I am blown away by Adobe's Buzzword web-based word processor.

It feels like a great native application, with great widgetry and lots of attention paid to the details.

I had forgotten about Medsphere's LGPLed Gtk# widgets, the Medsphere Widgets.

Today Brad blogged about them.

This is my favorite:

View Video
Format: wmv
Duration: 1034

View Video
Format: wmv
Duration: 577

I wanted to build a multi-page (Search - Results) application when I realized that isn't really our model. Fortunately, I wrote to Ashish Shetty , who combines enormous knowledge with enormous kindness, and even though he is in the middle of blogging about this, he agreed that I could blog about it as well. Since I will be creating an HDI Video on this as one of my first Beta 2 videos (RSN) and since I think his solution is wicked cool, here is how you do it

1. Create a new Silverlight 2 project in Visual Studio , (I named mine, MultiPage).

2. You want to have at least three pages. Let's use the default Page.xaml as the first. Add any content you like but  but include a button with a name and set the content to something like "Switch"

3. Right click on the project and click Add New Item, and add a second User Control. Name the new user control anything you want and give it any content you want. I'll call mine Page2.xaml and give it content to make it distinct: 

Note that again I have a button for switching pages.

Here is where the magic happens

4. Add a third page (I named mine PageSwitch.xaml.)  Put nothing in the xaml file, because the content will be the page you want to display,  but in the code-behind file add this method:

5. Wire up the buttons on all of your pages to invoke the Navigate method, passing in the page you want to navigate to.

So, in Page.xaml.cs you'll add this code,

public Page()
{
    InitializeComponent();
    SwitchButton.Click +=
          new RoutedEventHandler(SwitchButton_Click);
}
 

void SwitchButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
    PageSwitcher ps = this.Parent as PageSwitcher;
    ps.Navigate(new Page2());
}

6. Finally, in App.xaml.cs change the startup page from Page.xaml to PageSwitcher.xaml,

The way this all works is that when your program starts, the opening page is now PageSwitcher whose content is blank, but whose constructor sets it to whatever you want your first page to be (in this example,  Page.xaml.)  Since all pages are actually user controls, they work fine as the content of a page.

When you click the switch button, you find the parent of your page which is the PageSwitcher page and that has a Navigate method that you invoke, passing in the page you want to navigate to. In this case, we're hardwiring the change, but it wouldn't be hard to make that value be more dynamic.

Navigate causes the PageSwitcher page to change its contents from whichever page it is currently displaying to whichever page you ask it to display, and the garbage collector cleans up the old.

(If you need to keep old values around between switches, create both pages and don't call new, but that will use more memory, or stash the values you need inside member variables of PageSwitcher -- more on that when I do a video on this approach).

It is a very cool, very fast effect switching from one page to the other.

Here's the complete source code

Larry Lessig has a fantastic presentation, in the very best Larry Lessig style, of why he supports Obama over Hillary. Chris has a transcript of the presentation for those reading blogs from work.

While reading CNN summary: But the two-term senator from New York surpassed the one-term senator from Illinois when voters were asked about experience, with 91 percent of voters saying she "has the right experience," versus just 5 percent who said the same thing about Obama.

Both John F Kennedy and Bill Clinton were younger than Obama is today when they became presidents. It seems odd that this fact is not mentioned more often. (Update: Raphael pointed out that I used the wrong word here; Sorry, not a native speaker and all that).

And Wonkette goes through the checklist: Hillary Pre-Election Day Cry For Points: Check: With Super Tuesday coming tomorrow, and polls showing Hillary Clinton in a dead heat with Barack Obama in states like, let’s see... Connecticut... it seemed like a good opportunity to CRY again. Not that this has anything to do with anything, but Hillary Clinton did cry in New Haven today while discussing children’s health care, one of the various things that she cares about. We’re ashamed at Hillary for this: If she had planned it around mid-afternoon, it might be a fresher topic for the evening news cycle.

Which is at odds with the speech I heard from her appearance in Massachusetts two nights ago when I jumped in a taxi. She was yelling repeatedly "am ready to lead" with a loud and strident voice. Which makes the perfect timing for the crying all too suspicious.

Larry Lessig's post underlines an important point about the way that Obama is conducting his campaign vs the way Hillary is. Hillary will have a debt with all the lobbyist, there will be favors to repay, concesions to make, special initiatives to pass through congress.

The video with Hillary's position on taking lobbyist's money is educational. Not only she is very happy taking their money, but she also twists facts when she says "They represent real Americans, they actually do". She should have added "The top 1% of Americans", you know, the Americans that actually count.

This is the complete context for the debate where the previous video was taken from. Edwards and Obama interventions are brilliant, "we do not have to start for the next election to start reforming, we need to start a grass roots movement to start reform today". Edwards and Obama went down this path: they did not take lobbyist money. Watch the full thing.

Obama as a president would not have those ties, he refuses to take money from the lobbyists.

View original post | Add to del.icio.us| Updated 7 months ago | Share

I was doing some shopping today for a Lenovo ThinkPad T series, and noticed that they are finally offering them with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 preinstalled.

(At least in the US).

View original post | Add to del.icio.us| Updated 7 months ago | Share

View Video
Format: wmv
Duration: 1047

We are looking for consultants to work on a six to nine month project at Novell to write a prototype for a Visual Studio addin in C# or C++ that will connect Visual Studio and its debugging infrastructure to a remote Linux machine running Mono and the Mono Debugger.

If you are interested in working with us in this project, you must have good C# and C++ skills, experience with networking and protocol design, knowledge of COM and assembly language programming are pluses.

We are looking to bring two consultants for the duration of this project. If you are interested, please click this link and attach your resume, pointers to some existing projects of yours and so on.

Tamir Khason published an interesting approach at hosting standalone Silverlight applications.

His solution is a Windows.Forms application that hosts a Windows.Forms.WebControl and inside the WebControl he hosts Silverlight.

Unlike my proposal for standalone Silverlight Applications that is currently Moonlight-specific (and currently limited to Linux/X11) this approach works on Windows with .NET and with Linux using Mono and Moonlight:

Left side: .NET hosting WebControl and Silverlight on Windows; Right side: Mono hosting WebControl and Moonlight running on Linux.

In addition to hosting the WebControl for hosting Silverlight, a thread is running to dispatch http requests locally using HttpListener. HttpListener is an embeddable HTTP server that is part of the class libraries, and exposes a very limited API. You can host ASP.NET with HttpListener by doing the bindings by hand, or you could use our Mono.WebServer library (part of our XSP/mod_mono distribution) to allow your applications to have a fully hosted ASP.NET server.

Mono.WebServer is what iFolder uses to embed the ASP.NET server to expose SOAP-based WebServices to clients.

Of course, this currently does not work on MacOS X as we do have no implementation of WebControl for Windows.Forms on OSX, something that a contributor might want to look into.

You can get the source for the sample from Tamir's page.