Tafiti Beta

Tafiti is an amazing Silverlight user interface on Windows Live Search services. Check it out!!!

Developing Windows Sidebar Gadgets: Design Guidelines

Here you can find a preliminary documentation containing all the design guidelines for developing Gadgets for Windows Vista Sidebar.
What are Gadgets? Well,

• Gadgets are applications giving users fast access to personally relevant information and simple tasks.
• Gadgets are visually attractive and optimized to do a single task very well!!!
• Gadgets are normally hosted in the Sidebar, which is a region on the side of the desktop. Besides being attached to, or docked, in the Sidebar, gadgets can also be detached from the Sidebar to float anywhere on the desktop. A gadget can be bigger in its floating state than in its docked state.
• Gadgets are part of the desktop, like the Start button, taskbar, and notification area. Unlike normal windows, they aren’t represented with a taskbar button.
• Gadgets can have flyouts that temporarily show more information. Flyouts are displayed by clicking the gadget, and dismissed by clicking anywhere outside the flyout. You can use flyouts in both the docked and floating states.
• Finally, gadgets can have an options dialog box for settings and customization.

How to create an ASP.NET 3.5 and Silverlight-enabled demo application

Steve Marx has recorded a 15 minute screencast to give you an idea of what’s possible with all the new ASP.NET 3.5 and SilverLight releases that came out last week.

Highlights:

• Searching and paging via ListView, DataPager, and LinqDataSource (all new ASP.NET controls with .NET 3.5).
• Video player via the Media control in the ASP.NET Futures July CTP (uses Silverlight 1.0 RC).
• Popup biographies and “more/less” collapsible details via the new .NET 3.5-compatible drop of the AJAX Control Toolkit.
• Back/forward buttons support via the History control in the ASP.NET Futures July CTP.

Resources:

• Video
• Code

SQL Internals Viewer 0.9 beta

I’d like to link a very useful tool for looking into the SQL Server storage engine and seeing how data is physically allocated, organised and stored: SQL Internals Viewer.
The features currently implemented regard allocation (GAM, SGAM, IAM), page viewing and SQL editing. You can download it here.
Very Cool!!!

Extension Methods in C#

An interesting feature of the .NET Framework 3.5 is that any set of methods available on an instance of a particular type is open to extension. Effectively, adding new methods to existing types is now possible.By using extension methods, we can declare static methods that can be invoked using the instance method syntax. In order to declare an extension method we must specify the keyword this as the first parameter of the static method.
Let’s show an example:

1. We have a Customer class, which needs of another method “Logout”:
 
2. Instead of using an inherited class, we add the “Logout” method to our Customer class by declaring a static method which can be invoked directly in any Customer class instance.

3. Finally, in our code we can invoke our “Logout” extension method in this way:

When extension methods are consumed, the argument that was declared with the keyword this is not passed, while all other arguments will be passed and seen by intellisense.  So, the first argument in the declaration (keyword this) allows the compiler to determine the class instances on which the extension method is called.
Remember that extension methods, though declared as static, can be called only on instances values!!!