Did you know you can decompile Silverlight apps? As with ever other .NET app, if you have the assemblies you can pretty much load them into reflector and view the source.

So when it comes to silverlight how do you get the assemblies in the first place? Well it turns out when you develop your app all the assemblies are packages into a XAP file which is then downloaded to the client.

An XAP is actually just a zip file with a different extension. Therefore, all you need to do is the following.

1.) Locate the XAP file on a web page or file system by looking at the source.

2.) Place into the browser and download the XAP package.

3.) Once downloaded, change the XAP extension to .ZIP

4.) Extract the package using whichever tool you like. I use WINRAR.

5.) Locate the assemblies in reflector and view the source.

Rockford has an interesting post about a website called http://browsershots.org. The idea is, you submit a url and they will check how your website renders in 45+ browsers on multiple operating systems and provide screenshots for you to download. They also do some cool javascript testing as well.

Below is an a screenshot of the initial results page for the home page of my site.

And here is what my site looks like in Opera running on linux. V.cool.

Ok I'm sure you were hoping I was going to announce something cool like the hidden flight simulator in excel.

Sorry, here is some XAML instead.

 Windowless Easter Egg

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Something has definately gone wrong here.... A quick browse for robots on the web turns up a robot trying to be human and a human trying to be a robot.

Robot Albert Hubo

Robot Dance

Take the following statement.

Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot process the content of most Flash files or dynamic pages.

You can find this text in the google indexing FAQ site here. What I find compelling about this statement is that of the last line..

we cannot process the content of most Flash files or dynamic pages.

This raises an interesting question with regard to the future of search engines as we enter the web 3.0 era. As HTML has slowely reached the limits of what it can offer, we are starting to see the rise of new rich/smart client style applications based on technolgies such as silverlight, Flex and Flash.

Tim Berners-Lee has predicted that web 3.0 could possibly be based on vector graphics platforms. These technologies offer rich vector graphics with runtime libraires that are delivered direct to the desktop. With these runtimes comes the use of custom binary formats that allow code to be run within the browser and peform functions that standard HTML/Ajax apps would dream of. 

So with the winds of change coming....how will search engines continue to perform effective indexing of site content when its delivered in custom binary formats?

• Will we see new standards defined that will be specifically used for the publication & management of site content for indexing?
• Will search engines implement new techniques for indexing binary files?
• Will our Web 3.0 apps always require HTML equivalents for supporting search providers?

I dont know the answers to these questions yet but I am looking forward to seeing how it pans out.

Looking through my logs I decided to compose a list of useragents/browsers visiting my site during feb.  I was amazed to see that there were still people using  IE2 out there! I mean.... really???

These results are shown below.

Netscape Navigator 6+
Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer 6
Netscape Navigator 4
Internet Explorer 5
Internet Explorer 4
WebAlta Crawler/2.0 (http://www.webalta.net/ru/about_webmaster.html) (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; ru-RU)
MSNBOT
msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
Internet Explorer 2
Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 3 subscribers; feed-id=10707310861055891819)
Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 2 subscribers; feed-id=10707310861055891819)
ia_archiver
Netscape Navigator 3
BlogPulse (ISSpider-3.0)
BlogPulseLive (support@blogpulse.com)
EnaBot/1.2 (http://www.enaball.com/crawler.html)
freedir.co.uk/0.8 (+http://freedir.co.uk/directory/)
Opera/8.00 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en)
NewsGatorOnline/2.0 (http://www.newsgator.com; 1 subscribers)
Opera/9.0 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en)
Opera/9.00 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en)
Opera/9.26 (Windows NT 6.0; U; en)
psbot/0.1 (+http://www.picsearch.com/bot.html)
SurveyBot/2.3 (Whois Source)
Technoratibot/0.7
Tgulhz enqb iwgovpdqc
Wkivtc bnfswe wvdu
Pxmtonqhj szftv djhiesuc
Opera/9.50 (Windows NT 5.0; U; pt-br)
Opera/9.00 (Windows NT 5.1; U; ru)
Opera/9.23 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en)
Opera/9.24 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en)
Opera/9.26 (Windows NT 5.1; U; cs)
Opera/7.50 (X11; Linux i686; U) [en]
Opera/8.0 (Macintosh; PPC Mac OS X; U; en)
Opera/8.01 (Windows NT 5.1)
Internet Explorer 3
Ajuqwt tdmy djrpagf
Java/1.6.0_02
Jyxgil mryhla ugxwa
Lwizpcxo mgvx lsxa

Looking through my emails I found a few easter related jokes bouncing around. This one particulary made me laugh so thought I would share.

Just been snowboarding in Austria for the last few days. Had some great snow and a litte stiff today. I just wanted to blog quickly to tell you that you can now download the source code for the Silverlight 2 Control Template browser. Please note, this version currently uses an embedded XML file to render each template. I am working on updating this to use a XAMLWriter implementation but this is still a work in progress.

Download

Well it seems one of the big annoucments that was due to be made at Mix 08 is that Silverlight is coming to mobile devices and more importantly... Nokia handsets.

There is apparently going to be a demo of an S60 device running Silverlight mobile edition which I can wait to see!  Will post more when it arrives!

The Nokia s60

Scott Gu has shed some light on some of the changes coming to WPF this year. Notably, Scott inidcates that there will be new contols for WPF, one of which is a new a "Ribbon" control. I have thought that for a while that Microsoft needed to get this control to market as the Office 2007 styling has become quite popular.

There are a number of vendors that do offer a WPF ribbon these are shown below.

• Divelements - Sandock Ribbon (Xbap demo)
• DotNetBar Ribbon
• Actipro (Xbap demo)

Also it seems more graphic intensive features such as shadowing etc are being pushed onto the graphics hardware increasing performance. V.cool!

I have just finished listening to Scott Gu's comments on Silverlight 2.0. From what he is saying 2.0 should finally offer the level of functionality to truly make Silverlight a compelling option.

Just to summarise....Silverlight 2.0 will get the following.

• Large suite of controls for developing LOB style applications
• Databinding support
• Styling and control templating
• Flowlayout support
• WCF Communications stack support

Good news!

Having attended the Alt.net UK conference a few weeks ago I am disappointed by the fact that I cannot make the US event. There's going to be some great people there and the chance to discuss topics with them would have been great.

I am making sense of my decision using the following.

• Its expensive to head over to the US just for a conference.
• I am  getting married this year and need to save some money.
• The "Mrs" gets jealous and thinks its a holiday.
• There will be other events.

With that I rest my case.

Lightning Forks

Ants nest paths

Tree root system

Most developers spend the majority of their day with their head stuck inside visual studio,  I’m no different, so as a result I like to customize my editor so that I am as comfortable as possible.  Its in this area i’m a little old fashioned. I can’t stand the default white colour settings that visual studio offers, therefore I spend quite some time tuning them so they meet my needs.  Below is an example my code windows in visual studio. I really like these settings and I feel it makes the code far more readable and items such as strings, numbers, operators, keywords and regions are all specifically coded.

Many of my colleagues have commented that my settings make my code window look like a Christmas tree. So if your feeling like you want to be a little festive then you can grab them here.