microsoft at no cost for three years, and enables you to expand your business and build great web solutions using ASP.NET, Silverlight, SharePoint and PHP, and the open source applications built on top of them."