Handling Network Outage in Silverlight with Caliburn
If you are building an OOB application with Silverlight that relies on web services, you may have some interesting challenges on you hands.  You probably want to have some fallback for certain operations when the network is down.  You can do some fun stuff with caches and message queuing, but there still may be certain operations that you just don’t want to be available when the network is down.  Here’s a solution you can build using Caliburn’s filters that will automatically disable UI attached to decorated actions when the network becomes unavailable: public interface INetwork : INotifyPropertyChanged { bool IsAvailable { get; } } public

The Silverlight 4 Beta is Available!
You can check it out immediately at http://silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-4-beta   Here's a couple of other links to help you get started as well: http://wildermuth.com/2009/11/18/Silverlight_4_Beta_Announced! http://johnpapa.net/silverlight/silverlight-4-beta-announced-at-pdc09-g

MVVM Study Part 4: Naked WPF
I’ve blogged previously about the MVVM pattern, but so far I have managed to escape without showing any code ;)  Before diving in deeper, I would like to stop and show what it takes to do a very simple implementation of this pattern on top of naked WPF (that’s plain WPF without any cool frameworks). After all my praise of MVVM and how well matched it is with WPF/Silverlight, you might be surprised to hear me suggest that it’s not possible to implement without building a little infrastructure first.  It’s true.  But, we really only need to create one cl

A Follow-up to my Azure Panic Attack
In this post, I panicked a bit about an email I received from The Azure Team ;)  In short, the email said that my storage account was going to be deleted on November 3rd if I didn’t migrate it to the new servers.  I received the email around 6pm on November 2nd.  Yikes! I feared that we might lose all of Silver Arcade’s assets.  After a bit of research, I discovered that I should have received a similar email warning me about this change several months ago. Something went wrong somewhere, somehow. In

Microsoft, what is the meaning of this?
I just received this email on November 2nd at 6pm.  I hadn’t heard a word of this prior.  Thanks for the warning… Windows Azure CTP participant, You are receiving this mail because you have an application or storage account in Windows Azure in the “USA - Northwest” region.  Windows Azure production applications and storage will no longer be supported in the ‘USA-Northwest’ region.  We will be deleting all Windows Azure applications and storage accounts in the “USA - Northwest” region on November 3rd. To move your application/storage, first delete the project using the “Delete Service” button.  Then recreate it, choosing