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Monthly Archives: March 2010

  • Article: The Essential WPF/Silverlight/XNA Developer and Designer Toolbox

    With your help, I've just put up a new article on the essential tools every client developer should have in their toolbox. If there's a tool (not a library/framework - that'll come next) that you use during your client development, please go ahead and comment on the article and let me know. Article: The Essential WPF/Silverlight/XNA Developer and Designer Toolbox

    Published Wednesday, March 10, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Leave comment

  • Windows Client Developer Roundup for 3/9/2010 - Special Edition

    This is Windows Client Developer roundup #15. I had so much to send out this week, I decided to do a special edition. I'll be at MIX10 next week. Be sure to watch the keynote at MIX (usually broadcast live), as well as the sessions once they are posted (typically by the end of the week). Stay tuned to the MIX website. The Windows Client Developer Roundup aggregates information of i...

    Published Tuesday, March 9, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Leave comment

  • Tracing WPF in Visual Studio 2010

    Yesterday I blogged about using the special "Item[]" property name in the PropertyChanged event for a custom ObservableDictionary class. What I didn't know was whether or not the Item[] property name was effectively a change notification for every single binding target, or just the current one. I suspected it did it for every binding (I even tried specifying a key inside the brackets, ...

    Published Tuesday, March 9, 2010 | Tagged: , , , | 2 comments

  • Binding to a Dictionary in WPF and Silverlight

    I saw this tweet in my Windows Client tweetstream today: I thought, "what a good idea for a sample." I know that binding in WPF and Silverlight can be a challenge, especially if you're new to the technology. It can be even more difficult when you're working with an edge case like binding using indexers. So, here's a quickie on binding to a Dictionary<TKey, TValue> in WPF...

    Published Monday, March 8, 2010 | Tagged: , , , | 24 comments

  • WPF / Silverlight Quick Tip: INotifyPropertyChanged for indexer

    WPF and Silverlight allow you to bind to property indexers by string key or numeric index. For example: <TextBox Text="{Binding [field1], Mode=TwoWay}" /> <TextBox Text="{Binding Fields[field1], Mode=TwoWay}" /> <TextBox Text="{Binding [15], Mode=TwoWay}" /> If you're creating the data source for those (for example, you are building your own ObservableDiction...

    Published Monday, March 8, 2010 | Tagged: , , , | 17 comments

  • Windows Client Developer Roundup for 3/8/2010

    This is Windows Client Developer roundup #14. This is my first Roundup on my new blogging platform. Please check out the site and let me know what you think, what could be better etc. The Windows Client Developer Roundup aggregates information of interest to Windows Client Developers, including WPF, Surface, Windows 7, XNA, Windows Forms, Silverlight and Windows Phone. If you have s...

    Published Monday, March 8, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Leave comment

  • WPF: Now with Less Fuzz

    The WPF Text team has been really busy this release. Not only did we have the huge text improvements early on from the complete rewrite to a DirectWrite-based text stack, but now they've tweaked the WPF text rendering to be even better, especially on high-contrast light-on-dark scenarios. Can you tell the difference between the GDI VS2008 text rendering and the new WPF GDI-compat...

    Published Saturday, March 6, 2010 | Tagged: , , | 2 comments

  • PsyMUD: a MUD for Linux

    When I went to my first college (more on why it was the first shortly), I used to play on a lot of MUDs. MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) were the thing for on-line gaming at the time. The only other real alternative were BBS-based games (usually turn-based) or forking over serious cash to play checkers on CompuServe. This was pre-commercial internet (1990/1991), so MUDs were full of computer...

    Published Saturday, March 6, 2010 | Tagged: , , , | Leave comment

  • Excited about Windows Phone Development!

    I can't wait to get my hands on a Windows Phone to do some real development. If you've read Charlie Kindel's post, you know that the developer story builds on .NET, Silverlight and XNA (among others). It wasn't always that way, though. A little History When I picked up my first Windows CE device, a Sharp Mobilon HC-4000, it was big (like a super fat checkbook), clunky and mon...

    Published Friday, March 5, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , , | 1 comment

  • Ignore: New Technorati claim token

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    Published Friday, March 5, 2010 | Not tagged | 1 comment

  • My First Windows C++ Application in Ages: Hello World in Win32 with Visual C++ 2010

    The last time I wrote C++ code that ran on Windows, the compiler came in a box that looked like this: (interesting in buying that? This person has it for sale) No, it didn't cost $49.95, that was just a special offer on an add-on. I seem to recall it was more like $700. Yes, the box was enormous. It weighed almost 25 pounds. It was full of printed paper manuals. Oh, and you ne...

    Published Thursday, March 4, 2010 | Tagged: , , , | 24 comments

  • jQuery to the Rescue: Changing style and target for all external links on my site

    The editor (or some other code) in umbraco does a few things I strongly dislike. One of them is removing the target="_blank" from url's I add. I like all external urls to open in a new window so the visitor doesn't forget about my site. I'd add it back into the html and the editor would strip it back out again. Annoying. I've never written a line of jQuery before, but tonight, with so...

    Published Thursday, March 4, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , | 4 comments

  • Top 10 Standard Internet Comments

    You too can be part of the internet fun. Just pick one of these comments at random and post it to any blog post, youtube vid, or anything else with a public comment field. Guaranteed to work 100% of the time. Bonus points if you trigger a comment war.   10. Lame. Go look at <url>, they did it better. 9. <insert instant godwin's law trigger here> 8. OMG LOL YOUR...

    Published Wednesday, March 3, 2010 | Tagged: , , , | 6 comments

  • Shortest .NET program I have ever written (or smallest solution anyway)

    I was looking for a screenshot of an old app I wrote, and I ran across this code from 2001. This is the shortest .NET program I ever wrote. Intermediate Language (IL) was new to us back then, so many of us tried writing simple programs in it just to try it out. The whole solution consists of three files: the resulting EXE, the source IL and a batch file to do the compilation: T...

    Published Tuesday, March 2, 2010 | Tagged: | Leave comment

  • New Site, New Platform, New Domain – 10rem.net

    It's after 5am and I'm still up. Why? I just completed standing up the blog portion of my new site and I'm pretty excited. The full site migration is far from over, but the bones are there, and the blog content has been all moved over. New Site My blog (first picture below) has had roughly the same look for a number of years now. I've updated the background and the header graphic...

    Published Monday, March 1, 2010 | Tagged: , , , | 1 comment

  • Windows Client Developer Roundup for 3/1/2010

    This is Windows Client Developer roundup #13. The Windows Client Developer Roundup aggregates information of interest to Windows Client Developers, including WPF, Surface, Windows 7, XNA, Windows Forms, Silverlight and Windows Phone. If you have something interesting you’ve done or have run across, please send me the URL and brief description via the contact link on my blog. WPF WPF Shell...

    Published Monday, March 1, 2010 | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave comment