Lythix Designs Blog

I got back from my trip over east on Thursday last week, and while I was over there I had read a news article announcing that Vodafone has the exclusive rights to sell the Dell Mini 9. I have been looking at this machine for a couple of months now, and had come across hints that it would be released soon with 3G. Also a visual inspection in Officeworks of the non-3G model shows it sporting a SIM slot under the battery. A good indication that it was going to have 3G soon.

Anyway, Friday finds me on the Vodafone web site and I discover buried away in the online store a way to order the Dell Mini 9. Later on it shows up on the main web page.

Today it arrived. Overall I’m very happy with it but I had a few hiccups, mainly with dealing with Vodafone. The first thing I noticed was that it only had an 8Gb SSD. I checked the web site and sure enough it says 16Gb. There goes my immediate plans to install lots of stuff, but I had plans on upgrading to a larger drive anyway. There are 64Gb SSD drives for $216US so it won’t be long before that price comes down.

The second problem I had was actually getting through to Vodafone to activate my SIM. I wouldn’t bore you with the details normally but in hindsight it was amusing.

1. Called the number on the SIM packet. On hold for 20 mins then got disconnected.

2. Called the Customer care number and got Lara their automated bot. She wanted my phone number and I don’t have a Vodafone number to give her. Eventually she put me through to a real person. I had to swear at her, and I hope I was being recorded.

3. While giving the Vodafone employee my SIM number one of the kids picks up the other phone and autodials her friend. I get disconnected.

4. I call back the care line and this time get someone who understands me. (English being her native tongue). I explain to her my perils (activation and the hard drive size) and she can’t find my SIM in her system. She doesn’t have access to the Direct order system so has to transfer me. While on hold my ISP drops my internet momentarily. No web browsing while I’m waiting and oh look… you guessed it, I use Voip for my main phone. Disconnected naturally.  Length of call 50 mins. 

5. Realising I need to try the original number again, I give it another shot. 20minutes later I get a person. She’s very helpful and informs me the hard drive issue will be resolved but it will be up to Dell to handle. they will contact me when the know more about the solution. My SIM is activated (and was working immediately while I was still on the phone with Vodafone).  So my 1 hour lunch break ends up being 3 hours long.  It all ended well so that’s the main thing.

I spent the evening in bed reading my RSS feeds with Google Reader. It’s been over a year since I’ve read more than a couple of blogs, so it was good to catch up on some stuff. It still says 1000+ to read so I doubt I’ll actually catch up. Ever. The battery life was about 3 and a half hours before it hibernated (at 8% battery) I was using wireless not 3G so not sure if that uses more or less power. It’s really nice to use. I did discover I couldn’t sit up in bed for that long so the battery outlasted me.

Oh, I also tried running World of Warcraft on it, from an external USB drive and it runs! I was getting about 8 to 10 fps and everything was in minimum graphics. I had to drop the settings to get it to run as it crashed first try due to lack of memory. I normally play on a 4Gb system so all the settings were still set to full. Definitely playable though, if only for a bit of PvE.

So my next plans are to get myself a memory upgrade (around $45A for a 2Gb chip) and a larger hard drive. 64Gb or if I wait long enough, a 128Gb.

Last week I delivered a two day Silverlight workshop and despite a few little road bumps it all went to plan.

I wrote the course for a company here in Perth and it took me around three or four weeks to put together. The main reason for that was juggling with my day job, my Uni study and the workshop. One of the best resources for learning Silverlight is Microsoft’s Silverlight.net site and while writing the workshop I came across a number of good quickstarts. They seemed perfect for the topics I was covering in the workshop so I decided to send an email off to one of my Microsoft contacts asking for permission to reuse their quickstarts. Just over a week later I had permission (Thanks Microsoft and big thanks to ShaneMo!). If you want to learn more about a topic then I highly recommend taking on a presentation or workshop on the topic. You really focus on learning the material when you take on the role of teacher.

Some lessons learned along the way; dual screen is ok for powerpoint slides but clone screen is much easier to do demo’s with. Proof read your material carefully. (I had a couple of typos. Cut and paste can be evil!). If you are reusing someone elses material then make sure you have all of the supporting prerequisites. There was a couple of labs that expected you to have access to the files that came with the lab on the web site. Check your software runs before you arrive. (Blend was crashing which an uninstall and reinstall took care off but could have been avoided in the middle of the workshop)

Over all I think the workshop went really well, I felt like I had given the class a good introduction to Silverlight and judging by the feedback, which was positive, I gave them value. With a few very minor tweeks I will improved the workshop and have it ready for the next delivery. My little part in spreading the Silverlight magic.

I got my iPhone just over a week ago. So far, I’m very impressed.
I’m actually posting to my blog from it right now using a free apps for wordpress.
Two things that you could say could be better. Battery life is great if you are just using it as a phone but if you use gps or apps a lot then the battery goes down almost visibly. Also iTunes is wifi only. Couldn’t believe that but I guess they did that to try to cut down traffic?
Favourite app would have to be shazam. It listens to music around the phone and then identifies the song and then tags it so you can download it later. It’s been very accurate so far! Also the corrective typing is also very good even words you type wrong seem to be guessing the word I meant about 80 or 90% of the time.
Do yourself a favour and check one out. The UI is amazing and raises the bar. Something that a UI guy like myself loves to see.
Well done Apple. No that doesn’t mean I’m going to buy a mac.

I had a problem today where I could not open my Linq to SQL file, it would give me an error message box, as well as the following error in the errorlist.

The custom tool ‘MSLinqToSQLGenerator’ failed.  Could not retrieve the current project.

A quick search turned up a thread here Msdn Forum which suggested that this command would fix the problem, and for me it did!

devenv /ResetSkipPkgs

I’m getting this error when I try to edit any of my resources in blend.

Exception: Error HRESULT E_FAIL has been returned from a call to a COM component. If I track down what the issue is I’ll update this post but if you have seen it and know what the fix is, please comment. I suspect it is something to do with the way the new visual state manager is handling my converted styles, or dealing with my beta 1 controltemplate.

Update - I ended up recreating my style that was causing problems and then pasting the content into the control template. problem went away. My side comment here is that boy, the Silverlight error messages are pretty cryptic.

As I mentioned in my previous post, there were some breaking changes in Silverlight Beta 2.

Also of interest, part of your agreement in using Silverlight beta means that you have seven days to update any Beta 1 sites to Beta 2. It’s in the fine print (somewhere?) but I found it from one of my many Silverlight blogs I’m reading.

Anyway, here’s some more fixes I had to make to upgrade.

VisibilityProperty = DependencyProperty.Register(“Visibility”, typeof(Visibility), typeof(Progress), OnVisibilityChangedCallback);

became

VisibilityProperty = DependencyProperty.Register(“Visibility”, typeof (Visibility), typeof (Progress), new PropertyMetadata(OnVisibilityChangedCallback));

Also, now that we have PropertyMetaData we should also have the ability to set the default value on a DependencyProperty, but alas it does not seem to be implemented. In WPF the PropertyMetaData has a DefaultValue property which can be used to set the default value of the property. I guess in Silverlight this has to be set in the constructor where you are using the property.

Tooltips have changed.

The gridsplitter control has been moved into the Controls.Extended dll so if you use that control you will need to add a reference to your project and add it to your Xaml file like so;

xmlns:ControlsExtended=“clr-namespace:System.Windows.Controls;assembly=System.Windows.Controls.Extended”

<ControlsExtended:GridSplitter x:Name=“pageSplitter” Grid.Column=“0″ Width=“3″ />

I’ve noticed I’ve had to change some SetValues on dependency properties to the correct datatype. For example, I had to make sure that I passed in a double whereas in Beta 1 I could pass in an Integer and it was converted into a double for me.

page.SetValue(Canvas.LeftProperty, 0);

page.SetValue(Canvas.TopProperty, 0);

// Had to be changed into 

page.SetValue(Canvas.LeftProperty, 0.0);

page.SetValue(Canvas.TopProperty, 0.0);

That’s it… not too many errors really, and mostly changing strings into types to bring things a little closer to WPF

Something nice that I have just noticed, when you are debugging a Silverlight application and you click the break/stop debugging button IE (beta 8.) used to recover the IE session for you. In Beta 2 this seems to have been fixed, when you break the app, it closes the window gracefully and returns you to edit mode.

With the release of Silverlight 2 beta 2, I thought I’d blog the things I have noticed with the upgrade from Beta 1.

Breaking changes:

After installing the new version I have noticed there are some breaking changes with the project I’m currently working on. It doesn’t seem serious, mainly changes to parameters to some Silverlight methods.

Storyboard.SetTargetProperty(animation, "Opacity");

had to be changed to:

Storyboard.SetTargetProperty(animation, new PropertyPath("Opacity"));

Interestingly Visual Studio 2008 gave me compile errors for the above line but entering code as per the documentation still did not compile.  I saved my changes and restarted Visual Studio and then it was happy. I’m not sure what caused that, possibly a change it made when I opened the project first time after upgrading required a restart?

I’m still going through the compile errors from the upgrade (only a handful) so I’ll make another post once I’ve fixed them and have a bit more time.

I also got told off by my wife for working on the weekend. hehehe… I guess from her perspective it all looks the same.

Update: Breaking Changes between Beta 1 and Beta 2 - given the number of things that have broken, here’s a great resource for converting your code from Beta 1 to Beta 2. I’ve found a couple of posts so far with changes people have come across already. The main points I’ve noticed are you have to rebuild even if you don’t have any broken code. Beta 2 won’t run Beta 1 compiled code. fair enough. Also you will need to change the version in your html file (if you are using a html file to host your Silverlight app.) The new html template has some extra error handling so might be an idea to create a new html file.

Here is a list of tools that I am currently using (some of which I can’t do without).

• Adobe Photoshop Elements
• Beyond Compare - The file compare, folder compare and remote directory compare utility
• Expression Encoder 2
• Expression Blend 2
• Expression Design 2
• Expression Web 2
• FileZilla - The free FTP solution
• Gtalk
• Xilisoft - iPod Tools
• MSN Messenger
• ESET Smart Security (Antivirus)
• Nvidia Drivers
• Office 2007 Ultimate
• Treesize Professional - Powerful Graphical Disk Space Manager
• Skype
• TortoiseSVN
• uTorrent - Lightweight and Efficient BitTorrent Client
• Vault - Version Control tool
• Vista Ultimate x64
• Visual Studio 2008
• Windows Home Server Connector
• Windows Mobile Centre
• WinZip - Zip File Utility for Windows

I’ll update this list as I come across things I’ve forgotten about

I bought a new Silverlight book this week. Well, half of one anyway.

I was stunned when I opened the book and flicked through the book. Half of the book (and I mean that literally) was blank pages. There was that brief WTF moment until I read the back of the book a little more closely. Oh, I see… I have to download and print the upates. I guess that’s what you get when you are using bleeding edge software that is still in beta.

It was somewhat annoying to find that there was already an update available. I could download it and print it out or order the update (and pay more in postage than the update costs). Surely they could have included the printed update with the book? The new update was 84 or so replacement pages which included two new chapters. They also plan to release another update with the Silverlight RTM and one when it is released.

I guess that’s one way to beat all the other Silverlight books to print! All of the other Silverlight books you can pre-order are still a few months away.

Anyway here are some pics…

Cover page

Blank pages left over after I printed the update

How to update your book instructions

The old pages. I’ll keep them just for reference.

Reminds me of back in my Navy days when we used to get technical updates in this form. I’d have to replace each page with the new version. This isn’t a new thing but it kind of took me by surprise.

Oh, while I think of it, it’s not all bad news. The book contents are actually pretty good.

Well, once again I struggle to keep my cartoons separate from my coding. hehe

Tonight I had some fun with Expression Design (you’d think I’d have enough after 12 hours of coding but no, apparently I can’t get enough of this stuff.)

I’m going to have a shot at embedding my Silverlight app into this blog page. My first try but I’ve seen it done on other blogs. (It always takes me by surprise, I’m expecting images not fully functioning Silverlight apps!)

Update: Here’s the html I ended up using to embed my Silverlight app in the blog page. Note the ending is needed for Wordpress blogs. Thanks go to Tim Sneath for his post here

<iframe src="http://www.lythixdesigns.com/quokka/quokka.html" frameborder="0" width="400" height="450" scrolling="no"></iframe>