bling on software

Well, it’s been quite a while since I’ve blogged about…well…anything, and I figured it’s about time I get off my lazy butt and do something with my spare time on weekends. What better option than to see what all the hype is about Node? I had to do it sooner or later. As any newbie would do, they go to Google and type “nodejs tutorial”. The Node Beginner Book came up first, so I went with that. Read on...

Ever since MEF was conceived, despite the authors saying that it is not an IoC container, it has since evolved to become one of the more popular IoC containers.  I’ve always avoided it because I disagree with using attributes, and I’ve had no reason to use it over Autofac or Windsor. Recently, I found a reason to use it – Metro-style applications only support MEF so far.  My Twitter client ping.pong uses Autofac as the IoC container.  It uses some very basic functionality like factories and hooks.  To my surprise, MEF has no support for either of these. Read on...

I have a whole series dedicated to blogging about how I wrote a Twitter client from scratch, but if I want anyone to actually use it, I better do some advertising :-D. ping.pong is a fast and lightweight Twitter client written in Silverlight.  As of this moment it targets v4 but will likely target v5 whenever that is released. Here are some highlights… Visually Pleasing The UI is based on your typical column-based design.  The column widths will automatically resize to take up all available horizontal space.  There is no horizontal scrolling. Read on...

This is going to be the last post that concludes my series on building a real-time push app with Silverlight. Any additional posts would likely be outside the context of writing a push app and more about how I’m adding features to ping.pong, my Twitter app, so I think this is a good place to wrap up and talk generally from a top down overview of building a push-style application. Here’s a recap of everything discussed so far: Part 1: Basics – Creating an Observable around a basic HTTP web stream against Twitter’s streaming API Part 2: Subscription and Observation of Observables Part 3: Basics of UX design with a look at shadows and gradients. Read on...

Exploring Caliburn Micro As I hinted in earlier posts, Caliburn Micro has some wicked conventions that makes for writing MVVM super easy, and it also have a very convenient syntax for hooking up events. For example, the following: <Button Content="R"> <i:Interaction.Triggers> <i:EventTrigger EventName="Click"> <i:InvokeCommandAction Command="{Binding ReplyCommand}" CommandParameter="{Binding}" /> </i:EventTrigger> </i:Interaction.Triggers> </Button> Can be rewritten like this: <Button Content="R" cal:Message.Attach="[Reply($dataContext)]" /> There are some smarts going on here. Caliburn Micro will default to the Click event for buttons. Read on...