Creating and using a Storyboard in code behind is a very simple process. In this example, I’m going to implement a custom Silverlight behavior using a dynamic Storyboard. My custom behavior is called WiggleBehavior and will wiggle any FrameworkElement you place it on. First I need to create my behavior and add some properties to it.

  public  class WiggleBehavior:Behavior<FrameworkElement>

    {

  static  int _randomSeed = DateTime.Now.Millisecond;

        Random _random;

        Storyboard _Storyboard;

  public WiggleBehavior()

        {

            SizeDelta = 0.2;

            RotationDelta = 2;

            DurationDelta = 2;

            DurationSec = 4;

        }

  public  double SizeDelta { get; set; }

  public  double RotationDelta { get; set; ...

Sitting taking notes at the second day Keynote. There is a lot of new stuff in Android OS 2.2 codename Froyo:

• Access to camera, accelerometer etc from within the browser
• JIT compiler, much higher performance
• Exchange integration (jag at RIM Blackberry there)
• Support for Flash (came with a lot of funny barbs and lots of applause)
• Push messaging, where intents can be messaged, for instance the user goes to Google Maps on one device, send a message to his phone and pulls up the same maps on the mobile device
• Very cool speech recognition, awesome ...

Falafel Software is attending the third annual Google IO in San Francisco. I am here with our CEO Lino Tadros, our Director of Training, Steve Trefethen, and also Scott Frolich.

So why are we here? Isn’t Falafel Software a .NET Consulting and Training company? There are two important things behind this visit:

• We need to stay current on what is happening in the industry, be it .NET or not, it would be foolish to think the world will not change when the only thing we are sure of is that change is constant. It is important to know what the ...

One of the new features introduced in C# and VB 4.0 is this daunting pair of words. What is generic covariance and contravariance? The short explanation is that this new feature allows the generic type parameters of interfaces and delegates to behave polymorphically as you would expect of an equivalent non-generic interface or delegate. For more details and examples, read on.

Definitions

When class A is more derived (inherits from) class B, class A is covariant of class B.

When class A is less derived (is the parent of) class B, class A is contravariant of class B.

Example Classes...

I have been working on a project in Silverlight that was, until recently, debugging under the Visual Studio .NET development server.  Recently we converted this application to be hosted by IIS 7 on our development environments.  Ever since then, I’ve been getting timeout errors whenever I debug the application and halt execution using breakpoints for more than a couple of minutes.  The error dialog that appears says “The web server process that was being debugged has been terminated by Internet Information Services (IIS).”

To solve this problem, I followed the advice given in the second half of the ...

On January 31st 2010, I wrote a blog expressing my opinion and reasoning behind rejecting the idea of having an iPad and predicting its imminent failure.

Well, believe it or not, I decided to buy one last week, as I am a tech junky – gotta have it – kind of guy.  I was going to keep it next to the TV to check emails, surf the web, read the newspaper at Starbucks, etc…

Well, I have to eat my words from the blog on January 31st, this device is AMAZING, I am “again” pretty impressed. 

For a company, “Apple”, ...

Capitola, CA – April 27th 2010 – Falafel Software is privileged to announce the addition of the “Software Heavy Hitter”,  Mr. Lance Bullock.  “Lance will be heading the Mobile division at Falafel Software to help our customers worldwide integrate their LOB applications with IPhone, Android and Windows Phone 7 platforms” said Lino Tadros, Falafel’s Chairman & CEO, “Lance and I have worked together in the past and it is a true privilege to be working with him again”

Lance has over 20 years’ experience leading teams, architecting, and developing enterprise-level solutions for some of the world’s largest corporations. Prior to ...

Capitola, CA – April 13 2010: Falafel Software Inc, a .NET consulting and training company specializing in Microsoft Silverlight, and Albert A. Webb Associates, a civil engineering and planning services firm, are pleased to announce the immediate availability of the WebbSTAR TM system.

WebbSTAR TM is a leading edge Special Tax and Assessment Resource system, developed on the new core set of technologies such as Silverlight 4, Windows Communication Foundation RIA Services and Microsoft ADO.NET Entity Framework 4.0.

“Our customer came to us looking to create a new Web based product, and we were early to adopt the fast evolving ...

This answer is easy to find once you realize it was the addition of a CaretBrush in a TextBox that started the blinking…but if you’ve just added in a bunch of Styles and Resources with dozens of additional properties, well, it could take a while.  Hopefully this post will help someone find the answer a little quicker.

Applying any StaticResource brush to the CaretBrush property of a regular TextBox in Silverlight 3 will apparently cause everything else using that StaticResource to blink with the caret blink.  Odd, very odd indeed!  The fix is easy, of course…just don’t re-use your caret ...

Capitola, CA March 25th 2010 – Today, Falafel software, renewed its GOLD Partner certification with Microsoft for the 7th year in a row.  Falafel is proud of its relationship with Microsoft over the years and very pleased with the advancements Microsoft has made in the Windows, Web and Mobile platforms.  Falafel will continue to support the Microsoft platform especially the .NET framework with all its derivatives, Winforms, ASP.NET, WPF, Silverlight, WCF, WF, OData, RIA and sleuth of other exciting technologies.  Falafel is also very excited about the new Windows 7 Phone Series and is already architecting and developing state of ...

Lino Tadros, Falafel software CEO, is excited to present this 2 hour session at the Bay.NET Usersgroup

When: Wednesday, 5/19/2010 at 6:30 PM

Where: Microsoft San Francisco Office, 835 Market Street, Suite 700 San Francisco

Register for the Free event HERE

Agenda:

• 6:00 doors open (pizza and drinks)
• 6:30 announcements
• 6:45 - 8:15 presentation
• 8:15 - 8:30 raffle

Hope to see you all there!

I am excited to record today with my dear friends Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell another episode of DotNetRocks!  I have been invited to be a guest on this show so many times over the years, but finally we were able to get a time where the 3 of us are not traveling :) something believe me is magical!

We will take about Technology, Microsoft, Telerik, Falafel, Silverlight, Phone 7, WCF, Monotouch, Android and a lot of other stuff, but the most important part will be the jokes and the tricks I was part of over the years with ...

Then check for the .xap extension in the list of MIME Types. If you don’t have it, you need to add it. Click on “Add…” in the Actions panel and fill in the info as follows.

Now restart IIS and you can serve ...

Got so excited at MIX 2010 in Las Vegas to see all the new cool toys for Windows Mobile 7, Silverlight 4, MVC 2, RIA, Blend 4, and so much more.  When they released the SDKs on Monday morning, I could not wait to get to the computer to start downloading and playing with the Phone Emulator and get some Silverlighting going on the phone.

Well, I had no idea that I will be faced with the longest 2 nights of my life :)  I had the VS 2010 RTM installed on the machine and all the new bits at ...

Have you tried to upgrade to GotoMeeting 4.5 from 4.0 or 4.1 and the upgrade was successful but no matter what you do the version number is still showing 4.0 or 4.1 ? even after shutting down GotoMeeting completely. Not even that, UNINSTALLING GotoMeeting from the machine and installing 4.5 still shows the same symptoms.  Very weird.

Well, if you have Outlook running, you probably have the Gotomeeting plugin installed already and Outlook won’t let go of its plugins.  Shutdown Outlook and do the install again.  You will be much happier that way :)

Falafel Software is happy to announce that we’ve recently published a new tool for importing lists of email addresses directly into Telerik’s Sitefinity CMS. If you’re looking to leverage Sitefinity’s built-in Newsletter capabilities but your customer list isn’t already there this tool can get going quickly. Easily import CSV files directly into your Sitefinity database and start sending Newsletters through Sitefinity’s rich CMS capabilities.

For more details checkout our video on using the tool available from the Sitefinity Marketplace here and from our store here for $29.95.

It was brought to my attention today that given the following setup:

  public  class BaseClass
    {
         public  override  string ToString()
        {
             return  "BaseClass";
        }
    }

     public  class SubClass : BaseClass
    {
         public  override  string ToString()
        {
             return  "SubClass";
        }

         public  string SubClassProp { get; set; }
    }

So, the promise of RIA and the Entity Framework is to make common Line of Business Application development simpler, right? Yet there is an incredibly basic scenario that has me stumped – am I alone here in having an application with lookup fields like State or Gender? Here is the setup:

We have rows of data (County entities) that reference another entity (States). These are both in our Entity Framework model. I.e the State is a lookup table for county (it could just as well be a gender table for a person, or some other lookup table relationship). ...