Kidding about the Tsunami thing, but for a moment there I was tempted.

Wave looks cool, but as I evaluate it, I realize quickly that myOSity will be that and much more, so perhaps “tsunami” isn’t such a bad nickname after all.  Nah, I don’t like tsunamis, they hurt people… :(

I am pleased to announce that myOSity was recently accepted into the Microsoft BizSpark program.  For those of you who don't know what BizSpark is all about:  It's a program specifically designed for small-business startups and provides software, support, and exposure - all courtesy of Microsoft.  A good program that myOSity is proud to be a part of.

In the second installment of this video series, I demonstrate the myOSity Interop framework, which allows applications to communicate with each other and pass information.

Link to wmv file

The little solitaire application I wrote a while back has been accepted into the Silverlight.net Community Gallery  Check it out!

Over the next several days, myOSity will be relocating to a new server and hosting provider.  The current host has been good to us during early development, but it's time for myOSity to find a home where scalability is not going to be an issue down the road.  So over the next week, expect a few random disruptions to both myOSity and this blog.

This is actually really exciting news, because it means that myOSity is getting closer to v1.0!

The myOSity project is getting big.  So big in fact, that I’m beginning to have trouble troubleshooting issues in a reasonable timeframe.  I’ve decided that it’s best at this point to spend a little time writing some unit tests, rather than move forward on features.   Once I have all the unit tests written, I’ll begin moving forward again in a test-driven mode, which should help me save time in the long-run.

I put together a little screen cast (my first ever) which highlights the main features of myOSity.   Subsequent videos will dive into different aspects of myOSity in more detail.

Link to WMV file

I moved another application to open-source on Codeplex today:  Solitaire!

I previously wrote about Solitaire here, waaay back in January.  Oh how the time flies…

myOSity’s file system has received an important upgrade.  Now when you click “Open” on any file in the File Browser, myOSity will attempt to load an application that supports the selected file’s MIME type (.jpg, .png, etc). 

I’ve upgraded Xamla and the myOSity Image Viewer applications to take advantage of this new feature.

So here I am in the File Browser, about ready to open a Xamla file that I’ve previously uploaded to the myOSity file system from my computer…

I click “Open” on the file “myosity_mockup2.xaml" and… voila!  Xamla opens and the project file I selected is automatically loaded.

In order to check out this new feature, you’ll need to create an account (guest accounts don’t have file system access).

What’s next for the File System? 

Next up is integrated load and save directly to the file system from other applications.  Right now you can only upload files to the file system from your local computer, but that will soon change…

A common situation I run into is the need to access some element within a DataTemplate.  Silverlight isn't able to auto-generate strongly typed references to these elements in code behind.  In other words, adding the "x:Name=myElementName" property to the element doesn't matter from a code-behind standpoint.  However, we can use the x:Name in a different way to access our element at the right moment. Enter: Element-To-Element databinding.  I think many of us know how to bind to property of another element, but it is also possible to bind to the element itself.

The scenario:

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