Andrej Tozon's blog

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NT Konferenca 2010 – Where you’ll find me

This year’s NT Konferenca is starting next week! Organized by local Microsoft, it will be held (for the 15th year in a row!) in beautiful Portoroz (Slovenia), that’s now become a traditional venue for this event. Over 130 sessions, labs and seminars will be delivered by over 130 speakers in only four days – that’s a lot of content.

I’ll be speaking (and discusing things) on the following conference sessions:

Tuesday, 25th

10:15 – 11:30 Silverlight and MEF
11:45 – 12:30 ASP.NET, WebForms, Silverlight – What to choose? [BoF session, co-hosting with @dusanzu]

Wednesday, 26th

10:15 – 11:30 Silverlight and WCF RIA Services
11:45 – 12:30 Tips & Tricks: Expression Blend For Developers [Tips & Tricks session, co-presenting with @krofdrakula]
13:30 – 14:15 What’s new in Silverlight 4?
16:30 – 17:30 MVP Panel [A panel discussion with all Slovenian MVPs]

See any theme/pattern here? ;)

You can follow me and my whereabouts next week through twitter [@andrejt], with the official conference hashtag being #ntk10.

See you next week…



NT Konferenca 2010 – Where you’ll find me

This year’s NT Konferenca is starting next week! Organized by local Microsoft, it will be held (for the 15th year in a row!) in beautiful Portoroz (Slovenia), that’s now become a traditional venue for this event. Over 130 sessions, labs and seminars will be delivered by over 130 speakers in only four days – that’s a lot of content.

I’ll be speaking (and discusing things) on the following conference sessions:

Tuesday, 25th

10:15 – 11:30 Silverlight and MEF
11:45 – 12:30 ASP.NET, WebForms, Silverlight – What to choose? [BoF session, co-hosting with @dusanzu]

Wednesday, 26th

10:15 – 11:30 Silverlight and WCF RIA Services
11:45 – 12:30 Tips & Tricks: Expression Blend For Developers [Tips & Tricks session, co-presenting with @krofdrakula]
13:30 – 14:15 What’s new in Silverlight 4?
16:30 – 17:30 MVP Panel [A panel discussion with all Slovenian MVPs]

See any theme/pattern here? ;)

You can follow me and my whereabouts next week through twitter [@andrejt], with the official conference hashtag being #ntk10.

See you next week…



SilverlightShow Eco Contest

SilverlightShow.net is running a SilverlightShow Eco Contest! Write a Silverlight-based application that helps support and promote environment-friendly activities, and you can win great prizes, including a trip to MIX10 event in Las Vegas (MIX10 pass, 3-night hotel stay at Mandalay Bay Hotel and 1,000 USD for travel expenses included).

Read official rules here. But hurry, the contest ends on February 15th, 2010.



This blog’s address changed

I broke most of the external referrals to my blog posts when moving to a new blog engine, so why not take this opportunity to change my blog’s address as well?

From now on, the official address of this blog is http://tozon.info/blog/ The old address will remain functional and I will do my best to catch and properly redirect all referring links to my blog posts that now end up in an error page.

The main RSS feed remains the same, again, thanks to FeedBurner.

Goodbye Community Server, hello BlogEngine.NET

I was thinking about switching this blog’s engine for some time now, mainly because I was stuck with Community Server 2007 (.NET 1.1!), not playing along with any further upgrades. Too much custom actions and customization, I guess. Meanwhile, Community Server went mainstream and developed into a really big and complete community solution (blogs, forums, wikis, galleries, …), while I only needed a simple blog engine.

I became more alert about the BlogEngine.NET after our local MS DPE’s set up their blogging site. Loving its simplicity and responsiveness, the idea of migrating to a new engine was becoming stronger by the day, until I gave in and gave it a try. Note: the root of all evil lied in the fact that my blog is hosted on my hosting provider servers with limited access and other options. 

The setup couldn’t be easier – copy the files. The tricky part was migrating the data. Hopefully, others have been on the same path before me (here and here), so I just had to adapt those sql scripts a little and get rid of all the spam, which found its way into my database through all these years. The new database is currently 20x smaller than the old one, which sure sounds good too.

I’m not completely saying goodbye to Community Server though. SLODUG, SLOWUG and Spletomanija communities will continue to run on Community Server, which fits perfectly for the job.

Also of interest: BlogEngine.NET is a part of Sueetie.

And yes, I’ll do some work on this site’s visuals…

Integrating Silverlight with Community Server 2008.5

I’m sure Telligent will fully enable Silverlight parts into future Community Server releases, but until then, a couple of tricks are needed to make Silverlight play well with CS. The following points were made with Community Server 2008.5 release.

Include Silverlight apps in posts

The common way to include Silverlight in CS posts is by using HTML iframes. CS is blocking this tag by default so you have to edit communityserver.config file and enable it. Look for the <Markup> tag and go to the <Html> section within it. Add the iframe line somewhere to that section:

<iframe src = "true" frameborder = "true" width = "true" height = "true" />

Only attributes with values set to “true” will be allowed so don’t forget to add the attributes you plan to set on an iframe.

Next, upload the Silverlight app to a web site folder. The files to upload are usually the application’s [app].html (host page), [app].xap (application) and Silverlight.js (JavaScript helper library). Make sure that the uploaded .html file is accessible through the web and the app is working.

The last step is an easy one. Insert the iframe in your post wherever you want to put your Silverlight application. You’ll most commonly do that when editing posts in Html view. I usually put another div tag around an iframe:

<div style="width:100%;height:200px">
  <iframe src="/silverlight/app.html" frameborder="0" width="100%" height="200" />
</div>

Putting Silverlight into CS master page

This one requires some more manual work, but you can use CS’s master page’s system to control where you want to include Silverlight. As I needed to have Silverlight-enabled on all pages, I picked the Master.master file. I also used a different approach for embedding Silverlight – instead of iframe, I used a new Silverlight ASP.NET control, which makes things much easier. You’ll get this control in your toolbox once you install Silverlight SDK. This approach, however, will require you to “upgrade” your web.config to target .NET Framework 3.5. You can either do this manually by copying all the missing sections and other entries into it or by opening the site with Visual Studio 2008 – Visual Studio usually prompts for this kind of upgrade when opening ASP.NET 2.0 projects. You should also add the following reference line into the pages/controls section to make Silverlight possible on every page:

<add assembly="System.Web.Silverlight" namespace="System.Web.UI.SilverlightControls" tagPrefix="asp" />

My edit of Master.master file now looks like this:

... <div id="CommonHeader"> <asp:ScriptManager ID="ScriptManager1" runat="server" /> <asp:Silverlight ID="sl" runat="server" Source="/Silverlight/banner.xap"
Height="100%" Width="100%" Windowless="true" />
<div class="Common"> ...

[inserted lines bold]

Because of the inserted Silverlight control, all existing header contents were pushed further down. To fix this, override affected elements’ CSS style. You’ll do this on the Control Panel | System Administration | Site Administration | Site Theme | Custom Styles (Advanced) page. Just enter the overrides:

#CommonHeaderTitleArea
{
    position: relative;
    top: -113px;
}
#CommonHeaderUserArea
{
    position: relative;
    top: -113px;
}

[Note: my header has its height set to default – 113px, so I had to push it (-)113px up. Change this value according to your header height.

These were just very quick (and dirty) fixes to enable Silverlight in your CS2008.5 site until Silverlight gets native support in Community Site. I’ll most likely be putting even more Silverlight into my CS so I may update this post with even more tips.

SLODUG is expanding

While SLODUG web site is waiting for its facelift, all Facebook users are kindly invited to join SLODUG group over there. And if you're not familiar with the Facebook yet - it's fun. There's all sorts of stuff going on, you can do craziest things possible, and all your friends are invited to participate. You can share and compare your movie taste, find a perfect date, even play your favorite ZX Spectrum game and beat your friend's high score. But beware, you might as well find yourself chased by zombies or bitten by a vampire. Curious place, it is.

And SLODUG is now part of it.

Tick, tock... Silverlight Challenge: one week left

Just a quick reminder: 1st European Silverlight Challenge is entering the finishing line. As announced, the competition ends next Monday, which still gives you plenty of time to polish your applications and give them some finishing touches. When ready, don't forget to submit your app on local competition site (click here for Slovenian site). Note: you'll have to register and log in first to submit your entry.

Starting today, Silverlight v1.0 is also available through Windows Update, as an optional update.

Wait, there's more... also available through Windows Update from today, are updates for all Expression products, including service packs.

Just keep 'em coming...

Let Silverlight shine on YOU!

Join developers all around Europe in the ultimate Silverlight Challenge. Yes, the 1st European Silverlight Challenge is on and Slovenia is one of the many countries participating. For more information  head over to Slovenian and European competition site, read the official rules and start your Visual Studio. Also, feel free to discuss the Challenge and Silverlight on SLODUG's forums.

1st European Silverlight Challenge ends on January 28th, 2008. The spotlight is on you!

Slides from my WPF talks

This is the PowerPoint presentation [in Slovenian language] from my WPF talks I did yesterday and two weeks ago. This was my first time delivering full-day courses and not everything went as originally planned. The first talk suffered from some technical difficulties and classic demos trouble, and for the yesterday, some evil virus got me so there were some fever/sore throat issues, leaving me powerless at the end.

Anyway, I'm not posting any sample code this time, instead I'll be writing some more blog posts on the subject, OK?