I am talking in the context of services such as Google Docs. I don’t have a huge amount of documents, but I simply don’t have the perfect solution for having these docs available anywhere and everywhere I am. I like many users I expect work on/want access to docs in different locations and on different machines. Google docs seems like a perfect solution, but when you don’t have an Internet connection, like when you are on a plane for example, its not a good solution at all.

Then there are services like Live Mesh, DropBox that both sync files on your local machine, into the cloud and sync to any other machine where you have the software installed. Well sometimes you are working on a machine that isn’t yours, or you don’t/cant install anything. Going back to Google Docs, despite the fact that it’s an excellent service, but lets face it , Google Docs doesn’t have the same features or usability as MS Word/Excel etc. Then there’s Office Live, which again is kind of a mix, but still not perfect. You need to install the software, do connect to your online DMS (Office Live), open the file from Word/Excel, edit and save directly back to the cloud.

So what do I want? Well I want it all, I want to be able to store docs in the my own secure DMS, be able to upload scanned docs (which I do with google docs at the moment, it works well!), read/edit those docs on my iPhone (which is possible, but its not great!). But I think the mostly I would like to have the option to work on them locally or in the cloud.

With the new Office web apps on the horizon, it looks like this may be a reality, although Word for the web isn’t released yet, Excel is and looks great. One problem, the docs have to be in my SkyDrive, which as far as I am aware cannot be linked directly to my local copy of MS Word? Perhaps this will come!! I still don’t think I will be able to edit or even have great viewing experience on my iPhone for these docs as lets face it…the iPhone is apple and Word is Microsoft! But one can dream!!

[Posted from Blogo on the Mac!] [[ Prefer Live Writer!!]]

[So much that I had to open in Live writer to sort the formatting out!]

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I came up against a problem, it seems like a pretty specific problem, but none the less the solution took me a while to figure out, so worth sharing!

My problem: I have a user control that contains some text among other things, but the text is of various length, the containing textblock therefore, like the user control has a dynamic height (set the Height property to System.Double.NaN).

There are n instances of the user control within a StackPanel, as a control is added to the StackPanel I want a StoryBoard which animates the Height and the Opacity.  The Height of course I do not know.

So I need to the set the Value of the Double Animation at runtime.

The XAML for the StoryBoard.

Firstly I need to new up the user control, set all the properties, add the control to the StackPanel, set the height of the DoubleAnimation and fire the StoryBoard.

Just simply going UserControl.ActualHeight will return 0 because the layout engine has not calculated the ActualHeight property. Which is the problem!!!

So we need to use the Dispatcher class (you can find out more on MSDN).

In the User Control (UserComment)

Hope this helps!

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By Default scrolling with the mouse wheel is not enabled in the Silverlight DataGrid, actually I don’t think any control has it enabled.

Personally I think its pretty standard functionality for things to scroll with the mouse wheel.

So, I have got this little chunk of code that takes does the trick, nothing fancy going on here, but it works a treat.

To explain a little…I found that my delta would change in multiples of 120, depending on how fast I scrolled, –120 if I scrolled down, +120 is I scrolled up.  I needed to change this as if I scrolled down I needed the SelectedIndex to increase, so that’s what the first bit does.

Then I check that I’m not at either 0 or the last item in the datagrid, set the selected index and use the ScrollToView() method.

You may need to change slightly if you have horizontal scrolling, to stay with the correct column, for me having the first column is more than ideal, perfect in fact.

Note: This code has been tested nowhere except on  my dev machine. So, here goes!!

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The issue is with Sharepoint blog category view. The page should only show the posts which have been tagged with the category you click on, but I have found this not to be the case.

I posted a thread on the Sharepoint blog forums and thankfully Laura Rogers came up with a solution.

Here we go…

Navigate to the category.aspx page of the Sharepoint blog.

Add a Query string (URL) Filter web part.

Modify the query string web part settings. Query string parameter name must be Name.

Remove the filter from the posts web part.

Go into the Posts web parts settings, click edit the current view.

In the Filter section, change the option selected.

Now connect the query string web part to the posts web part.

You will get this little popup (you may need to allow popups). Select Category from the list.

That’s it.

Your category filtering should now work.

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I had a little mishap last night at the driving range...

Needless to say I am now in the market for a new driver...I never liked the sound of that one anyway!!

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