Well, the test was tough, I only had 20 minutes left when i finished.  But I was pleasantly surprised afterwards, I scored 940 out of 1000.  There were total of 50 questions.  So I figured I probably got 47 right.

Well, I figure since I have given both the WPF and Silverlight MSTC exams, I compare the two experiences.   I knew going in that Silverlight exam is not going to have the same questions as the WPF one.  After all, even though they both use XAML and you can code using C#, there are substantial differences between the two.  Not to mention the obvious: Silverlight is a web animal and WPF roams the desktops.  And both of these technologies offer solutions that are relevant to their environments and different from other.

Though, there were some similarities.  I would say all together there were may be only 20-25% of the question that I would consider common between the silverlight and WPF exams.  And they were most basic xaml related questions.

That’s it for today.  Until next time.

This was the first time, I ever took any Microsoft certification test.  I figured given that I develop in WPF all the time, it will be a piece of cake.  But no, it wasn’t.   It took me full 3 hours 15 minutes to finish the exam.  I didn’t even have the time to go back and review the questions.   Some of the questions were really verbose.  Just to understand them took me 1 to 2 minutes.  Some questions actually had code in them where one or more lines were omitted that the examinees had to fill in from multiple choices.  My suggestion for future test takers is to allot your time wisely.  Answer the shorter questions first and then go to the verbose ones as they can be very time consuming.

Overall, I believe it was a good test in the sense that it truly does measures ones abilities.   I am glad I passed the exam.

Well, my endeavor was a success.  To learn more about my experience and basic overview of the porting/migrating applications between Silverlight and WPF check out my article @ simple-talk.com :  http://www.simple-talk.com/dotnet/.net-framework/one-application-in-both-wpf-and-silverlight/.

Things to notice about this demo is that these transitions are between two navigation pages.  And transitions are easily controlled through query string parameters.  In the coming days i will be adding more animated transitions to this demo.  Check out these transitions here: (click on the image below to see the demo):

A demo highlighting beautiful transitions that are possible in Silverlight

Ok, if you are coming from Silverlight 3 development like me you will probably fall into this one as well without even knowing it. In Silverlight 3 there were only 9 fonts, and as soon as you select a different font other than the 9 basic fonts then blend would automatically embed them for you. Now in Silverlight 4 Blend doesn’t do that, because now Silverlight can take advantage of system fonts. And that’s what happened to me when i picked Segoe (the new hip font), it didn’t embed and on that xp box it didn’t had that font, hence it broke the formatting. So if you previously tried my ATM app and were stuck at the login page because all you could see was “Hint: the Pin is” (since the default font was bigger than segoe it cut off the actual pin), well, now you can give it another try. This time it reads fully to “Hint the pin is 1234″. Give it a try:  http://www.agileitgroup.com/ATM/

Silverlight ATM Demo Application done in Silverlight 4

Code (applications) are the same way.  They are just like your home. After all, you spend so much time and energy building it.  But 90% of all applications are not obfuscated.  Why?  I think it’s because of lack of information.  I bet a lot of programmers think it is complicated, time consuming and expansive.

In this blog post I am going to try to demystify obfuscation.  In particular, I will be talking about obfuscating Silverlight applications using Eziriz’s .Net Reactor.

First of all it is very important to obfuscate Silverlight applications.  Two reasons:  1.  They are web based and anyone that has access to them can run them.  2.  They run on the client.  Very easy for the user to get their hands on all the dlls.  This is different than let’s say ASP.net where code executes on the server and only the html is sent down to the client.

Lately i have been trying out different obfuscation tools to obfuscate Silverlight applications.  I have tried RedGate’s Smart Assembly, Eziriz’s .Net Reactor and Babel.net.  All three are paid, however the last one has a lighter version for free.  All three are good however, in this post I am going to be talking about my experience with Eziriz’s .Net Reactor.

I say Eziriz’s .Net Reactor is one of the best obfuscation tools around.  It let’s you fine tune your obfuscation at a very granular level.  It uses various obfuscation techniques to protect you code.  here are some of the key techniques it utilizes:

• Standard obfuscation – renaming types and members
• Anti ILDASM – suppresses decompilation
• NecroBit – another Suppresses decompilation technique
• Anti Tempering – prevents assembly modification
• Control Flow obfuscation – turn code in spaghetti code without alerting the functionality
• String encryption – encrypts hard coded strings inside the code

Along with those, it also offers the following:

• creates a mapping file for you to deobfuscate the stack traces from an obfuscated application.
• compresses and encrypts resources within your application.

And best for last for all the Silverlight developers out there.  It works directly with the xap files.

Now, to demystify obfuscation:

Myth 1:  Obfuscation is complicated.  False.  It didn’t require me to write a single line of code.  It didn’t even require me to alter the way i build my application.

Myth 2:  It’s time consuming.  False – Using .Net Reactor, it took me less than 5 minutes to obfuscate my application.

Myth 3:  It’s expansive.  False – most developers out there know of DotFuscator.  And yes they are very expansive.  But i think i got the same results from .Net Reactor which only costs $179.

How i obfuscated my application using .Net Reactor:
Step 1: Built and then published my Silverlight application to staging as usual.
Step 2: Fired up .Net Reactor.
Step 3: Clicked the ‘Open’ button, and pointed to my xap file on the staging
Step 4: It already had checked the following options:  Anti ILDASM, Obfuscation and string encryption.  I additionally checked NecroBit and Control Flow Obfuscation.
Step 5: Clicked the ‘Protect’ link on the side menu bar. It took less then a minute and obfuscation was done.
Step 6: Navigated to Staging:  .Net Reactor had already created a secure folder for me where the obfuscated version of xap file was.  I copied that file and replace the original xap with it.
Step 7: Moved staging to production and i was done.

I tested the obfuscation by opening it up in reflector and guess what, it couldn’t even open those files.  Awesome.

My experience with .Net Reactor has been great.  I found this product to be one of the best obfuscation tools out there, specailly for Silverlight.  And at a price point of $179, I think if it’s not the cheapest then it’s definitely one of the cheapest.

Eziriz’ .Net Reactor: http://www.eziriz.com/dotnet_reactor.htm

ATM Demo Application done in Silverlight 4

On the serious note:  Silverlight ATM is a demonstration of Silverlight’s rich application development capabilities.   The demo was inspired by the Windows Phone 7 user interface.  Some of the things to notice include fluid animations and 3D transitions between pages.  Notice how navigation is tightly integrated with the browser’s navigation stack.  Silverlight gives total control to the application developer in terms of what actions to take in regards to browser’s navigation commands.  Application is completely done using MVVM pattern taking advantage of Silverlight 4′s much awaited commanding support.  Server communication was established using WCF with binary encoding.

One thing to note about Silverlight, given that it’s a subset of WPF, it is not much tolerant to bad architecture/design.  Therefore a solid architecture/design goes a long way toward developing robust enterprise class Silverlight applications.

Side tracking to a different topic:  I think this demo would be a great case study to prove Silverlight as an ideal platform for kiosk applications.

Well, that’s enough talk for today.  Until next time

Today I introduce to you “WPF programmer by day, Silverlight programmer at night”, or me.  Now it’s not strictly WPF programming at day and Silverlight at night.  I really depends.  Like sometimes I will also do some Silverlight programming over the weekends and WPF programming at night.  So don’t take that literally.  Not every thing is black and white.  I though I clear that before we go any further.  Also I make lots of typos and sometimes I just omit whole words all together.  So if you are reading a sentence and it seems like there is a word or two omitted then just fill those in with what you think i would have said.  After all, it’s not a term paper and I shouldn’t have to proof read it out loud 3 times (or in my case 6).

Well, without further ado, my name is Khawar Yunus.  Having trouble pronouncing my first name; you are not alone.  Well, i can try to explain how to pronounce my name but that’s a whole blog entry on its own.  In the mean time, you can just call me the silverlight, wpf guy or Howard.

Professionally I have been programming for 10+ years.  I specializes in architecting/developing end-to-end solution build using Silverlight, WPF and ASP.net (all things Microsoft).  I have worked on numerous projects from concept to completion in various capacities.  And currently as the title suggest I am a silverlight & WPF programmer.

Personally, well, I don’t know, may be if you tell me a little bit about yourself then I will tell you a little bit about me.  How is that.