Copyright 2012 Michael Knopf's BlogArticles and resources covering Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), SOAP, WSDL, and moreBing has release a Maps SDK for use in your Silverlight projects. In this white paper we will cover how to use the SDK to display weather conditions for cities across the United States. The real-time weather data will be retrieved using the WeatherBug API and shown on the map. We will animate the weather conditions (a glowing sun for Sunny conditions, a raining cloud for Rain, etc...) and cover some core concepts along the way, specifically use of a Controller mechanism in your Silverlight projects, parsing XML into your own data model that can be returned from a Web Service, and of course getting up to speed with the Bing Maps SDK for Silverlight.http://www.mknopf.com/articles/creating-a-weather-map-using-the-bing-silverlight-map-sdk-and-weatherbug.htmlWed, 23 Dec 2009 19:55:08 GMT2009-12-23T19:55:08Building Silverlight application takes time, effort, patients, and tools (yes, you have to have some tools). In this post we will cover: where to get the necessities and some useful additional tools, as well as straight talk about the awesomeness, disadvantages, and difficulties of building Silverlight applications. We will also cover the basics of XAML, referencing and using related assemblies, and the how Expression Blend and Visual Studio make it all happen.http://www.mknopf.com/articles/silverlight-straight-talk-the-awesomeness-disadvantages-and-difficulties-in-silverlight.htmlMon, 07 Sep 2009 20:03:27 GMT2009-09-07T20:03:27In this post we will cover Silverlight from start to finish; including architecting, coding, testing, and deploying real-world Silverlight apps. We will also discuss security, its limitations, and what you need to know to secure your application and WCF services and deploy them to IIS.http://www.mknopf.com/articles/building-real-world-data-driven-silverlight-applications.htmlSat, 29 Aug 2009 22:43:54 GMT2009-08-29T22:43:54At some time in your career you will need to interview for a job, if you own your own consulting firm then you are most likely interviewing for jobs on a weekly basis (by pitching clients to contract you for work). Preparing for technical job interviews requires a great deal of research, work, and most of all patience. This article provides a list of questions and answers that I fielded while interviewing for senior level software development positions, it is a collection of my experiences during 17 different job interviews with 10 companies including NASA (who offered me a job)...http://www.mknopf.com/articles/preparing-for-technical-job-interviews.htmlFri, 27 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT2009-03-27T00:00:00The GET method appends name/value pairs to the URL, allowing you to retrieve a resource representation. The big issue with this is that the length of a URL is limited (roughly 3000 char) resulting in data loss should you have to much stuff in the Form, so this method only works if there is a small number of parameters. What does this mean for me? Read more and find out...http://www.mknopf.com/articles/whats-the-difference-between-the-get-and-post-http-request-methods.htmlFri, 14 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT2008-11-14T00:00:00Representational state transfer (REST) is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web. As such, it is not strictly a method for building what are sometimes called "web services." The terms “representational state transfer” and “REST” were introduced in 2000 in the doctoral dissertation of Roy Fielding, one of the principal authors of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) specification...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_TransferThu, 13 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT2008-11-13T00:00:00Wikipediahttp://www.mknopf.com/topics/distributed-applications.htmlSat, 18 Oct 2008 15:08:27 GMTen-us