Blog List

Ever use a repeater or a grid view an can't remember how to append some other string to the databound value and finding it hard to search for? I always forget the syntax for this one..don't know why, it's just one of those things I always have to look up.

Normally when i just need the value straight from the item i use one of Bind or DataBinder.Eval :

Text='<%#Bind("Name") %>'
Text='<%#DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "Name) %>'

When i need to do some sort of additional string formatting, then I need to use Eval:

Text='<%#Eval("Name", "FullName: {0}")%>'

I can't believe 1/4 of the year has gone by already!  It's been a fun and exciting month for us...so what have we been up to:

• We finished our Aussie Usergroup tour, with sessions 8 and 9 at the Gold Coast and Brisbane this month.
• We went to the Brisbane Heroes Launch as superheroes
• John did a VE map of all the MVP summit attendees
• Our Windows Live articles were published in CoDe Focus
• John played with Deep Zoom, and wrote some more code
• We did our 400th blog post
• John helped with the Virtual Earth javascript intellisense project

April is shaping up to be exciting aswell:

• 9-12 we're at the Museums and the Web conference in Montreal, where we do a 1/2 day workshop on Virtual Earth and John presents a virtual earth paper
• I'm hoping to speak at the Montreal Girl Geek Dinner while we're in Canada.
• 14-17 we're attending our first MVP Summit in Seattle

9 presentations, 8 cities and 9 giant tennis balls later, we've concluded our series of SQL Spatial and Virtual Earth talks.

There were a few questions that kept occuring around the funding for our "tour".  We paid for all the flights, accommodation and transport ourselves (except for the flights to the Melbourne group..which were kindly funded by the usergroup).

Then the next set of questions were around why did we do it if we didn't get paid for it.  For us, there were a few opportunities. 

• There was the fact we got to see a new new places..like Perth and Adelaide.
• We got to meet lots of people we "talk to" onlink but had never met.
• We got to talk to people about stuff that we find interesting
• We got to meet lots of people passionate about GIS, GML, community etc. When you get to talk to people truly passionate about something, it always makes you feel more energetic!

I was truly amazed by the enthusiasm of some of our attendees.

• People flew in from other cities to see the presentation. Last night, one of the attendee flew from Woolongong to Brisbane to see us.
• People made special efforts to come and see us on Valentine's day :)
• People were really keen to share their experience and knowledge of GIS, GML etc.

I think the tour really strengthened in our minds how much people identify with maps, and that there's a lot of interest out there in what both SQL Spatial and Virtual Earth can do.

It was a really good experience, and we'd like to thank all the usergroup leaders who hosted us. These guys do a truly AMAZING job or organinsing the speakers, rooms, food etc. in their own time, just for the love of it.  My hat goes off to you all!

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Soul Solutions Virtual Earth

It will be my first MVP summit next month. The summit is at Microsoft Campus in Redmond Seattle. The event sounds pretty cool with presentations and social activities.

So to contribute I teamed up with the event organisers to create an Attendee Map using Virtual Earth.

http://mvp.soulclients.com/

It is very cool to see how international the event is and just how many community focused people will be there.

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Soul Solutions Virtual Earth

We went to the Heroes Happen launch event today in Bribane.  We thought we'd be funny and go dressed up as "super heroes" Batman and Batgirl.  We got lots of weird looks and people wanted to have their photo taken with us. 

Learnt a few things about being a super hero:

• Rubber and vinyl are VERY hot so we had to get changed into street attired half way though.
• Wearing high heals make your feet really sore..so didn't take long before i needed to find a seat.
• The batmask cripples your ability to hear and kills periferal vision

We did get our Heroes pic in costume:

And John answered a few questions about how to deal with mould and rising damp in your batcave at the Ask The Experts area.

We had a really good day.  Met lots of interesting people, got to talk about stuff we're passionate about, got some swag...what more could you ask for?

We have both been invited to the Heroes Happens event in Brisbane this Wednesday. As MVPs we will be answering questions on Visual Studio and SQL 2008 around the place.

But why not make it a *super* event we said... what if we had more famous heroes to answer your questions.....

See you there, we will wear a little badge or something so you can spot us!

Ever wanted some Geeky Girls to speak at your event and didn't know where to find them?  I found a post here: http://coffee.geek.nz/2008/03/23/registered_com.html about geekspeakr.com. 

To quote:

What is geekspeakr.com

We help you find technical women to speak at your events.

ABOUT
Many organisers of technical conferences, meetups, and dinners want to have more gender-balance in their lineups, but they don't know where to find technical women speakers.

Enter geekspeakr.com, a simple directory and connections system to help technical women speakers and event organisers to find each other.

Have had "fun" with the SilverlightStreamingMediaPlayerl today..haven't found the solution..just all the symptoms.

So i've got a SilverlightStreamingMediaPlayer, I've set it to point to an application on Silverlight Streaming, with autoplay OFF so it doesn't start playing as soon as you load the page...all works well.

Then I added a GridView which displayed thumbnails of all the videos I want to play, and when the user clicks on one i update the video and play it using the following javascript:

        function updatevideo(url)
    {
        var slMediaPlayer = $find("<%=CurrentSilverlightStreamingMediaPlayer.ClientID %>");
        slMediaPlayer.set_mediaSource(url);
        slMediaPlayer.set_autoPlay(true);
        return false;
    }

This also works a treat :)

My problem arrises in the following circumstance:

If I select a video from the list and then change pages the video starts from the beginning rather than keep playing.

If I play the default video and change pages, it continues on fine.

So it's remembering the video url property ok, but losing where the video is up to.  Will post back if I find a solution.

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Soul Solutions SoulSolutions - Live Services

After touring the country, this week we are visiting the Brisbane SQL User Group to give our presentation on SQL 2008 Spatial and Virtual Earth.  This is our 9th and final performance of this talk around Australia. Make sure you pay attention as we have some questions at the end to give our some swag.

Location Details: Microsoft Brisbane Office, Level 9, Waterfront Place, 1 Eagle Street

Start Time: 6pm

Registration HERE

SQL Spatial with Virtual Earth

In this visually interactive talk we explore the new spatial data types, functions and indexes directly related to the real world using the interactive browser based Virtual Earth control. We focus on the new Geography data type providing an overview of the new functionality as directly applied to mapping. This includes the storage of points, polylines and polygons as well as real world tasks like effective rendering to the map, geofencing and proximity searches. We explore the power of union and buffering. Finally we examine the new index specifically built for fast spatial lookup.

The talk will inform, teach and demonstrate. You will understand what this new functionality is all about, what data types and functions are needed, how they operate and how to add an effective spatial index to your project.

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Soul Solutions SoulSolutions - Live Services

The Expression team have posted about how to manipulate collections within the Silverlight 2 multiscaleimage control. So what a great time to revisit my little sample code and make some improvements. Let make sure we have mouse, mouse wheel, keyboard, bounds checks and resorting.

See my updated sample here. Use the "R" key to resort the collection.



First up you should read my first post that explains creating the image assets and setting up your project. In this post we will cover the following:

Move event handlers into anonymous methods Use Pete Blois' mouse scroll wheel code that requires no JavaScript Add zoom bounds code for minimum and maximum zoom Resorting the images into a randomly ordered grid As the expression blog mentions the first step is to ensure you export your assets as a collection:



Anonymous Methods for Events The concept here is to move all the event handlers into the constructor and implement them up as very simple code. I understand the reason why you would want to remove the handlers from the XAML. If you were working in tandem with a designer who was creating the XAML for the UI this does keep the code very separated. Our new XAML is cut down to this:

While we hook up the events directly to the event in the constructor as follows:

public...

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