After a short discussion in silverlight forums with a guy who have only 19kb line, I checked out compression for XAP files. A XAP is a zipped package of DLL’s and resources. With winrar installed you can open by context menu from Visual Studio Explorer the xap (clientbin). It contains files like The size of the package in this case is 750 KB. I unzipped the content and compressed it with Winrar again and- surprise- surprise, package size is now 547 KB. A reduction more than 35%. Only rename the rar back to xap. I will investigate a little bit, how to automate that within the build process. Read More……(read more)

I usually work downtown and I take the subway for my daily commute but in January, I'll have to take my car to drive to my client. Last fall, I bought a new car radio with a mini audio jack to plug in an MP3 player and WMA/MP3 playback from a CD or a UBS device. All of this for a mere $99 and installed for free at BestBuy! I first plugged in my Zune in the mini jack but I found that it's really not usable while driving since you need to use the player. Some radios have iPods connectors that let you control the player from the radio, that make more sense. The best way is to copy a few podcats onto a USB stick and plug it in the USB connector. I also tried to plug a 80GB external HDD and it worked however, my radio can only read something…(read more)

Christoper and I have had the privelage of helping Ayende to build the UI for his NHibernate Profiler over the last couple months. Yesterday evening he released the public beta with a 30 day trial version. If you are using NHibernate, get over to the product site and download the beta . This is going to be an invaluable tool for developers using NHibernate and you can get it at a special price if you purchase during the beta period. As a developer on this project, I had the unique opportunity to watch a master at his craft. The architecture of the product is clean and Ayende has managed to jam pack this version with a ton of NHibernate smarts. Just working on it, I gained a deeper understanding of the types of problems one can run into while…(read more)

I’m looking forward to the day when I’ll be announcing new releases of my Drive CodeSmith template library to generate custom code for Sueetie, but while I’m still doing a lot of Community Server stuff I will continue to release updates to Drive for CS development. Version 1.0.4 has support for creating Chameleon SubForms. I also made a number of modifications to the Form templates to reduce keystrokes. Drive is available at http://driveframework.com . Template updates - Removed SourceTable requirement on Forms - FormEmptyStructure.cst - Removed ControlUtilityPrefix property requirement from FormFilledStructure.cst - Added ability to generate ints in SubFormFilledStructure.cst as TextBoxes rather than only the default DropDownList control. Will…(read more)