When trying to access remote content in Silverlight, you need to add a clientaccespolicy.xml file to the root of the web server that you are trying to access.  I did this, my file looked like this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <access-policy> <cross-domain-access> <policy> <allow-from http-request-headers="*"> <domain uri="*"/> </allow-from> <grant-to> <resource include-subpaths="true" path="/"/> </grant-to> <... [More]

My previous post talks about learning some Silverlight and going through some of ScottGu's articles about getting started with Silverlight.  As I have been trundling through then I have started to notice one thing that is getting particularly irritating. When you're styling up your application, you need to be very careful about typing the Setter properties correctly.  I admit, I am using Visual Studio and not Expression <insert useful variant here>, but I would still expect a little more intelligence or when editing the XAML. Let me explain... Consider the following XAML from my App.x... [More]

I found myself with a little time between BizTalk Server tasks recently and decided it was high time I took a look at trying out Silverlight and seeing what it is worth.  It's still early days for me at the moment, but I thought I would share my starting point. I was lucky enough to find a series of posts buy Scott Guthrie that give a good 8-step tutorial on building a Silverlight application in Visual Studio 2008. I've really only just started and am taking the time to read some surrounding content on the web about each step, but I have to say that it looks quite impressive so far (as I thi... [More]

Summary Quite often we want to be able to perform the same operation on some information given a differing number of arguments.  Typically, you might pass these arguments in as an array, thus avoiding the need to specify the number of arguments.  In order to call a function like this, we then need to go ahead and build and array of to pass in our arguments.  To me that seems like a little bit of an effort, at each point in my application, I know how many things I want to pass in.  So how else can I do this? Solution Now, consider the funtion System.String.Format().  In one form, the Format ... [More]

I was trying to parse a file which was divided into numerous parts - each one 12 lines long. For debugging, I was interested in how fast the file was being read and processed and therefore looked at the StreamReader.BaseStream.Position property. Here is an example of what I was trying to do: class Program{ static void Main(string[] args) { string filename = @"C:\windows\windowsupdate.log"; string filenameBackup = filename + ".bac"; File.Copy(filename, filenameBackup); FileStream fs = new FileStream(filenameBackup, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read); Str... [More]

Since yesterday, and my post about Google Chrome, Google has updated its terms and conditions and removed the clauses.  See my previous post here: Security: How much do you trust Google?. Privacy clauses Section 11 has been completed rewritten.  Note that this is the only change in the terms of service, even the date has not been changed: 11. Content license from you 11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. Looks a bit different to the previous clause.  Specifically, the following has be... [More]

Our network guys recently added a proxy server to our network which has caused my Windows Mobile device to no longer sync with Exchange via ActiveSync. I thought that's annoying but its ok I will just set the proxy settings in ActiveSync... To my disapointment ActiveSync doenst have that option! After some investigation I discovered that if you change the "This computer is connected to:" value to "The Internet" (rather than "Automatic") it works fine! So in summary, with your device connected, in ActiveSync go to: File > Connection Settings > This computer is connected to: > Th... [More]

Chrome threw the following error when posting to a forum: (my login name and domain is deliberately blanked) This warning 'Exploit-ObscuredHtml' isn't thrown when doing exactly the same in Internet Explorer, so I'd be interested to know why it's throwing the virus alert. Possibly because it's running the javascript in a separate process to the HTML? Unlikely. More inclined to think it's because it's in the unsecure 'Documents and Settings' folder whereas IE uses the rather more locked-down Temporary Internet Files folder. Either way, I can imagine lots of sites would use Javascript that ... [More]

Google has just released a beta of its Google Chrome web browser.  Make sure you read the terms and conditions.  Have a look at the privacy clauses... [Note: Google has updated its terms and conditions.  Read my blog post here: Security: Google retracts its privacy clauses] Privacy clauses 11. Content license from you 11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive li... [More]