Thursday 19 August 2010

Why ‘web’ doesn’t ‘win’

If you haven't heard, apparently HTML5 is going to kill native apps. Awesome. Please tell my competitors that. Convince them in fact. I'll stick with my "obsolete" native apps, weather the hype and pick up their customers when they all decide to jump ship.

There's a great series of articles up on Wired at the moment, well worth the read for anyone pondering the future of the internet

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/

Tuesday 17 August 2010

Silverlight Deployment dispatcher

Note to self. I encountered this problem when trying to access WCF Data Services from a Silverlight App, specifically when running out of browser. Trying to set a collection that's bound to a UI thread throws a cross thread exception, you're supposed to use the UI Thread dispatcher.

A lot of examples suggest you use the Application layout root dispatcher, but Shawn Wildermuth (as is so often the case, thanks Shawn!) has the right answer. You need to use the Dispatcher in the Deployment class as such.


Deployment.Current.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(
        () => results.Text = "Pooled Dispatcher Worked");

Works like a charm.

Windows Phone 7 Launch Games

Awesome. Apps? What Apps?
http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/16/xbox-live-launch-titles-for-windows-phone-7-finally-revealed-we/

Every time I see great demo's like that, my aspirations for world domination collapse ...

Monday 16 August 2010

Snip of the week

Without a doubt the most interesting bit of news last week was Oracle suing Google over Java.

The best comments coming form Miguel Icaza of the Mono Project. Most notably:


Unlike the Java patent grant, the Microsoft Community Promise for both C#, the core class libraries and the VM only require that you have a full implementation. Supersetting is allowed.
Additionally, Microsoft has placed the .NET Micro Edition entirely under the Microsoft Public License which comes with an even more generous patent grant, and covers a superset of the code covered by ECMA/ISO 335.
We have open source implementations of both, and even more luckily, the ECMA/ISO VM specification allows for different profiles, to allow for ultra-small or server-sized versions of the VM to be created. Ideal for mobile platforms.
Google could settle current damages with Oracle, and switch to the better designed, more pleasant to use, and more open .NET platform.

 I really like the Mono project and hope this does them some good, especially with the success of MonoTouch and the upcoming release of MonoDroid. With cross platform skills becoming more of a necessity than a nicety, being able to present a unified C# story is a great prospect.
Hello Blogspot, long time no see ....

It's good to be back. After trying spaces for what seems like a painful eternity I'm happy to be back. the old stuff is still there, well at least until I figure out how to port them across.

http://dubiouscode.spaces.live.com/blog/