Aimee Gurl… for as long as i can remember, technology has always fascinated me

I just saw this from one of the discussion lists. I know a lot of the partners here have some code that's on VB6. The product has some pretty good reviews too. Just posting this out for any partners that may be interested at looking for tools to help migrate their code from VB6 to VS 2005/2008.

VB Migration Partner – The best tool to convert VB6 applications to VB.NET – Home

The third in our Mix It Up Series is coming up! Join us on the 29th of May, when we will be talking about leveraging on Microsoft Office and the Web Platform. Find out more about our Mix It Up Series at http://www.microsoft.com/singapore/msdn/mixitup/default.mspx

So there was a bunch of xml files that I wanted to understand better based on trends and i thought i'd build a silverlight app to render the data. I could have created a program to generate the data in text and just plot them in Excel, but then i thought i should exercise my Silverlight mind for a bit.

Ingredients:

* xml sources
* a styled rectangularBar control// i basically drew a rectangle, changed the fill, right-clicked -> make control
* a named StackPanel i in the main silverlight component

1. using linq, read in and process the data from your bunch of XMLs. In my case, i read each file, concatinated everything, grouped by an attribute, and make the count an attribute. Package it all up in a method called readXML that will return a list of your desired objects / form

2. Blend the rectanglularBar to make it a bit more pretty.

3. Add a named StackPanel to your main canvas:

<Canvas x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White">
        <StackPanel x:Name="panel"></StackPanel>
    </Canvas>

4.in your Page.xaml.cs (codebehind, append the next lines to after the loaded event InitializesComponent():

var msgxml = readXML(); //reads from XML &sorts your data

foreach (var x in msgxml)
{
var y = new StackPanel() { Orientation = Orientation.Horizontal }; // created a new horizontal
//StackPannel to manage the layout of the next two components

y.Children.Add(new TextBlock() { Text = x.datestamp, Width = 100, FontSize = 8, Height=10 });
y.Children.Add(new bar() { Width = x.value});

this.panel.Children.Add(y); //add the Panel born out of Visual Studio t
//e panel born out of expression blend

}

this was how it looked like. Blend it up so you can make it much prettier! I'm really loving LINQ and XAML right now.

P.S. Yes, this could have also been easily done with data binding but my brain was too tired to think. I still don't have the layouting part nailed down yet. Still have a LOT to learn…

p.p.s. yes, i know, there is something off with my sorting.. i only sorted by datevariable[0],  i.e., first character. :p I was also too lazy to think about how to sort dates read from xml ..

Pretty cool update from Live Spaces with virtual earth! It gives you a way to visualize where people are updating their blogs from. //i'm posting this on my spaces just to see if i see myself too..

Live Spaces Vision – Updates in near real-time – MSN on Windows Live

Wish I had the time to fool around with this but for those that do, check out the Popfly Game Creator Alpha

An instructional video is also posted on channel 9.

VERY COOL! Leon introduced me to Messenger TV today. Visit Messenger TV  and find out how you can start watching MSN Videos with your IM buddies today!

Alright, back to work. :p

There's an update to the Deep Zoom Composer. Get it today!

Expression Blend and Design : An Update to Deep Zoom Composer

Pretty cool use of the activity window on live messenger. Check this out if people in your group are on live messenger and would like to have an sort of message board functionality. I wish it would support IM window only though, currently, to view group message history, you have to open an activity. It would be good if you could send the bot a message that would give you the messages of the day or something like that (thinking of when you're accessing the group on messenger mobile).

check it out just the same. Pretty cool.

Messenger Group Chat