Dave Burke : Freelance .NET Web Developer specializing in Online Communities

The Best Darn Microsoft Evangelist in the biz, Chris Bowen, brought his troupe of geek freaks and coding acrobats to Vermont today for the Northeast 2008-09 Winter MSDN Roadshow. Actually, it was just Chris and fellow evangelist Jim O'Neil, but they were a forceful presence and only seemed like an e... [More]

I spent an hour yesterday afternoon at a local tire store where I spent the time setting up ASPNET Membership on a new development site.  This story isn't about ASPNET Membership though, it's about the good fortune we as developers have to become more skilled at our craft even while at the tire... [More]

Column sorting in my recent Silverlight 2.0 Datagrid app wasn't a priority, but I wanted to be able to click on a column header and sort, darn it.  I added a CanUserSortColumns="true" property to the DataGrid and CanUserSort="true" to each DataGridTemplateColumn.  Still nothing. It wasn't ... [More]

I downloaded the new Silverlight Toolkit from CodePlex and used the AutoCompleteBox control on my recent Silverlight Datagrid app.  It worked great, that is, after I struggled to figure out why it wasn't. My problem was that I was replacing a ComboBox control with an AutoCompleteBox and was try... [More]

This is the first in a series I'm calling the "Silverlite" series, posts covering issues I encounter working with Silverlight 2.0.  I hope to work with Silverlight for a long time, so hopefully the series will be around for a long time, too. Tonight's Silverlite looks at what to do if XAML file... [More]

This post describes the issues I encountered moving my Silverlight 2.0 Application from development to a hosted server environment.  The app is running great and deployment really wasn't too bad, considering I had never installed a Silverlight application before. The first experience I had with... [More]

Twitter is a marvelous thing.  Without flying to Los Angeles, our crack DBVT Staff can deliver, via the #PDC Twitter Stream, each and every PDC2008 highlight for you without ever having to get off our fat asses taunt, shapely buttocks. All hail "ScottGu Mode!" This is probably one of those "ha... [More]

Two good screencasts on passing parameters to a Silverlight 2.0 Control are available on Silverlight.Net. The first from Mike Taulty demonstrates InitParameters as a property in the ASPX Silverlight control.  The second from Tim Heuer demonstrates using InitParameters as well as how to pass in ... [More]

This will be my last Silverlight 2.0 Immersity post because we've arrived at the portion of our show where it's all .NET all the time.  Now that the datagrid is pretty much in place, we're back to supplying the Business Logic to populate lists, update, insert and delete data on the back end of ... [More]

One of the good things about being older and typing out code for so long is being able to appreciate how far Microsoft's great development tools have evolved.  The intellisense in VS2008 seems much improved over VS2005, and VS2005 intellisense was good! Take this little example of populating a ... [More]