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Undo/Redo support is one of those golden features that really differentiate a client app from many web apps. There have been a number of methods/techniques to provide this support that I’ve run across from brute force, to the memento pattern , but none that lit any fire for me. Here’s my answer...
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Ian Griffiths posted a great example of how powerful and cool LINQ is when used in everyday code (it's not all about databases people). If you haven't started to learn how to incorporate this awesome toolset into your daily coding life, you're killing yourself. No excuses.
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I've been a faithful unit tester for a few years now. I may not do everything by the book (I think end-to-end unit tests are helpful), but I do get good coverage most of the time. That said, I've found myself unable to use any of the Mock frameworks out there, because I don't use your typical...
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http://dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showID=115 Just awesome! I didn't see anything far fetched other than they must have a great designer on staff. I wonder if the designer was doing the Blend work?
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I don't often have the need to implement the Visitor Pattern , but today I was that day. I looked around really quick for an example of how to do this with Lambda Expressions and Anonymous Methods , which seemed like they were the way to go. It may be that my search skills have deteriorated right...
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For those of you who use NHibernate you may find this convenient, if you don't already have your own. Below is a C# code snippet for creating a public virtual property (code and file are both there). Just put it in your <Visual Studio 2005/2008>\Code Snippets\Visual C#\My Code Snippets folder...
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Get your head out of the gutter. It's important to look at your mapping files closely when trying to diagnose unexpected results. One of our developers had recently added two properties to our big honkin' CustomerOrder entity. These both happened to be enumeration values, which are represented...
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When I'm trying to explain things to people or just want to try something out really quick I'll often create myself a temporary Visual Studio projects that I don't intend to keep around. In fact, I have an entire Temp folder full of them. I always loved that in the VB 6.0 IDE you could choose...
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It has been quite a New Year so far. As of today, Monday January 14th 2008, I have left Speedway and the Speedy Rewards™ team and found new employment with SDS Consulting and I have new eyes courtesy of Lasik Plus of Dayton . I'd say that's a fairly ambitious first two weeks. I'm still working...
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So last weekend I picked up the new ASP.Net 3.5 Extensions Preview CTP (and MVC Toolkit ) from the ASP.Net team and I'm loving the MVC bits. I never could get in to MonoRail mainly because I'm a developer diva. I need intellisense, syntax highlighting, the whole deal. For a CTP, this release...
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I posted recently a manual .reg file for adding the NHibernate Query Generator custom tool to Visual Studio 2008. I just sent Ayende an update to the .Setup Product.wxs, a WiX file, which adds a new fixture specifically for 2008. If you are interested in building the installer and running the trunk of...
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I've updated my PerformanceHelper class that I'll throw around certain code blocks to help trend or monitor performance. Before it was merely a PerformanceCounter wrapper with a few metrics, but now you can specify Console, Debug and/or Perfmon. You do this by using an XOR ( '|' ) in...
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Here's one of those real-world situations that no one bothers to demo. If you are building a form or have some sort of input your gathering from the user, you'll likely want the first input control Focused initially. You have a few ways to do this (in ascending order of recommendation): Call...
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This evening the Central Ohio .NET Developers Group was nice enough to let me present on WPF. Everything went fairly well, though it was more a test of my efficiency in WPF development than I had planned; I managed to leave behind the external hard drive that had my code-snippets, slides (both of them...
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If you happen to use CodePlex as I do, I hope you found Team Explorer for Visual Studio 2005 to be a huge productivity boost. With Visual Studio 2008 it wasn't entirely obvious to me how to replicate this setup. It turns out that Team Explorer can be installed individually from the Visual Studio...
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I'm working on a WPF app for my wife who coaches our local high school track team. One of the features she wanted was to have some images for different players and teams and, religious debate aside, I have chosen to save these in SQL Server 2005. I'm using NHibernate for all my data access which...
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The key to scaling your WPF elements in a specific direction other than down and to the right are the CenterX and CenterY properties of the ScaleTransform . It's easy enough to set these manually, but that's just lazy and asking for long term trouble. Instead, decide how you want it to animate...
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One of my play projects with WPF is a photo viewer for the pictures we put out on http://cromwellhaus.com . One of the views is a montage of the latest photos with a random RotateTransform Angle applied to each image's RenderTransform. Getting the view itself set up as cake, but when I attempted...
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While up in Redmond for the WPF Bootcamp , we had a short time to work with some of the WPF/E, now Silverlight , team members. At the time Silverlight didn't make a whole lot of sense in our strategy. That said, I hope everyone sees the great potential that comes from some of the features surrounding...
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The last few weeks I've felt like a little intern again. With the WPF Bootcamp and the early stages WCF integration into the Speedy Rewards messaging infrastructure (I'll be posting on this soon), I've had lots of time to play with .Net 3.0 stuff. For those that have had a chance to fiddle...
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In the Speedy Rewards team here we use custom PerformanceCounters quite extensively to monitor and trend our host systems. You may not know, but our rewards program implements real-time host integration for transactions that are Id'ed as a SpeedyRewards member such that systems like the in-store...
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One of the cool tools we had a chance to use while up at the WPF Bootcamp in Redmond was Expression Blend . While there I became pretty engrossed in the ease with which you could create fairly cool animations without an intimate knowledge of Xaml. This made it all that harder to leave seeing as we had...
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[Update: These are being posted due to the ftp access restrictions at the Microsoft Campus] Today has been pretty intense which has kept me away from blogging "live". Today started with Kevin Moore , Program Manager for WPF/Blend(?), and a lightning round with Expression Blend . As I mentioned...
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To avoid disappointing users after they've gotten as far as running your application on their 1997 300mhz Pentium II, determine their capabilities using the RenderCapability.Tier value before hand and notifying them that they'll need to joing the 21st century before running your app. Henry Hahn...
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For those who don't already know, I want to make it perfectly clear that I am the last person you would ask to design an appealling interface. Messaging, thread syncronization, etc I'm your guy, but pretty pictures I am not.
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We moved past the introductions quickly and are getting down and dirty. Rob Relyea took us through the basics of WPF from the latest Visual Studio Orcas perspective. Starting simple by creating a button via Xaml and a duplicate example using purely C# code. I've posted a copy of the sample here for...
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My co-worker Steve and I are here in Redmond this week for a WPF Bootcamp training session. We started off by meeting the WPF Product Unit Manager, Ian Ellison-Tayler, and Lead Program Manager, Rob Relyea. Ian ran through some existing WPF applications floating around the intersphere. As early as it...
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Our build process is pretty seamless all the way through to an Integration environment which sits right between Development (laptop/workstation) and Certification (keep your muddy paws off land). With this automation and continuous integration in general, comes a large amount of excess in the form of...
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Well the Dayton-Cincinnati Code Camp and my presentation have both come and gone. In all, the day was a success, but I was a little disappoint in my session. Nothing in-particular went wrong, but I just never felt we got into a good flow. I feel exhaustion took a toll on my presence, but other than that...
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It looks like Mono will finally be a valid option for deploying applications. Red Hat has announced that it will include Mono in its Fedora Core 5. Does that mean it will be in Red Hat as well? I couldn't tell you since I don't follow the Linux distributions to closely, but that would definitly be impressive...
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The final schedule for the Dayton-Cincinnati Code Camp to be held January 21st has been released. I'm really looking forward to Jim Weirich's session on Ruby on Rails and the especially interesting Developing for Windows Media Center (with Xbox 360!) session by Jason Follas and Greg Huber. I'll be following...