Michael Sync

We had great BBQ party at East Coast Park last Saturday. We went there around 3 PM for attending skating class which is provided by our company. It was really fun. Thanks, Xuenn!!

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Hello Everybody! How are you doing? I recently received some mails from some of you asking why I’ve disappeared in Silverlight Forum lately. Well, yes! I couldn’t participate in Silverlight forum that much these days. :(  Why? Because there are mainly two reasons behind.

Let me start with the first one. I recently changed my job. I started working as a IT consultant at Xuenn Pte Ltd and I will be working with .NET 3.5 (espcially: WPF(Windows Presentation Foundation), WCF(Windows Communication Foundation) and maybe, Silverlight too). I’m really happy to be a part of Xuenn. All people from that company are young, active and very cool.  As you all know, I’m big fan of Silverlight and was looking for Silverlight Developer Position in Singapore. But I found that the most of companies are not ready to use Silverlight for their products. So, I decided to play with WPF and WCF in future. I will be doing Silverlight also and maybe, I will be pushing my company to do some Silverlight products in future. As of now, I have to learn WPF, WCF and Prism as much as I can.

Here is another thing. I have joined the Prism Contrib project and will be start working with them very soon. Our team will have Live Meeting on July 22, 2008. Contributing to this project is my spare time work and I believe that I will get a lot of great experience from that project.

That’s all what I was doing lately. What about you? What are you doing these days? I didn’t read Silverlight Forum that much these days so I think I might miss out some importants news or problems/workarouds or tips or etc. Please tell me if I miss out something from Silverlight community.

Manning Publications is giving away 2 free ebooks a day through April (April 17 to April 30). They will choose two winners randomly everyday. Winners are allowed to chose any ebook available on Manning.com.

All you need to do is that go to this link http://www.manning.com/free/ and give your first name and email address. That’s all. Good Luck!

This is a guest post by Su. Before reading this, I just want you to know that this is not a technical article. This is nothing related to .NET or Silverlight that I used to post in my blog. But As I’m a Buddhist and currently staying in S’pore, I think I should probably post her feedback here. Thanks for sending this post to me, Su!
~ Michael Sync

To whom it may concern, especially Dr Lam and Claire Huang,

I am referring to the article “Doctor with a heart for charitable causes, Page no. A4, My Paper, 26 Mar 2008“. First of all thanks to Dr Lam for his contribution and donation to Myanmar. The level of health condition in Myanmar is low due to low food hygiene standard and people need helping hand like what Dr Lam did. I do appreciate it.

However in the article, Huang quoted “I thought monks, being on a vegetarian diet, should not have coronary heart disease, but I was so shocked to see so many of them with severe coronary heart disease”.

I was originally from Myanmar and lived there since from 1980 to 2001. As a Buddhism. I would like to highlight that most of the Myanmar monks are not vegetarians, not like Chinese monks. To be a Buddhist monk, it is not necessary to be a vegetarian. I don’t think that Buddha himself was a vegetarian. He never set the rule to be a vegetarian in order to be a Buddhist. Some people choose to be vegetarians which came from Hindu. Therefore, vegetarian is “a choice”, not “a must” to a Buddhist.

I would like to ask Dr Lam, why was he so shocked? In fact, they were Myanmar monks and not Chinese monks. Did he ask the monks, who he referred, whether they are vegetarians or not? Were they from vegetarian monastery? What did he mean in that phrase? Why did he choose to put his surprise on Monk, why not Myanmar people?

I was confused after reading that paragraph and worried that it may create misunderstanding about Buddhism in Myanmar and Myanmar Monks to Singaporeans and Non-Buddhists due to tradition and culture difference between Myanmar and Chinese Monks. He may have seen vegetarian monks but they could not represent for whole Myanmar Monk, not vegetarians in majority, although he mentioned “so many of them”.

I would like to request that please leave the perception in Singapore before you comment about other countries.

Regards,
Su

Yesterday was my blog’s birthday. My blog is two years old now but still a babe, isn’t it? Let’s take a look the stats of my blog and what I have done during last year.

Blog Stats

• 311, 219 page views this year. ( 377,947 - 66,728)
• 800 to 2,000 page views per day
• 97 posts ( 311 - 214)
• 1342 comments ( 1,961 - 619 )
• 25 categories

My blogging experience for this year

I moved my blog to Dreamhost on 11st Oct, 07. Their support team is really great.. but there are a few downtime during those days. Another news is that I got two great guest bloggers (Brad McKelvie and egoZd) for my blog recently. Thanks a lot, Brad and egoZd. I hope there will be more guest bloggers who love to share their expertises in my blog. Actually, Guest blogging is “win-win” situation for both blog owners and guest bloggers. I’m really appreciate their help on my blog.

Award

I’ve been awarded SOB (Successful and Outstanding Bloggers) for my blog this year. <link>

Plans for next year.

• More articles, tip/trick and tutorials for Silverlight: I’ll write more about Silverlight in my blog. And also, I will write about other interesting stuffs some time.

I really want to say “thank you” to all of my loyal readers of this blog. Feel free to let me know if you have any suggestion or comment to improve my blog. Thanks!

I’m sorry that I’m not able to post any new post in my blog during these days. Because, those tutorials below eat all of my free time lately. but yes, those are petty good. You should read if you have some free time.
Silverlight 2.0 - Tutorials

Those tutorials are the first and earliest tutorials for Silverlight 2.0 that will be released next month. There is no sourcecode attached in those tutorials but it will be added once SL 2.0 is released. Yes, SL become more like WPF.

• Part 1: Creating “Hello World” with Silverlight 2 and VS 2008
• Part 2: Using Layout Management
• Part 3: Using Networking to Retrieve Data and Populate a DataGrid
• Part 4: Using Style Elements to Better Encapsulate Look and Feel
• Part 5: Using the ListBox and DataBinding to Display List Data
• Part 6: Using User Controls to Implement Master/Details Scenarios
• Part 7: Using Templates to Customize Control Look and Feel
• Part 8: Creating a Digg Desktop Version of our Application using WPF

WPF: A Beginner’s Guide

Those following tutorials are written by Sacha Barber, one of my favorite writes from Codeproject. He is awarded MVP (Most Valuable Professional) from Microsoft and MVP from Codeproject. He wrote a lot of award-winning articles in Codeproject.

• Layout
• XAML vs Code / Markup Extensions And Resources (next article)
• Commands and Events
• Dependency Properties
• DataBinding
• Styles/Templates

WPF Business Application Series

• Part 1 Application Structure, Skinning & Custom ToolBar Button Control
• Part 2 Form Notification Control That Binds To IDataErrorInfo.Error Property
• Part 3 Business Object Declarative Programming; How To Implement Object Validation & Logging
• Part 4 Business Object Declarative Programming; How The Business Entity Base Class Work
• Part 5 Business Object Declarative Programming; Dynamic Form Control
• Part 6 Exception Handling and Logging
• Part 7 Loading Menus & ToolBar From Object Source & Application Security
• Part 8 Business Application MDI
• Part 9 Displaying SQL Server Reporting Services Reports In WPF
• Part 10 Complete Layered WPF Business Application
• Part 11 Complete Layered ASP.NET Business Application

A Guided Tour of WPF

• Part 1 (XAML): Learn about XAML and how it is used in WPF applications.
• Part 2 (Layout): Learn about layout panels and how they are used to construct user interfaces.
• Part 3 (Data binding): Learn how WPF data binding works and how it can be used.
• Part 4 (Data templates and triggers): Learn how data templates and triggers work and how they can be used.
• Part 5 (Styles): Learn about how UIs can be styled in WPF.

Plus, I’m also reading WPF - Unleashed book. I think that this book is also good one. If you are interested in learning WPF, I would recommend you this book. but only one thing. that books doesn’t focus on VS 2008 since it has been published before VS 2008 releases.