You might be wondering what do all these guys have in common....good question....

We're currently building an RFID enabled System where complex processes are handled by BizTalk Server, and data being pushed down to Silverlight V2.0 clients via a WCF Silverlight 'Eventing System' (which really is polling under the hood, but to us in developer land - it's cool and it's Events)

Scotty has the full write up of some of his learning experiences through this - well done Scotty, he's been in that place where there are no manuals, no documentation, no previous code, just a gut feel and a compass to sail the seas.

We demo-ed the system at our last user group (or more over used them a guinea pigs :)

Token Screen shot: (we've associated tags with people information and this is what is displayed when TagReadEvents are captured. We need a little work to avoid being underneath or on top of a previous animation)

FULL DETAILS HERE

Proof is in the popping - http://labmylife.blogspot.com/2008/06/you-can-cook-your-brain-with-cell.html

Think of your ear/brain/head/eye in this space.......

On the lines of mobile phones - a while ago I decided to check out my latest phone and how much 'energy' it gave out
(you know - hot handset, hot ear etc after been talking on it for a while)

As I found out - as part of Govt. regulations there's some one who set a number/limit on this energy at 1.6. (for Australia)
The 'energy' reading is known as 'Specific Absorbtion Rate' (SAR) rating.

Check more out here:

http://www.sarvalues.com/what-is-sar.html
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2006/07/12/1152637733291.html

Lately here we have several top neuro surgeons throwing their mobiles out, due to the amazing increase in the number of brain tumours they treat - especially on the 'preferred ear'.

When this stuff comes out - there's always the 2 main camps, ones that say 'yes' it does and others that say 'what a joke'.
(we then recite - high voltage power lines, lukemia and the classic was smoking ads back in the 50s that state all the medicinal benefits of smoking. Big full page ads but a few years later we know more about smoking...)

So I figured that I'd go looking.....

...I went to the manufacturers website and I was able to get 63 properties and details about the phone. Battery life; bands; standby; talk time; features; dimensions etc.......

....but.....

....NO SARs number.....

....after doing a couple of web searches.....my phone comes out at 1.4 (the website also tells me that in the current phone market, 95% of all mobiles are better than mine!!!)

Interesting to say the least!

When you've got a moment - check out his take on the BizTalk world and there's some great in the field stuff here!!

http://zeetalks.wordpress.com/

Keep up the great work Zee!

http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/Default.aspx

Some pretty cool features as I've previously posted

From my perspective I'm particularly interested in the supported 'WCF Dual HTTP Binding'.......more on that later :)

(updated**)

SILVERLIGHT 2.0 BETA 2 SDK is now available!!!!

Grab it here from the Getting Started section

Also get the videos, hands on labs, training material from HERE

Jesse has written a great little article on creating a popup control in Silverlight 2.0.

Nice way of doing it - I was also thinking, that quite simply you could also set the ZIndex of the element to a positive value.

Enjoy.

I've started developing a RFID Mobile application on a Windows Mobile device - which is pretty cool.

I decided to use VS2008 and all worked well until deployment.
"Unable to load System.Data.SqlServerCe.dll ....Version=3.0.xxxxx " as the version OOTB with VS2008 is v3.5

So I grabbed SQL CE Mobile 3.0 and copied over and installed the sqlce30.wce5.armv4i.CAB and all is good!

At TechEd 2008 in Orlando, an announcement Silverlight 2 Beta 2 will be publicly available later this week. 

Improvement areas are:

• UI Framework, including improvements in:
  • animation support
  • error handling and reporting
  • accessibility support
  • keyboard input
  • performance
  • more compatibility between Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation
• Rich Controls, including:
  • Visual State Manager, permitting the creation of controls as templates
  • text wrapping
  • scrollbars for text boxes
• Networking Support, including:
  • improved cross domain support
  • security enhancements
  • upload support for web client
  • duplex communications (a server “push” model from server to a Silverlight client)
• Rich Base Class Library, including:
  • improved threading
  • LINQ-to-JSON
  • ADO.NET Data Services support
  • improved support for Simple Object Access Protocol (SOA)
• Deep Zoom Support, including:
  • a new XML-based file format for Deep Zoom image tiles
  • a new MultiScaleTileSource that enables existing tile databases to utilize Deep Zoom
  • event-driven notification for zoom/pan state

Thanks Scotty for the reference to this.

Check it out from the Silverlight Horse's Mouth

Cheers,

Mick.

I was cracking into getting my machine setup for a Silverlight project that I'm working on and came up with the above error.

Now....I admit....running x64 Windows 2008 on my Fijitsu Laptop mighten be the best combination given the huge support for my laptop drivers that I have.

I installed all the new(er) Silverlight 2.0 Beta bits from http://silverlight.net (VS2008 Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 Bits) and opened up my VS2008 seeing all the new Silverlight project types - cool! (I thought)

Each time I either created or opened an existing project - boom! up came the error.

So I figured the installation didn't complete properly.........after running/re-running/uninstalling/installing countless times the error was still there!!!!

My one solace and saving grace was running the following command line:

devenv /setup

......"I'm on my way, on my way to happiness today.....ah huh ah huh ah huh"........

Hi folks, love to see you there

Check the details out at - http://sydbiz.org/Lists/Events%20Calendar/DispForm.aspx?ID=15&Source=http%3A%2F%2Fsydbiz%2Eorg%2Fdefault%2Easpx

Also one of the things we've been working on in the last month is a Private BizTalk User Group mailing list
oztalk@groups.yahoo.com

This mailing list is 'invite only' and is intended to enhance learning within the community, as well as an avenue to get bts (&related) problems solved - delivered straight to your inbox.

There are currently Brisbane & Sydney User Group members on board (more groups to come shortly)

How to get on:
- an invite was sent to your email address registered on http://sydbiz.org. Through the invite you'll be able to join (you *don't need* a yahoo acct)
- if you misplaced the invite, or want to get on the list - post a comment to this blog entry and I'll send an invite out to you.

Take care,

Mick.

Back in V2.0 we had a Web Service that did this sort of stuff for us, now in V3.0 it's delivered straight from the Object Model.

Essentially:

1. We create a batch of XML which could have 'adds, updates + deletes' in there.
2. We call the web.ProcessBatchData(xml) method, handing to it our wishes.

This technique is fast, and CAML based :(

So if you need to add 100 items to the list - this would be a way to do it. (I've got to check whether this technique fires event handlers on the lists or whether it's a 'back door' thing)

Note: in the snippet below, the fields are referenced via their namespace#<name>
- you can get the field's details by saving your list 'As a template', downloading the *.stp file, renaming to *.stp.cab, opening it and looking into the *.xml file there.

- you could also call the lists.asmx webservice (..\_vti_bin\lists.asmx) and calling the GetListCollection(); method to see a chunk of describing XML.

   1:  "<ows:Batch OnError=\"Return\">" +

   2:              "<Method ID=\"A1\"><SetList>" + myGuid + "</SetList>" +

   3:                  "<SetVar Name=\"ID\">New</SetVar>" +

   4:                  "<SetVar Name=\"Cmd\">Save</SetVar>" +

   5:                  "<SetVar Name=" +

   6:                      "\"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office#Title\">" +

   7:                      "New Manager</SetVar>" +

   8:                  "<SetVar Name=" +

   9:                      "\"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office#Body\">" +

  10:                      "Congratulations to Mary for her promotion!</SetVar>" +

  11:                  "<SetVar Name=" +

  12:                      "\"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office#Expires\">" +

  13:                      "2003-09-14T00:00:00Z</SetVar>" + 

  14:              "</Method>" 

Here's a small MSDN article on it - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc404818.aspx

Cheers,

Mick.