My internet service provider TimeWarner Cable provides free CA Internet Security Suite. I tried to cancel my account but the links to cancelling does not work. With a bit of googling, I found the following number 1-866-663-2273 for Windows Live OneCare support. At the end of the voice menu, I said "Cancel an account". Then I was directed to a rep who cancelled by account within 5 minutes.

Silverlightt 2 broke David Anson's Simple XPS Silverlight Viewer. The cause was that Glyphs.FontUri can longer load fonts from resources other than an assembly. Fortunately, silverlight applications can download other assemblies. So the fix is to package all the fonts used by an xps document into a separate downloadable XAP file. This solution is not optimal because:

1. Silverlight 2 appears to have trouble opening the xps file generated by xps writer. One has to unzip and rezip for Silverlight 2 to open it. See the comments in the middle of this page for more information.
2. One has to create an XAP file for each xps file to package all fonts used by the XAP file.

If you are willing to accept these limitations, yes, it is possible to view XPS in Silverlight 2. See the demo here. The source code may be downloaded here.

To keep track of Silverlight resources and solutions, I created a new web site called www.silverlightkb.com.  I am also going to present at Socal Code Camp on developing line of business applications with Silverlight 2.

The context root information are in two files, one is obvious and the one is obscure. However, both must be be sync. The not-so-obvious file is org.eclipse.wst.common.component under .settings folder under the web project. The obvious file is application.xml inside META-INF folder in the EAR project that contains the Web project.

 

Silverlight 2 Release Candidiate is a developer-only release.

The official information can be found here. One the page, we can download the RC0 SDK and Tools for VS2008 SP1. It does not work with Expression Blend 2.5 Preview any more. Instead, it works with Expression Blend 2.0 + sp1 preview.

The RC0 offline document can be downloaded here.

The Silverlight Unit Testing framework has been updated for RC0 and can be downloaded here. Detail information can be found here. As for today, the Visual Studio 2008 Silverlight Unit Testing Project Template has not been updated, it works fine if you follow the option 1 path in this Jeff Wilcox's post.

There isn't a RC0 version of Deep Zoom Composer. Instead, we just need an updated project template.

Some projects are already porting to RC0, for example:

Siverlight multi-file uploader.

ExpandoHeaderControl.

There is an interesting form layout tool called XAML Power Toys and it supports RC0. 

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When develping a large UI project, Composite Application Guidance is a great framework for breaking large pieces into smaller chuncks using model-view-presenter pattern so that multiple developers can work on it at the same time. However, the current Composite Application Guidance for WPF, Prism 1.0, does not support Silverlight. Luckily, Prism 2.0 is on the work so hopefully we will see Composite UI for Silverlight soon.

J2EE 1.3 implements WS-Security draft specification while J2EE 1.4 implements WS-Security 1.0 specification. This makes it a challenge WAS 5, which is based on J2EE 1.3, and WAS 6, which is based on J2EE 1.4, to interoperate with each other. Luckly, IBM DeveloperWorks has a 4 part article that tacles this problem:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/views/webservices/libraryview.jsp?search_by=tackle+ws-security+specification+interoperability+challenges

 

Silverlight 2 could be an interesting platform for business applications. It comes with a set of VB like controls, yet it could be deployed like a web application. The silverlight 2 runtime is only 3.5 MB, yet it supports C#/VB language and client-side library with good set of functionalities, includding LINQ and web service communication library.

A Silverlight 2 business application would typically communicate with back-end via web service calls. Interestingly, .NET 3.5 sp1 also comes with ADO.NET data service that allows us quickly turn database into a web service. The following are the resources, from the front-end to the back end, that allows us to construct application using architecture:

Silverlight 2 control demo Download

Using ASP.NET authentication in Web Service with Silverlight

Accessing ASP.NET membership, role and profile from Silverlight

ADO.NET Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Service Framework

The following are additional resources that allows us to create rich applications:

Silverlight Rich TextBox

Silverlight and Virtual Earth and Album Atlas (Created with VIEWS)

Silverlight File Browser and Upload and Silverlgiht File Uploader

Unit Testing: Silverlight unit testing, Silverlight NUnit

Dependency injection or IOC: SLUnity, Bloom, ninject

Model view presenter framework: MVC#

AOP for Silverlight: PostSharp

Lastly, there is an MSDN casts on this subject by Shawn Wildermuth. I would also recommend Shawn's blog.

Today, The ASP.NET MVP NewsLetter at blognewschannel.com brought me attention to PInvoke Interop Assistant at http://www.codeplex.com/clrinterop/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=14120. It is a valuable tool.

soapUI is a great tool for testing web service. However, configuring soapUI to test securied web service have not easy. The only information I can get is this page. Fortuanately, soapUI is an open source tool so I was able to down the code and open it in Eclipse to step through the code. I finally figured out how to make it work:

1. Make sure you installed JCE unlimited strength policy (at the end of this link).
2. soapUI does not import jks or jceks keystores correctly. It needs to be converted to PKCS12 keystore.
3. soapUI failed to recognize the server public key in the keystore (a bug in version 2.02?). Instead, I have to provide it the server private keystore for it to work.

Basically, I configure the keystore in the project level. Create the outgoing and incoming configuration. Then I go to binding to bind the outgoing and incoming WSS configuration.