November 2008 Entries

XamlFest: WPF/Silverlight Tools

Both Snoop (WPF) and Silverlight Spy (Silverlight, obviously) allow you to connect to running processes and see what's going on inside them. Very powerful tools. With Silverlight Spy, you can see the contents of any Silverlight app... and reflect against them. The temptation with Silverlight is to put more code in the stateful .NET client, but the consequence is that your code is essentially available to the world. This also applies to any keys, passwords, etc that may be stored within your code. ...
Posted On Tuesday, November 25, 2008 11:49 AM | Comments (1)

XamlFest: View-Model-ViewModel Pattern

Some quick notes about one architectural pattern for WPF apps -- this is a modified version of MVC/MVP. The Model bottom layer of the pattern no knowledge of the View (UI) variables should be named in UI-agnostic terms ("available" vs "visible") .NET class The View WPF/Silverlight representation of the UI should have minimal code connects to the ViewModel through the DataContext property should be editable in either Blend or Visual Studio XAML file The ViewModel represents the "glue" between the ...
Posted On Tuesday, November 25, 2008 11:48 AM | Comments (2)

LiveWriter Code Formatting Plug-In

Another thing that took me far too long to find today... there's a lot of links to Steve Dunn's tool, including the CodePlex version, which hasn't been updated since 2006. And, since it doesn't have an installer or the DLLs readily available, you'll waste a lot of time looking for that too. You might consider trying this tool. Looks pretty good to me so far. And, yes, it supports a few languages. And line numbers. And highlighting. Public Class ThisRocks Public Function URL As String Return "http://www.amergerzic.com/... ...
Posted On Tuesday, November 18, 2008 5:14 PM | Comments (2)

VB.NET Generics with Multiple Constraints

I had a case today where I needed -- well, wanted -- to implement a generic class that was a little... unusual. Essentially, I'm working on a queuing mechanism based on Joe Duffy's BlockingBoundedQueue(Of T). Mind you, unlike Joe's sample, mine is written in VB.NET. ;) Taking it a bit further, I created a wrapper that specifies the number of producers and consumers of queued objects, as well as the queue capacity. Since I'm going to be turning this over to a bunch of developers to play with, I also ...
Posted On Tuesday, November 18, 2008 5:05 PM | Comments (0)

DataTable Performance Update

In a fairly old post, I promised graphs related to the performance of DataTables vs. other data access mechanisms. I've got an article almost ready for publishing on that topic -- should be out by the end of the week, and I'll link to it when it's public. Until then, let me throw out a bit of a teaser... The benchmarking code, as well as detailed numbers and analysis will be in the article ...
Posted On Monday, November 17, 2008 10:09 AM | Comments (2)

Azure Hands-On Labs Issue

If you should happen to create a new cloud services project in VS2008 with VB settings, you may well find that you are unable to save the project/solution. The message is, in typical fashion, singularly useless: Luke H's blog pointed me in the right direction. The solution is to enable saving projects on creation. Under Tools >> Options, select Projects and Solutions. Make sure "Save new projects when created" is checked. Restart Visual Studio, and you'll be good to go ...
Posted On Saturday, November 08, 2008 10:01 PM | Comments (0)

Variance: A Different Take on PDC

Ted Neward posted this blog entry on his thoughts after PDC 2008. Specifically, Ted said: The language world was a bit abuzz at the barely-concealed C# 4.0 features, mostly centering around the new "dynamic" keyword and the C# REPL loop capabilities, but noticeably absent was any similar kind of talk or buzz around VB 10. Even C++ got more attention than VB did, with a presentation clearly intending to call out a direct reference to Visual C++'s heyday, "Visual C++: Why 10 is the new 6". Conversations ...
Posted On Wednesday, November 05, 2008 2:30 PM | Comments (0)