Blog List

I have been working on a WPF project lately and finding I have both Blend and Visual Studio open a lot of the time.  There's things each tool does better than the other and then there's things I need to use both for to accomplish my task. Thought I'd put down my thoughts and see if anyone else has the same issues.

First for the things I’m liking:

In WPF in general, I'm loving the data binding. All I can say is very, very cool.

Now for the things that annoy me:

My latest Article is up on sql-server-performance. It comes from watching one of the cool videos on TED where the presenter remodelled the World’s landmass based on the number of minutes US news spent on stories from that country – it was quite dramatic.

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We went and visited the guys at QUT last week as they had some cool stuff to show us and we love seeing cool things. One of the projects they have been working on is called SilverGene which is:

“SilverGene is a novel genomic visualiser hosted within most standard web browsers and written using the Microsoft Silverlight presentation technology. It delivers highly interactive exploration at arbitrary scales, the ability to work interchangeably with local or remotely accessed data, and developing support for publication and collaboration.”

This month we're going to mix it up a bit and have a "Coffee and Chic Flick" night.  We'll meet at the Cafe next to the Southbank Cinemas for a coffee and chat and follow it up with a movie.

Thanks to Lisa for suggesting Australia - AUSTRALIA is an epic and romantic action adventure, set in that country on the explosive brink of World War II. In it, an English aristocrat (NICOLE KIDMAN) travels to the faraway continent where she meets a rough-hewn local (HUGH JACKMAN) and reluctantly agrees to join forces with him to save the land she inherited.

Register for the event here: http://girlgeekdinnersbrisbane03.eventbrite.com/

One of my favourite tools to help me with WPF at the moment is Snoop (http://blois.us/Snoop/). It's really handy to do some visual debugging of WPF at runtime. It allows you to explore the visual tree of you application, and all it's associated properties.

3 months ago I kicked off a little experiment on twitter, http://twitter.com/virtualearth. As a Windows Live MVP I decided to tweet everything interesting I come across with Virtual Earth and also actively engage others tweeting about Virtual Earth.

This weekend I hit 100+ followers and feel I’m really starting to connect with others around the world interested in this technology. I tweet interesting Articles, blogs post and links specifically on Virtual Earth, nothing else.

Extending on our current addiction of Guitar Hero we took up the awesome deal on an Xbox Arcade and equipped ourselves with RockBand and Guitar Hero: World Tour. The New Xbox dashboard just got released so we made up some gamertags to share.

Feel free to add us as friends and challenge us to a game!

Armed with 4 people and a combo of Rockband and Guitar Hero World Tour instruments we got our Soul Solutions Band together – Smiffy on Vocals, John on Bass, me on Lead and Kim on drums.

Welcome to the first part in series that takes you through the core functionality of the Microsoft’s Virtual Earth JavaScript control. Through example code I hope to either introduce you to the Virtual Earth control or show you how to do things better and highlight some things you may not have known. I will be making use of the jQuery JavaScript library to provide valuable helper functions and simplify our code. If you feel there is something that could done better please share your ideas in the comments below.

Lets start by loading the Virtual Earth map on a page. Sounds trivial? Well it is, but lets do it as if you were building a real world application and include:

• Browser detection to only load the map for supported browsers
• Binding to the body onload method programmatically as you may not have access to the actual HTML tag

Checkout Catherine’s latest Geek Girl Blogs set of podcasts on the Women Build event she attended at PDC. She managed to interview a bunch of famous Microsoft staff at the event, including Frank Arrigo and Lindsay Rutter.

Sounds like she had a great time at the event and I hope it makes it’s way out to Australia one day soon!