Blog List

Just an update to the sessions we’re presenting and activities we’re involved in at Tech.Ed Australia this year on the Gold Coast.

WEB 302 - Bing your data to life, the Virtual Earth Silverlight control  Wed 9/9/2009 13:45-15:00 in Meeting Room 7 Bing Maps (formerly Virtual Earth) provides a slick and powerful data visualisation engine for your spatial information. Join John O'Brien for a look at how the core control can be combined with other Silverlight components including DeepEarth and Photosynth to produce a rich and engaging interface. See how SQL Server 2008 spatial data can be rendered in real time and how this whole interface can be integrated into your Sharepoint site.

THG007 - 3 the New Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit for Social Websites Thu 10/9/2009 15:00-15:30 in Green Interactive Theatre

See how to add IM to a site with the Windows Live Messenger Library and UI Controls, and how to build new relationships around content with Messenger social capabilities. Also hear how top sites and marketers are using the social connections of Windows Live users to grow and build brand loyalty.

WIT Women in IT Wed 9/9/2009 12:45-13:45

Hosted by Catherine Eibner, Developer Evangelist for Microsoft Dynamics, Women in IT is about growing strong female leaders in the IT industry. Leading women in IT and industry experts will lead discussions...

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The project I’m working on at the moment I’m taking a bunch of content that in the previous system was stored as HTML and I’ve re-written the application in WPF and displaying the content as a FlowDocument.  Today I sat down to look at how to do the data conversion, basically I needed to convert HTML to XAML.  After looking at it awhile and thinking it’s quite a bit of work, someone else must have done this before I stumbled upon the HTML to XAML Prototype Conversion Utility. Now the code has a lot of todo’s but the HTML I was working on was pretty simple..basic font sizes, bold, italic, text align etc and this worked a treat and saved me a lot of code and testing. Just had to tweak it a bit to output the document the way I wanted it and it was all good.

It is very common to have a some of your spatial data sources still in SQL2005 and sometimes you don’t have the option to have this upgraded to SQL2008. Rather then having to deal with the data differently we decided we would treat every data source as Well Known Binary. If your data is simply some Latitude and Longitudes you can do this:

 

WKB:

select 0x00+0x00000001 + cast([Longitude] as binary(8)) + cast([Latitude] as binary(8)) WKT:

'POINT(' + cast([Longitude] as nvarchar(20)) + ' ' + cast([Latitude] as nvarchar(20)) + ')' GML:

'' + cast([Latitude] as nvarchar(20)) + ' ' + cast([Longitude] as nvarchar(20)) + ''  

Important to note that WKB and WKT are XY, Longitude, Latitude while GML is still YX, Latitude, Longitude.

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I had a situation where I needed the user to select an image to display and then move the location of the image. What I quickly found was while I was bound to the image I was holding a file lock on it that prevented me from moving it.  On a BitmapImage there is a CacheOption that allows you to cache OnLoad. Unfortunately I couldn’t set this on the bindings for the Image so to get around it I had to use a converter on the Source :

public class ImageCacheConverter : IValueConverter { public object Convert(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture) { var path = (string)value; // load the image, specify CacheOption so the file is not locked var image = new BitmapImage(); image.BeginInit(); image.CacheOption = BitmapCacheOption.OnLoad; image.UriSource = new Uri(path); image.EndInit(); return image; } public object ConvertBack(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture) { throw new NotImplementedException("Not implemented."); } } Image Source="{Binding Path=SmallThumbnailImageLocation, Converter={StaticResource imagePathConverter}}"/> Technorati Tags: WPF,BitmapCacheOption,FileLock

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This event we're going to try something a little different.  This year, Microsoft TechEd event is being held on the Gold Coast and we'd love to see as many of you as possible at the event - registration details can be found here: http://www.msteched.com/australia/Public/registration-info.aspx. We’re taking advantage of having so many ladies at one location and holding our next dinner at Broadbeach.

Of specific interest to all the girl geeks is this year's Women In Technology Event at the conference is the Women Build LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY (LSP). Microsoft have partnered with LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY (LSP) through Robert Rasmussen & Associates with their local agency Management Consultancy International to create a unique interactive workshop, using LEGO® Bricks to model solutions for growing strong female leaders in the software industry.

The session will give you an opportunity to meet other females in the IT industry – local and international, learn from role models that have been successful in their career and give you access to resources that can help you build your career and your own network. The session will help you make the most of the Microsoft Women in Technology community.

Who is invited?

If you are a geek and a girl or know of one who is willing to escort you then you are welcome and encouraged to come along. There is a technical focus with the intention of having fun and connecting with other women...

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Our 6th Girl Geek Dinner was held on the 2nd July. We were fortunate to have Kay Lam-Beattie as our guest speaker, who runs her own legal IT business and answered many legal questions from our geek girls. 

Kim Weatherall, a UQ Law Professor, also helped out with many of the questions and conversation.  The discussions ranged from politics with a hot topic being the proposed Internet filter, file copying and sharing, how copyright can be changed etc.  The discussions went well into the night and it was great to see a bunch of new faces!

The guys at the Hutch Bistro were great. We even had our own personal menus made up which was a really nice touch. The food and service were great too!.

Thanks to Tim for taking photos on the night an look forward to seeing more ladies at the next dinner. His photos can be seen on Tim’s Flickr stream here.

We’re fortunate to be presenting a session at Tech.Ed 09 on the Gold Coast. Here’s our session details:

WEB302 – Bing your data to life, the Virtual Earth Silverlight control

Bing Maps (formerly Virtual Earth) provides a slick and powerful data visualisation engine for your spatial information. Join John O'Brien for a look at how the core control can be combined with other Silverlight components including DeepEarth and Photosynth to produce a rich and engaging interface. See how SQL Server 2008 spatial data can be rendered in real time and how this whole interface can be integrated into your Sharepoint site.











For those of you who have been following Catherine’s blog, it’s been confirmed that the Wednesday lunchtime is the Women Build LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY (LSP) Women in Technology event.  Details on the event:

The Women in IT function at Tech Ed this year is specifically designed to address the decline of female talent and leadership in the IT industry. We’ll ask why is this happening and discuss...

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I was excited to read on my fellow Girl Geek Dinner Brisbane organiser Jenine’s blog that the Tech girls are chic! book, which she was one of many authors as well as compiled and edited, is now available on Think Geek!

About the book:

Tech Girls are Chic is a fun new book showing that it takes all types of people to work in IT. Inside, you'll find stories by 16 'tech girls' - awesome techie ladies working in a range of technology jobs across Australia (and even though they are all Australian, they serve as a great sampling of techie jobs all over the world). They are a bunch of fun and funky women who find working with technology challenging and interesting, and they are far from fitting the stereotypical 'geek' image portrayed by the media. They use their technical and/or non-technical skills (usually a combination of both) to have a successful career in IT.

Aimed at girls aged 12-16, Tech Girls are Chic also has wide appeal to educators and employers. As the number of females studying and working with technology is at an all time low, this book hopes to inspire girls to think a little deeper about technology - what they like about it, what they are good at, and what are the things that are important to them in their...

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I have an application where the user configures what video should display on the screen. When the user changes the video source I want to show a frame from the video so they can see they’ve picked the correct file. On the MediaElement in WPF there’s no ShowFirstFrame property. So on the Source change of the media element I had to do the following:

videoMedia.ScrubbingEnabled = true;
videoMedia.Stop();

I needed to assign a foreground colour to an item in code-behind and all i had was the HEX value of the colour. My first instinct was to set the foreground directly from the string e.g.

textRichTextBoxEditor.Foreground = "#FF97315A";

but Foreground takes a Brush so I then thought about casting the string to a Brush e.g.

textRichTextBoxEditor.Foreground = (Brush)"#FF97315A";

But that doesn’t work and creating a new Brush takes no parameters. So I thought maybe create a SolidColorBrush and give it my colour e.g.

textRichTextBoxEditor.Foreground = new SolidColorBrush("#FF97315A") But it takes a Color, not a string. So I needed to convert from a hex string to a Brush. Enter the BrushConverter. The solution ended up being:

var bc = new BrushConverter(); textRichTextBoxEditor.Foreground = (Brush)bc.ConvertFrom("#FF97315A");;

 

Technorati Tags: WPF,HEX,Brush

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