roncli.com blog: October 2009

Back in January of last year, I started work on the Six Minutes To Release website using Silverlight. It... didn't go so well. People couldn't use it on Macs, and there were other fugly things about it I didn't like. I ended up abandoning the project and coding it in straight ASP.Net.

Turns out that the XAML experience I got from working on it the first time through the SMTR website came in handy. The Rawr project is using Silverlight for its next major release, Rawr 3. Having taken on the protection paladin module, I was able to write a needed piece for that module to work in Rawr 3 in about 3 days on and off. Of course, the stumbling of not having touched it in nearly 2 years took me some time to get past, but once I did it was smooth sailing.

There's a few things I don't like about it, though. Rawr is going to release a Silverlight web release and a WPF application release. The problem with the two releases is that the XAML used in each is not necessarily compatible with each other in all cases. This results in being unable to use certain features, such as StringFormatting. We also have to use a cheap preprocessing approach to be able to compile the same XAML file in both places.

Is it me, or could Microsoft have done a better job of streamlining the two versions? Why even have two versions of XAML? It seems like a lot of extra work for similar functionality that could be done all in one place.

In any case, I've put a lot on my plate, and I've devoted this weekend to getting it out. Up next, SMTR's new raid performance reporting, which is almost done. Should be fun.

Labels: Coding, Gaming, Rawr, Silverlight, Six Minutes To Release, World of Warcraft, WPF, XAML

Sunday, October 11, 2009

LibWowHeroes 3.2.2
Posted: 4:25:00 AM 0 comments

It appears I'm amassing a nice amount of .Net libraries for World of Warcraft. My latest offering is for WoW Heroes, and is a .Net library for accessing their XML files. It's called, predictably, LibWowHeroes. Yeah, sorry for not being original, but at least you know what to expect!

Unlike my other libraries, this is a full release. With it you can query WoW Heroes for a guild and return lots of WoW Heroes-specific data from it. Unfortunately, I don't have manual character updates working yet, but that will be something I will work on soon. And WoW Heroes data will be coming to Six Minutes To Release very soon.

Labels: Coding, LibWowHeroes, Six Minutes To Release, World of Warcraft

Friday, October 02, 2009

An Experiment
Posted: 5:53:00 PM 0 comments

Six Minutes To Release seems to be my favorite testing grounds for experimental code lately. Fortunately, the RSS experiment was a success.

This one involves moving the ViewState off of the HTML page and on to the database. Some of the ViewStates were getting huge, even when I'd try to manage the size of the ViewState. So I decided to take that out of the HTML to slim some pages down. So far it seems to be working, but it hasn't been up for too long.

This caused me to rethink my ASP.Net model, and I ended up putting data that I usually store in a separate class, such as login information, into the class that inherits System.Web.UI.Page. Makes it much cleaner in my opinion, as I don't have to store references to Response, Request, and Server.

So we'll see how this goes. This is all based on an idea I got for Gate, and if it goes well I'll end up using it in Gate as well. Should be fun.

Labels: Coding, Gate, Six Minutes To Release, ViewState