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Showing posts from 2010

Carving Rings

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[Abstract/ Sharing]   To close off 2010, I’m posting an article on how to carve a pair of linked rings from a single block of wood. It’s very simple so if you have a chance, why not have a go yourself.     This post is dedicated to the memory of Julian Guy Tulloch , who died peacefully on the 12th December 2010, aged 78. Julian first introduced me to carving. We start with a small block of wood, 5cm by 5cm by 10cm. The exact dimensions are not too important, you just want a block of wood that is rectangular in nature with a square end: I’m using Tilia or Basswood which is good for carving – not too dense and very little grain. You can find this type of wood at craft shops, often described as ‘Carving Blocks’. Extruded Cross The first step is to mark out an extruded cross using a pencil: I made the cross 1cm wide. The cross is drawn on the two square ends of the block of wood and joined up over the length of the block. Note, the extruded cross is the shaded area

WCF Self Hosted Duplex Service for Chubby Client

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[Concrete/Interesting] I received an email from a friend of mine. He was trying to build a Chubby Client, following some of the ideas I put down in my previous article. What was needed in this case was a Duplex Service that send data back from a thread outside of the main thread. My friend sent me his code and declared it couldn’t be done. That sounded like a ‘dare’ to me, so I thought I’d have a go. In this article I will take you through some of the major steps and discuss the overall architecture and solution. If you want the code, I've published this to Google Code so feel free to download and take a look: http://deviceservices.googlecode.com The Goal The main goal was to develop a device service that can be called from a Silverlight in or out of browser client. The device service would have initialization and action methods similar to those supported by an Windows OPOS device such as a scanner, printer, cash draw, customer display or MSR. For more details about Microsoft OPOS

Chubby RESTful Clients using Silverlight and WCF

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  [Concrete/Interesting] Many years ago I was working on a project. We needed a application that worked in a browser but everything came from the local machine. Later I started to notice devices like Routers that had a web interface…just connect using HTTP to the device IP address and there you are. I used a similar technique in my Ghostfiles Service application ( http://www.lowrieweb.com/ghostfiles.htm ). Chubby Client Architecture Ghostfiles is a Windows Service Application that runs as a lightweight HTTP server on a private HTTP port. If you point your browser at it, the service returns back application pages. It’s just like having Apache or IIS running, only lightweight with only the pages of the application supported. This is what I called a Chubby Client, a thin client interface delivered to a browser by a local web and application server. The basic architecture used in Ghostfiles is shown here:   Page requests (GET/PUT) from the browser are handled by the light HT