Presentation - Canberra User Group - LINQ to SQL and WCF

Yesterday I presented in an unusually cold Canberra. The topic was using LINQ to SQL with WCF in a three tiered architecture.

There was a lunchtime session at King O’Malley’s Irish Pub followed by an evening session at Microsoft Canberra.

A big thank you to Adam Cogan and Justin King for accompanying me to Canberra and proving useful feedback. Also a big thank you to those who attended the seesions for the interesting view point and discussions we had on the topic.

Resources

• Slide deck
• Solution Files
• Northwind sample database

Silverlight Slide Show

Justin King pointed me to a Silverlight slide show control a while back and I decided to give it a whirl and implement it own my own site’s photos section.

The control is called Slide.Show and is made by the guys at Vertigo.

The configuration and setup itself was not too difficult, as long as you follow the Quick Start Guide. I pointed the control to my Flickr account by adding a data section in the Configuration.xml file

<configuration width=”757” height=”548” background=”Silver”>
	<modules>
 		<module type=”SlideViewer” ></module> 
		<module type=”ProgressBar” ></module> 
		<module type=”SlideDescription” ></module> 
		<module type=”NavigationTray”> 
			<option name=”thumbnailViewer.left” value=”83” ></option> 
		</module>
 	</modules>
 	<transitions>
 		<transition type=”FadeTransition” name=”CrossFadeTransition” ></transition> 
		<transition type=”WipeTransition” name=”WipeRightTransition”> 
			<option name=”direction” value=”Right” ></option> 
		</transition>
 	</transitions>
 	<dataProvider type=”FlickrDataProvider”> 
		<option name=”userName” value=”ericphan.info” ></option>   
	</dataProvider>
  </configuration> 

I did hit one snag though, and that’s a combination of Firefox 3 and Silverlight that many other users were experiencing too. Basically what was happening was that I had Silverlight 2 Beta installed and this control was a Silverlight 1 control and did not render and prompted you to download Silverlight 1 again.

The issue here is because the detection script bundled in Silverlight 1 had an issue with Firefox 3. To resolve the issue you need to replace your Silverlight.js file with the updated one provided on the Microsoft Silverlight.js code page.

After replacing the Silverlight.js file the control renders fine in Firefox 3 with the fullscreen button not working under Vista. It works fine under Firefox 3 and OSX.

Concise Code - Does it make things hard to read?

I was using Resharper 4 and noticed some nice code cleanup advise that it gives. One to note it the compression of:

// Create job if quote is won
if (CurrentQuote.Status == "A")
{
    quoteView.FindControl("btnCreateJobCard").Visible = true;
}
else
{
    quoteView.FindControl("btnCreateJobCard").Visible = false;
}

To the one liner (which I prefer)

// Create job if quote is won
quoteView.FindControl("btnCreateJobCard").Visible = CurrentQuote.Status == "A";

I like short succinct code. I think the shortened form is better, but I know some people need to do a double take to see what it’s trying to do.

I would love to hear your opinions on this.