Hi folks!  It’s been a little while since I’ve blogged, but fear not, I’m still watching and hoping to blog more in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, it’s been brought to my attention by a few people now that there are a few issues with the Activity control, and I wanted to address them.

  1. Performance – A bit of a mea culpa on my part.  I included a feature for the control that I’ve called “AutoBind”, whereby it would watch for changes to the visual tree of its contents and subscribe to any control that has a property whose name matches “ActivityPropertyName”.  By default, this is great when working with .NET RIA Service’s DomainDataSource, since ActivityPropertyName is “IsBusy” by default, but it also turns out to be a hefty amount of work, constantly searching the visual tree and registering/unregistering event handlers.  This wouldn’t be so bad, except that AutoBind defaults to true, meaning even if you’re not using this functionality, the Activity control is doing the work.  Below, you’ll find a new version of the Activity control that amends the situation, making AutoBind default to false.  This is the only change to the control since my last post on the matter, but I’d love to hear if you have thoughts about the control, this feature, or other requests!
  2. .NET RIA Services’ Business Application Template – So, the .NET RIA Services guys included with their July Preview a project template to help you get started with a RIA Services application.  In this template, they included a dll with the Activity control in it.  A few people have noted that it has a slightly different API than they’re used to seeing with the control, which is due to their use of the original version of the control that I posted (its API has changed a bit since then, and a number of bugs were fixed, including some layout issues).  Anyhoo, feel free to pick up the latest version below!

So there you have it – just a few changes and things to note.  You can find the control here:

Thanks for all the great feedback since I first posted this control.  As usual, let me know if you have questions or issues!