MCS UK Solution Development Team

So, you’ve cracked open your shiny new Visual Studio 2010, and you would like to build and roll out an add-in for Outlook 2010 (we’re using Outlook here, but most of the principals apply to Word and Excel also)? In this post (part 1), I’ll...

I spend a lot of my time analysing the performance of web sites and tuning the applications to make the sites run more efficiently and scale better. Over time I’ve pulled together a checklist of some of the more common performance issues that I see and...

In the first part of this series , we went through the steps to create a simple Outlook 2010 add-in, how to build a custom ribbon, and finally the backstage area. But what use is your add-in unless other people can use it too? In part 2, we will look...

After further experimenting with the Kinect SDK, it became obvious what needed to come next. If you were to create an application using the Kinect SDK, you will want to be able to control the application using gestures (i.e. waving, swiping, motions to...

Background It is becoming more commonplace for the means of authenticating a user to be externalized away from the content provider. In federation parlance the content provider is known as the Relying Party (RP) and is so named because it is reliant...

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...

Along with the new features of .Net 4.0 (including the long awaited Tuple classes, BigInteger, extra Code Access Security stuff, and a brilliant new feature Code Contracts) is the dynamic keyword. This keyword is designed to allow better COM interoperability...

The Visual Studio ALM Rangers have just released a new version of the WCF Load Test tool. The tool has been maturing over the last 3 years and the occasion of a new release seems like a good time to post a walkthrough of how to use the tool. What Does...

Warning: WiX 3.5 is still under development, so you may encounter things that do not work with your specific build of WiX, this article is based on build 1602. When you are in a tightly controlled corporate environment it is not always possible to deploy...

When developing a solution using WPF or Silverlight, there are normally designers working in Blend and developers working with them in Visual Studio 2010. Often it is impractical for designers to use data from live systems (e.g. they don’t want to install...

I was recently talking to a customer about the possibility of moving a web site from Linux to Windows Azure . The hosting costs of the application are not excessive, and the customer is happy with the service received. Nevertheless they were very interested...

Pulling through specific web page content Recently I’ve been working on developing dashboard application for a team portal site in SharePoint 2010. As any familiar with dashboard design and development knows, you often find yourself pulling in various...

In this blog post I am going to walkthrough the steps required to secure a WCF service with ADFS 2.0, as well as how to call this service from a client. The aim of this article is to provide an outline of the general principals and steps, not to explain...

Rehosting the WF designer in an application outside of Visual Studio is nothing new and since WF4, nothing particularly difficult. In fact the WF product team has gone out of its way to make rehosting the designer as easy an experience as possible and...

So you’ve added an ApplicationBarIconButton to your Windows Phone 7 Silverlight page and you can’t get the icons to display. You’ve tried every path under the sun, pack uri’s, relative uri’s, checked the case everything – still no dice. You’ve put an...

In carousel and coverflow type controls, you often see a “reflection” type effect. This is normally done by transforming an image to mirror the original then applying an alpha gradient to this (i.e. progressively increasing the transparency...

In this article I will demonstrate how to write a token handler for a custom token in Windows Identity Foundation (WIF). The likely circumstances for requiring a new token type are: The token type is pre-existing and needs to be federated The new token...

In the previous post we saw how easy it is to get basic Relying Party (RP) and Identity Provider (IdP) websites up and running using a minimal amount of coding with Windows Identity Foundation (WIF). I now want to extend these examples. In this...

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...

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...

So, you’ve never made a game before for the Windows Phone 7 - you’ve opened up your brand new Visual Studio 2010, with the Windows Phone 7 developer tools; but you don’t know what to do, or how to get started. This is the situation that both myself (Michael...

This article is part of a series: Understanding and Using OData (1 of 4) OData Publication (2 of 4) Analysing OData Feeds (3 of 4) Creating a Windows Phone 7 OData Client Application (4 of 4) – This article Hopefully these articles will show you how to...

Transact-SQL includes a number of date and time functions that have values are derived from the operating system of the computer on which the instance of SQL Server is running. With SQL Azure these functions are all standardised on UTC (as you would expect...

The full code base for this posting can be located here . If you have used XAML at all, you will have used some of the built in layout panels such as Grid and StackPanel and if you are a developer you have probably developed a custom panel that implements...

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...