Michael Knopf

turning concepts into working products...

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)

Bing 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.

Building 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.

In 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.

I've been working for several months on a Silverlight project and decided to upgraded from Silverlight 2 to Silverlight 3. The installs of the Toolkit and Visual Studio SDK's went well as did the upgrade to the project, however once the upgrade was done I compiled the project and was promptly smacked in the face with 182 compilation errors, 4 of which were Error 6 Custom tool error: Failed to generate code for the service reference 'Your Service Ref Name Here'. Please check other error and warning messages for details. 'Path to your Service Ref Resources File Here' and the rest were the typical cannot find, are you missing an assembly reference?

At 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)...

With REST gaining popularity at an exponential rate Microsoft released the ASP.NET WCF REST Starter Kit Alpha on Oct. 27, 2008 to provide a solid starting place for developers interested in building WCF applications using Representational state transfer (REST).

Representational 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...