During the past two months or so I had been working on building Silverlight Tips website and managed to put up some useful Silverlight tutorials along with examples and demos. Just after a few weeks of the site's life on the web, it started receiving a great number of visits from around the world. The site received almost about 5000 visitors through this short period of time (2 months) and I have to say the comments I received from visitors were great and motivating. The site was picked up by major and minor search engines just after a two weeks and is now been featured on various great Silverlight and none-Silverlight websites including silverlightshow.net,  silverlightcream.com and silverlightbuzz.com.

Today, I am glad to announce Gavin Wignall, an Interactive Design Lead and owner of Silverlight Buzz website, along with Allan Mullar, a Silverlight and WCF expert and owner of Silverlight Forums website, have joined the site to publish their tutorials and tips on Silverlight Tips website, and help to build a great source of information and tutorials about Microsoft Silverlight by using their experiences and expertise.

I am looking forward to continue posting articles on Silverlight Tips website and am most grateful to have Gavin and Allan on board.

I just came across this very random problem recently when one of your windows (Internet Explorer's Developer Tool window in my case) minimized itself and then I couldn't possibly get it back maximized. So all I had was an item in my taskbar that wouldn't maximize the window itself.

the solution was simply to press and hold the Shift button on your keyboard and then right-click on the item from your taskbar, then click on Maximize!

Here is a quick tip I received from Rachel while working on a Silverlight project:

The built in validation for the Silverlight controls rely on a ValidationException being thrown. If you’re debugging the project this gets really annoying as Visual Studio will break on un-handled exceptions. To stop Visual Studio breaking on the unhandled Validation Exceptions you can follow the steps below:

1. Press Ctrl + Alt + E
2. Click Add
3. Select Type = Common Language Runtime Exceptions
4. Name = System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.ValidationException
5. Click OK
6. Expand Common Language Runtime Exceptions
7. For System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.ValidationException untick Thrown & User-unhandled
8. Click OK

Before:

After:

Seriously, no rocket science, no magic and no bullbutter! It’s just a matter of downloading BlogEngine and customizing the style and layout, well, perhaps a bit more than that, but more or less This Is It.

This post aims at providing an easy and quick instruction to prepare a development environment for developing and debugging Windows Mobile 6.0 applications and creating a test application.

Requirements:

• Visual Studio 2008 (Visual Studio 2008 - Trial Software): make sure you have latest service packs installed.
  
• Windows Mobile 6 SDKs (Mobile 6 Professional and Standard Software Development Kits Refresh): Please note this has to be installed after Visual Studio 2008 as otherwise it might not work properly.

Creating a test application:

Summary: File >> New Project.. >> Visual C++ >> Smart Device >> Win32 Smart Device Project >> Windows Mobile 6.0 Professional SDK >> Windows application >> Finish

Details: from Visual Studio file menu click on “New Project..”, select “Visual C++” and then “Smart Device” form the left panel,

choose “Win32 Smart Device Project” and create your test project by entering the name for your project and clicking on the OK button. Now you need to complete a

wizard, click Next, remove

Windows Mobile 5.0 from the right list and add “Windows Mobile 6.0 Professional SDK” from the left list, click on Finish.

Resources: msdn Windows Mobile

So I thought I start my blog by talking about the platform I have built this blog on: BlogEngine, and comparing it to one of my favorite blog platforms: Community Server.

In this post, I will only be talking about setting up a new blog from the start. I will continue comparing features of the two platforms in another post in the future.

Setup a BlogEngine blog:

1. Download the latest version of BlogEngine code from here
   once you clicked on the release that you want (presumably the latest) you could choose to download the "source" if you are planning to customize the code, or the "web" package if you happy with the box standard package and may only want to change the styling of your site. I am going to use the source package.
2. Go to IIS and convert the "BlogEngine.Web" folder to application
   if you are working on an external host just copy the content of the BlogEngine.Web to your site root folder.
3. Add write permission to App_Data folder
   how: right-click on 'App_Data' folder >> Properties >> Security >> Edit >> click on IIS_IUSER OR NETWORK SERVICE >> Edit >> tick the Write checkbox.
4. Browse to your site and you are done!
   go to your application which you created in your IIS or to your website if you are hosting it on an external server and you should be able to see your blog’s homepage.

NOTE: since we are using the source package, you might get an Application error if you try to browse to your site for the first time, this is because not all '.dll' files have been generated. To fix this problem you simply need to open the blogengin solution in your Visual Studio 8 by opening the BlogEngine.NET.sln file and rebuild the entire package (go to Build menu and click on Rebuild Solution).

Setup a Community Server blog:

1. Download the latest version of Community Server SDK, normally found under 'Community Server Developers' category from here
   Right away you notice unlike blogengine, here you have to register in order to download the package! But don’t worry it’s just a simple registration and they don’t spam their users often.. To be honest, it took me about 5min to download the blogengine, setting it up and browsing to it successfully, but so far it has taken me 15min just to download and unzip the CS package!
2. Go to IIS and convert "CommunityServer.Web" folder to application
3. Setup database and new blog
   the full documentation to setup your CS blog is in the content of the zip file you downloaded. So I will stop here and let you follow the instruction they have provided and hopefully you will get it all right, and if you didn’t please come back here and send a comment on this post and I will try to help.
4. Browse to your site and you are done!

So which one is better?

OR

Community Server:

• Takes nearly an hour for a beginner to setup (if you were lucky)
• Slightly complex process to successfully setup the site
• Requires SQL database, which is good for security and stability of the site, but costs more
• Not free if you are a commercial organisation

Blogengine:

• Takes areound 5min and you are done with setting up the whole thing!
• Quite easy and simple process to setup the site
• Uses XML files for storage, which means you are not required to have SQL server database, however, if you want to change this to improve the security of the site then follow my post on how to customise your blogengine site to use SQL

After all those discussions, researches, arguments and annoying my mates over choosing between BlogEngine and Community Server, here comes my brand new and fresh out of box (almost) a new BlogEngine blog!

NEXT: Watch out for a new theme and a bit of customization which is going to happen over this weekend!