Ronan Geraghty's Blog

Silverlight now on Ryanair.com

Yesterday Ryanair.com went live with a new destinations map which uses Silverlight to map all its destinations and routes.

(For those of you who may not have heard of Ryanair, they are Europe's largest low fares carrier, with more than 700 routes across 26 European countries).

You can access the map via the DESTINATIONS link on the Ryanair.com homepage.

Be sure to try all the zooming, panning functionality, and of course because it's Silverlight it's cross browser and cross platform. Browsers / OS's I've tried include IE 6, IE 7, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Safari and Windows XP, Windows Vista and Mac OS X.

This is a great use of Silverlight, completed by local company iPLANIT in conjunction with Ryanair and the Microsoft Ireland DPE team. Martha and Cormac were involved from the start and I got involved in the last couple of weeks - it's done wonders for my geography, I never knew Ryanair had so many routes! If you have any feedback on the map I'd love to hear it.

Firefox 3 and Silverlight

I've been doing some work with Silverlight over the last couple of weeks and ran into this question yesterday (specifically re. SL 1.0). The issue arose since Firefox 3 came out after Silverlight 1.0 and is related to silverlight detection, meaning that Firefox 3 wouldn’t pick up on the Silverlight installation. There is a new version of Silverlight.js available now which has some changes to the isInstalled method to cover the FireFox 3 scenario.

 You can see the old behavior by looking at http://timheuer.com/ff3oldscript in FF 3. Note that it doesn’t pick up the SL installation. 

You can check FF 3 against a silverlight app that has the fix applied by going to http://timheuer.com/ff3newscript/ - this demonstrates the effect the change to Silverlight.js has had, i.e. the app is available as normal. The installation experience for a FF user on a machine without Silverlight installed is pretty smooth too (the page refreshed post-intallation and voila).

Tim Heuer has posted more detail about this on his blog at:

http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2008/07/02/updating-your-silverlight-javascript-detection.aspx

and

http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2008/06/17/silverlight-and-firefox-3-updates.aspx

The exec summary is that the latest Silverlight SDK includes an updated Silverlight.js file with the necessary fixes in script detection that works with FF3.  You don't have to immediately upgrade Silverlight 1.0 applications to Silverlight 2, but the update is in the Silverlight 2 SDK.

Composite Application Guidance for WPF now available

Patterns & Practices have just released guidance to help you more easily build enterprise-level Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) client applications. This guidance will help you design and build flexible composite WPF client applications—composite applications use loosely coupled, independently evolvable pieces that work together in the overall application.

Using the guidance streamlines the WPF team development experience. You can build solutions that take advantage of the full power of WPF and that are highly maintainable, testable, and whose pieces can be developed by separate teams.

The following technical challenges are addressed:

Modularity: The Composite Application Library promotes modularity by allowing you to implement business logic, visual components, infrastructure components, presenter or controller components, and any other objects the application requires, in separate modules. Developers can easily create the UI and implement business logic independently of each other.

User Interface Composition: The Composite Application Library promotes user interface composition by allowing you to implement visual components from various loosely coupled visual components, known as views, which may reside in separate modules. The visual components may display content from multiple back-end systems. To the user, it appears as one seamless application.

June 2008 Release

   Resources

·          MSDN site: http://msdn.microsoft.com/compositewpf

           (use http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc707819.aspx for now)

·          Community site: http://www/codeplex.com/compositewpf

New ASP.NET SQL Injection Defense Tools

If you're doing ASP.NET development then you need to check these tools out. As per this security bulletin there has been a recent rise in SQL injection attacks, exploiting vulnerabilities in sites that do not follow best practice.

So here's what you need to do:

1. Understand recent trends in SQL injection
2. Check out the guidance from the SDL blog on SQL-injection defense techniques and also on
MSDN
3. Use two new tools from Microsoft to a) analyse your code and b) filter suspicious requests
1. Microsoft Source Code Analyzer for SQL Injection (MSCASI).
2. URLScan 3.0
4. Also check out Scrawlr from the HP Security Laboratory (I like the cartoon on that page!) in conjunction with Microsoft

There's a forum for MSCASI at http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=92&SiteID=1 

In short, if you're doing ASP.NET development, check your code and make sure you:

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 publicly available this week

Hot off the press from TechEd US, Silverlight Beta 2 will be available this week. Check out below for a summary of some features, but perhaps most interesting is that Silverlight 2 Beta 2 comes with a commercial go-live license!

· UI Framework: Beta 2 includes improvements in animation support, error handling and reporting, automation and accessibility support, keyboard input support, and general performance.  This release also provides more compatibility between Silverlight and WPF.

· Rich Controls: Beta 2 includes a new templating model called Visual State Manager that allows for easier templating for controls. Other features include the introduction of TabControl, text wrapping and scrollbars for TextBox, and for DataGrid additions include Autosize, Reorder, Sort, performance increases and more.  Most controls are now in the runtime instead of packaged with the application.

· Networking Support: Beta 2 includes improved Cross Domain support and security enhancements, upload support for WebClient, and duplex communications (“push” from server to Silverlight client).

· Rich Base Class Library: Beta 2 includes improved threading abilities, LINQ-to-JSON, ADO.NET Data Services support, better support for SOAP, and various other improvements to make networking and data handling easier.

· Deep Zoom: Beta 2 introduces a new XML-based file format for Deep Zoom image tiles, as well as a new MultiScaleTileSource that enables existing tile databases to utilize Deep Zoom. Better, event driven notification for zoom/pan state is another improvement in Silverlight 2 Beta 2. 

Teach yourself how to develop on Sharepoint

This is a great site for developers who want to get up to speed with developing for Sharepoint. You can download a ready-to-go VPC or just take some Virtual Labs to take hands-on exercises via your browser. Here's a snapshot of the available topics:

There's a ton of useful material here to self-train, including webcasts, screencasts, presentations, demos, whitepapers and the full HOL download so you can use the HOLs on your own machine.

Microsoft SLPS Case Study featuring Softedge Systems (Ireland-based ISV)

I recently blogged about SLPS and am delighted to highlight a case study featuring a local ISV - Softedge Systems.

Softedge Systems flagship product, DocsAlive 2007, is a multimedia content-creation tool built on the 2007 Microsoft® Office system. DocsAlive is also certified on Windows Vista. .

Softedge Systems is using SLP License Designer to manage trial versions and activations. “The flexibility of licensing is the most important feature,” says Vikas Sahni, CEO Softedge Systems. “We can control the behavior of each individual license key and easily modify those behaviors without touching the code—we just log on to the server and change the key.”

Sahni adds, “Another benefit of SLP Services is being able to track customer usage—trial copies, downloads, and activations. We now have visibility into how many copies of DocsAlive are out there, where they are, and how they’re being used.”

You can read the full case study here

Difficulty accessing MSDN downloads

It has been brought to our attention that some Partners have recently experienced difficulties in accessing their MSDN Downloads.  This was due to a system change - affected users will need to re-associate their Live ID to their subscription to re-access MSDN Download.

ACTION: Partners if you have been experiencing difficulties in accessing your MSDN Download please click here and fill in the required fields.  Once your information has been processed access will be re-instated.

If you're based in Ireland / Northern Ireland have any queries in relation to this please feel free to contact us or the MSDN support team on 1800 88 21 95 choosing option 3.

We apologise for any inconvenience that this may have caused.

PDC 2008 goes live

The PDC 2008 site is live as of today - PDC will provide an indepth understanding of Microsoft’s future platform and offer practical guidance to help plan the evolution of your own products. To get a flavour of what to expect, check out the preliminary list of representative sessions that only hints at the 160+ sessions to be covered at PDC2008. Initial topics include software plus services, Windows 7, Windows Mobile, a deep dive on Silverlight and its graphics pipelines, how we architected and built SQL Server Data Services for scale, building for Live Mesh, the future of our developer tools, and lessons learned by running Team Foundation Server inside Microsoft (where we have over 33 million files!). And we’ll do it all PDC-style: so deeply technical that your brain will hurt. Based on your feedback, we’re including more 400-level, deep technical content this year. We’ll also have hands-on labs where you can work directly with our latest bits.

· Microsoft PDC on

· Stay connected to PDC via

· Post and explore PDC2008 images on

· Follow PDC2008 news on the PDC blog

Enterprise Library 4.0 Released

Enterprise Library is a collection of reusable software components (application blocks) designed to assist software developers with common enterprise development challenges (such as logging, validation, caching, exception handling, and many others). Application blocks are a type of guidance encapsulating Microsoft recommended development practices; they are provided as source code plus documentation that can be used "as is," extended, or modified by developers to use on complex, enterprise-level line-of-business development projects.

What's New in v4.0?

This release of Enterprise Library includes the following:

– Integration with the Unity Application Block

– Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) 2.0 support and improved instrumentation

– Performance improvements (particularly, in the Logging Application Block)

– Pluggable Cache Managers

– Visual Studio 2008 support

– Bug fixes

Note: existing public APIs (v3.1) are still supported.

The Application Block Software Factory and the Strong Naming Guidance Package are not included in this release but are available as a separate download. Thus, there is no longer a dependency on Guidance Automation Extensions (GAX).

For the detailed list of all changes, see About This Release of Enterprise Library.

If you are new to the Enterprise Library:

− read the Introduction to the Enterprise Library;

− download, compile and run the QuickStart samples—study the code;

− read through the related QuickStart Walkthroughs and “Key Scenarios” sections of the documentation;

− practice the Hands-On Labs;

− join the webcast in June 2008 (the exact date will be announced on the Enterprise Library landing page).

If you already know and love the Enterprise Library:

− check out the change log for this release;

− upgrade to V4.0—no code change is required—simply update the references to the corresponding application block assemblies and to the common assemblies;

− download the updated QuickStarts and run through the Unity-integrated examples to get the flavor of new dependency injection style of using the Enterprise Library;

− join the webcast in June 2008 (the exact date will be announced on the Enterprise Library landing page).

Developing ISV Applications using Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

If you need to learn about Architecture, Deployment and Operations essentials of Dynamics CRM then I think you'll find this white paper very useful. It gives a good overview of the platform capabilities and the opportunities for ISVs to plug-in to the platform, your options for deployment (on-premise/partner-hosted/Dynamics CRM Online) and finally data analysis capabilities

You can learn more about building on the platform at http://www.innovateonmicrosoftdynamics.com and if you work for an ISV in Ireland / Northern Ireland contact me me for some other great (and free) resources.

Popfly Game Creator

Popfly Game Creator is now in Alpha ... all you need to do is log in and you can start creating games either from scratch or else based on a template, without needing to write any code.  Since the game is a Silverlight app it will run in your web browser, on Facebook or just embedded in your blog (as I've done below with the Save The City sample game.

You can find out more at http://popflywiki.com/GameCreatorMain.ashx 

Protect your .NET code with SLPS

Want to protect your .NET code from reverse engineering?

Obfuscation is better than nothing, but it doesn't go far enough.

Encryption? Well the encrypted MSIL has to be decrypted before the CLR can handle it, meaning there's an opportunity for a hacker to obtain the key.

Code splitting, where you deliver sensitive parts of your application on external hardware such as a smart card or a dongle offers a higher level of protection, but it has disadvantages (expense, inconvenience and not least pushing out updates or patches!).

Software Licensing and Protection Services can help you protect, package, license, sell and control your software.

To protect your IP you can select certain functionality for one-way transformation, and this transformed code runs within a secure virtual machine (SVM), with each vendor receiving a unique SVM as shown below:

In a nutshell, your transformed code remains permanently unreadable. Check out the below video for more details, plus an overview of the licensing and activation functionality which gives you feature-level control/activation. Nice!

Bird's eye view on Live Maps : Dublin, Cork, Galway and others...

Check out Windows Live Maps where you can now zoom in to Birds' eye views of

· Dublin

· Carlow

· Cork

· Galway

· Limerick

· Navan

· Wexford

The level of detail is very impressive For example, here's Microsoft Building 3 (Atrium B) (be sure to select Bird's eye view). To see it in action, take a look at the below video:

CSI:NY using Photosynth

If you watch any of the flavours of CSI you'll probably get a kick out of this article which describes how the show's forensic scientists attempt to recreate a crime scene using hundreds of photos taken from a camera phone. The technology used to stitch them together? Photosynth.

What about using geospatial data types in SQL 2008 to map out all the crime scenes and overlay them on Virtual Earth, a la:

Or maybe Mapcruncher to overlay an aerial view with custom info? Or...? Could be fun ideas to play around with, maybe I'll give it a whirl...