Silverlight 2 with Expression Blend

If you want to bring up Silverlight 2 project in Expression Blend 2 you need the Expression Blend 2.0 SP1 otherwise the "UserControl" is not supported. Download both Expression Blend 2 and Expression Blend 2 Service Pack1.

With the SP1 installed Version 2.1.1760.0, I can open the project in EB2 and build (& run) the project from the Project menu item.

SuperPreview, a good web developer tool to have

Microsoft's SuperPreview (March 19 ) for IE is a nice tool to have. Developing web pages for multiple web browsers is a pain. This pain is real because often you need to have separate machines, since a new browser installaiton takes out an earlier version. Microsoft itself has so many versions besides the multitude of other versions for web and mobile, that a tool like this in a web shop will be more than a welcome addition.

You may download a beta version from here [https://www.microsoft.com/expression/try-it/superpreview/]. You can test how your web pages looks in several versions of IE (6,7,8) as well as Firefox and
Safari ( I did not see the Firefox and Safari in my download). Moreover this is will be part of the Expression Web. I suppose with this strategy Silverlight's cross-browser claims are verifiable at design time.

Well I downloaded and tried and it seems to have some bug (SuperBug!! kidding). I got this message even for the smallest html page 'Hello World' not to speak of a page from the internet (http://hodentek.blogspot.com). "Insufficient memory to continue the execution of the program". I did not see a tiny blip on my Task Manager during the execution.

Anyway here are some screen shots from the installation and test.

Silverlight 2 and the browsers

I have a Silverlight project I am working with.The ASPX page does not show up at all (no message at all) when browsed with Opera 9.1. On the rest of the browsers (IE8.0 RC1, Firefox , Google Chrome and Safari on WoS) the page function as intended.

The HTML page does show up on Opera but the click event does not get evaluated. On the others the page function as intended.

Another interesting thing was the 'background' attribute does not seem to be the same for all controls in XAML (I only tried three). The button seems to inherit color from quite a different source than the TextBox and the ListBox controls as you see in this rendered page. The elements are Button, Textbox and ListBox top to bottom. The first figure is when the page is displayed (HTML or ASPX) and the second figure is after the button click event. All controls have the same background(color) BlueViolet

IE 8.0 RC1 does not render the 'Web Slice' inside 'iframe'

I was testing a previously formatted web page to display the
web slice rendered inside a <iframe/>

Where as "This_has_slice.htm" would render the "slice" as it should.

This one does not,
<iframe src="This_has_slice.htm"></iframe>

You may want to read this article for reference,
http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2009/02/how-to-add-web-slice-to-your-page.html

Data Access with ADO.NET Data Services

ADO.NET Data Services leverages the ADO.NET Entity Framework to build data services for relational data sources. These include support for MySQL, DB2, and Oracle in addition to MS SQL Server. It can also be used with non-relational data using an add-on provider model. With ADO.NET Data Services, the developers can build dynamic internet applications (AJAX, Silverlight, etc) that works across intranets as well as the internet. With this in place data access by applications is made possible using URI Syntax and using HTTP verbs operating on the data.

In the following article I describe the details of creating such a service using the familiar Northwind database.

Data Access with ADO.NET Data Services