This blog post is going to explain what MEF is, the benefits of using MEF and then a walk through on how to implement it, followed by a screen shot demo. What is MEF? The Managed Extensibility Framework, otherwise known as MEF, is essentially a “.NET...

Overview This article will discuss the performance characteristics of the Silverlight DataGrid both standalone and in comparison with an HTML DataGrid with similar functionality. The project I was working on had a large ASP.NET DataGrid that was performing...

When working with Microsoft Word automation there is often the requirement to create documents from define templates. With the addition of the OpenXml specification it is now possible to do this safely within server side code. In a recent project I came...

Recently whilst working on a project I had the requirement to send an email from within Word, initiated from the Ribbon command, that contained the Word document as an attachment. Whilst sending an SMTP message was straight forward enough the challenge...

After installing Visual Studio 2010 on my Windows Server 2008 R2 box with BizTalk Server 2009 I got the following error when trying to deploy or access my BizTalk artefacts: "Could not retrieve transport type data for Receive Location 'ABC' from config...

As I get more and more familiar with the Azure platform, one thing that strikes me more than anything else is that Azure is is not an all or nothing thing. You can use the Azure platform as a component of your overall solution, or you can take advantage...

On a recent Silverlight project we had a requirement to be able to dynamically change the language of the site without refreshing the page. This ruled out the normal way of doing localisation using Resource files and meant we had to find away of binding...

Most agile methodologies have some way of analysing past behaviour, recording it for future reference, and modifying that behaviour for the betterment of the team dynamic. SCRUM uses something called a ‘retrospective’. This takes the form of a meeting...

Last November saw the release to web of the project I led for the 8 months previous. Eye On Earth is a portal to the masses of environmental data that the European Environment Agency collect. Initially launched in 2008 as ‘Water Watch’ our team have re...