One of our ClipFlair Studio users reported on having some issue trying to install Silverlight on MacOS-X, so I gathered some related info below:     First of all, at the Silverlight installation webpage, at the System Requirements tab, you can find the following requirements: Macintosh (Intel-based) Intel Core Duo 1.83-gigahertz (GHz) or ...

based on the other samples posted at StackOverflow on how to format XML created by DataContractSerializer, that use XmlWriter, here’s a version (from ClipFlair source code) that works with streams (and Ionic.Zip library in specific). It also shows how the code is when you don’t apply formatting (using conditional compilation).  ...

I’ve been puzzled for some days now with the IIS Transform Manager installation we have at ClipFlair for automating the conversion of media files (for example using Microsoft Expression Encoder) into IIS Smooth Streams. The watch folder I’ve set up for this task was ignoring some of the media files I was dropping in for no [...]

Copying from Microsoft Web Deploy readme: If you encounter any problems during installation, you can run appropriate command listed below for your version of Windows to create a log file that will contain information about the installation process: msiexec /L install.log /I <path_to_msi> You can analyze this log file after a failed ...

While stepping through “ShowDialog()” method of OpenFileDialog with Visual Studio 2010 debugger, at the Silverlight code pictured below (for loading a ClipFlair window’s stored options), I got a “Dialogs must be user-initiated” exception. Same behaviour will be shown with SaveFileDialog too, every time you try to step through the “ShowDialog()” ...

Project Linker is a Visual Studio Extension that “helps to automatically create and maintain links from a source project to a target project to share code that is common to Silverlight and WPF”. In ClipFlair, where I have shared code between a Silverlight and a WPF project (I guess same would be for XNA projects [...]

When using MVVM design style for a Silverlight or WPF control, it is common to use the control’s DataContext to keep the associated ViewModel instance, so that in the XAML file for the control one can use simple binding statements from the UI to the view model (and back if TwoWay binding mode is specified) [...]

Qualys BrowserCheck will perform a security analysis of your browser and its plugins to identify any security issues. You can install it at https://browsercheck.qualys.com/   Another useful quick online tool (needs no installation) for checking that you do have the latest in web browser technology is Browse Happy, at ...

An annoying feature of Skype of recent Skype versions is that by default it shows an icon on the Windows taskbar apart from the one at the taskbar tray while you’re signed in. This also means it shows in the ALT+TAB key sequence when switching between open windows, which you might not always want to [...]

If you want to use the latest DotNetZip library (version 1.9.1.8) with Silverlight, you should get a patched version from http://dotnetzip.codeplex.com/workitem/14049, instead of the official download for Silverlight. It seems the Silverlight build in 1.9.1.8 official download doesn’t work correctly, since it tries to get IBM437 Encoding (as ...

At ClipFlair’s Playground Silverlight app I’m using DotNetZip library (Ionic.Zip namespace) for writing saved component state to a .ZIP file. In fact the Activity container there can create one .ZIP for each state that contains one .ZIP per-component it hosts (it can even host multiple instances of its own Activity componnt type to have nested ...

Was just debugging an issue with loading of saved state at ClipFlair’s Text component, when I realized that Silverlight’s (and WPF’s) RichTextBox control doesn’t accept an empty string at its Xaml proprerty to clear its contents as one would expect. Instead clearing the contents of the RichTextBox requires a call to Blocks.Clear(). In ClipFlair’s ...

ClipFlair’s project description website is based on WordPress (a quite extensible blogging platform based on PHP). The other day we had an issue with the AddThis Plugin for WordPress, which was adding tracking suffices (in the form #.UAxxxxx) to the end of our URLs on the browser address bar. Moreover this wasn’t occuring in Internet [...]

One of the main goals of the ClipFlair project is to explore the use of Video Captioning (together with Revoicing) for Foreign Language Learning (FLL). There both are important enhancements compared to the simpler two-line subtitling that was put in use in its ancestor project LeViS. Captioning means that multi-row text is needed while text [...]

TeamViewer is a very handy remote control / remote support and screen sharing application with a free version for personal use only. I’ve been using it for some time now since friends and family tend to contact me for support issues and I’m very pleased with its simple installation and use (a user can even [...]

Supposing you have an MSDN Subscription, you could download say SQL Server 2012 Standard Edition (x86 and x64) – DVD (English) from the following URL: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/downloads/hh442898.aspx#FileId=48810 Suppose you do so and you keep that .ISO file (a CD/DVD image that you can burn to a disk using Windows 7 or ...

Just found in my backups a batch file for enabling big uploads to MojoPortal running on IIS: %windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd        set config "Default Web Site/portal"        -section:requestFiltering       ...

Since our onoing project ClipFlair is a follow-up of the succesful project LeViS, during its development I’m also looking at covering possible use-cases I infer from feedback entries at LvS application issue tracker on Codeplex (note that ClipFlair is also opensourced on Codeplex at http://ClipFlair.codeplex.com). One such issue ...

Trying to make CaptionsGridWindow of ClipFlair serve captions editing on-the-fly to SMF (Silverlight Media Framework [now called MMPPF]) player component, I had a real hard time, plagued by a bug at TimedTextElementStyle. It seems to be setting default FontSize for captions using a “Cell” unit instead of using a “Pixel” unit. Currently SMF only ...

In the context of ClipFlair development, I was recently adding independent scaling (zooming) functionality to its ZUI container’s floating windows (apart from the container zooming functionality) and came across some strange behavior, where the windows seemed to also move apart from getting scaled. After banging my head a bit I decided to take a ...

A big nuissance in Windows Live Writer is that when you try to type in a double-quote character you get some special Unicode character (“ or ”, at the start and end of a string respectively), other than the classic ASCII character used in programming. That way people copy-pasting snippets from your blog can get [...]

While refactoring ClipFlair code to use MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) pattern, I came across the XAML error “Object reference not set to an instance of an object.”, shown in Visual Studio when trying to bind to my ViewModel (accessed implicitly, being set as the DataContext of the XAML control) for a property named Source. I have settled [...]

Following up on my post on how to fix CSpeex (http://cspeex.codeplex.com) to compile at Silverlight 5 (see http://zoomicon.wordpress.com/2012/06/09/fix-compile-cspeex-audio-codec-at-silverlight-4-rc-and-silverlight-5/).  Initially I thought it was not working correctly, but then I noticed I was running it on Terminal Server and didn’t have an ...

According to http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/center.en.html#vertical CSS level 2 doesn’t have a property for centering things vertically. There will probably be one in CSS level 3. But even in CSS2 you can center blocks vertically, by combining a few properties. The trick is to specify that the outer block is to be formatted as a table ...

Babylon Search is one of the most abusive addons for Mozilla Firefox and other web browsers. It installs with other free software (most probably profiting from tracking your searching habits) and then it is quite hard even for experienced users to completely uninstall it. While maintaining other computers in the past I’ve used a combination [...]