Manicprogrammer

First, I'll repeat the news that's all over: Microsoft has released the ''final'' version of Silverlight 2.0 to the world! This is a major step for .NET developers, because it means we can do really incredible things on the web without massive injections of AJAX or having to learn Flash. For example, take a look at what we've done with Inkubook. ...

It was rather nice. For a few minutes earlier today, I was able to experience the designer's perspective of Blend. We had a bug filed on one of our common controls' visual appearance, and a designer and a developer were pairing on cleaning it up. They asked me how to structure something, and I was able to completely restructure the UI model of ...

Wow, so much I probably should talk about, but I don't even know where to start. Massive amounts of networking, information, realization, and even contribution going on, and I can't unravel it at all right now. I think there's a lot of potential for transforming this into real, meaningful changes in my current environment, but I need to be ...

Wow - it's been over thirty days since my last post. What's changed since then? First, we've put http://inkubook.com into production. I'm very proud of the work I've done and that my team has done on this one. We killed ourselves getting it done, but this is the product of just six months of work of the team. We took a new technology, started ...

Our team has decided to take a step back towards scrum and away from our previous semi-Kanban approach. I think that it's a good plan at this time, although I also suspect that many of the benefits of our earlier approach will continue to show through. Why did we do this? Here's some of my thoughts. They do not at all reflect the thoughts of ...

The concepts surrounding batch size have been floating around my head again in recent days. My current assignment is a rather large batch of work with Silverlight 2.0, but it's one that I've been able to subdivide into a number of small batches that rapidly build on each other. Thus, each one of my check ins to my private branch are able to show ...

Effective _now_, we are hiring a single experienced individual into an architect or senior developer role. If you have a desire to work with an incredible team, have great .NET coding skills, and have a desire to see your work become a real product in the marketplace, contact me ASAP. (eric dot willeke at gmail dot com) If you already have ...

I've managed to get past the random issues that seem to plague me when adopting new technologies, and I'm digging into the meat of Silverlight 2.0 (Beta 1). This is GREAT! Blend is a great tool, and they've made using resources SO MUCH BETTER! The visual studio XAML editor works VERY well. (Intellisense bonuses: clr-namespace tags are descriptive ...

or silverlight, or visual studio, or something. Anyway, my work is in the Silverlight.net installation forum under a post titled  ''Silverlight startup error with resources - Summary of fix'' The corrected file is attached here, and I hate wasting a full day (and some of the evening) on things like this.   [EDIT] the full link of ...

Thursday, after the main IndyNDA event, I performed my first public presentation. I've presented to teams, classrooms, and my company before, but this is the first time I've had the opportunity to present to an uncontrolled group of my professional peers. It turned out that I only had three people there, but I can't complain since it's very hard ...

I've never done this before... I'm sitting in the IndyNDA event for this month, and since there's wireless, and I've got my computer, and IndyNDA's got tables, I thought I'd actually give live posting a try. Expect a stream of thought as I (partially) listen to the presentations. Tonight's presentation is by Paul Hacker talking about what's in ...

Back to tech, for now. I like Linq to SQL. A LOT. However, there have been a handful of things that have annoyed me, and one of them is the story around serialization and disconnected entities. They've built a nice engine for it (DataContract-based), and really optimized it for the case where you're getting a data set from a disconnected client ...

It's been years since a new technology actually got me to the point of being ''excited''. .NET 2.0 almost did it, but I think the day I finally 'got' .NET 1.0 was the last time I was truly excited about a new technology for its own sake. I think I feel it happening again. Between the sheer joy LINQ is inspiring into my daily work (''the data, it ...

If you're curious how the XNamespace works, just do a ''Go to Definition'' in VS and you'll see the declarations, the key aspects are: public static bool operator !=(XNamespace left, XNamespace right);public static XName operator +(XNamespace ns, string localName);public static bool operator ==(XNamespace left, XNamespace right);public static ...

Namespace handling is much improved! Yay for easy namespaces! Anybody who has worked with XML in .NET 1.x or 2.0 knows how much of a pain XML namespaces can be in extracting data, yet they fill a very important part of the XML technology. Now, for linq. Let's say you've got a document on disk and you need to pull out the namespace of the root ...

I rarely repost, but this single, fairly short article seems to hit many of the high points in a very condensed format. If I were in a southern church hearing this read i would expect a constant stream of ''Amen'' echoing around me.  Read it. Think about it. Read it again. Then, compare this to what you're ...

What's the difference between these two lines? scriptInit.InnerHtml = string.Format(creationFormat, outerDiv.ClientID, someOtherString); scriptInit.InnerText = string.Format(creationFormat, outerDiv.ClientID, someOtherString); Answer: The first one doesn't do special character escaping, the second one does. With a format string that looks like ...

Freaking amazing. Scenario: I need to load the contents of a table into a dictionary of objects keyed by one of the fields. Before: Write the ORM code to load the entire table. (3 lines) Initialize the dictionary (1 line). Write the for each loop to move each instance from the ORM's collection type into the dictionary (3 lines). After: Write ...

I'm almost beyond words in a geeky technical sort of way. The ease and simplicity of accomplishing my desires is releasing a sense of joy that I have not felt professionally for quite some time. My desire is made manifest, and I don't have to fight the constraints of the environment to make it happen.   I'll let you know when the honeymoon ...

I've read the lengthy articles that Guthrie posted, and I've followed the buzz with interest, but tonight I finally sat down and gave it a shot. First impression: the ''default'' application is among the most useful I've seen of any templated project. Most projects have a ''default.aspx'' or some such... this one has a default presenter for your ...

Ok - Rule #1 of .NET programming: If it's Disposable, dispose it... wrap it in a using statement, call Dispose... SOMETHING! Easy, once you think that way, nothing to worry about. Except... when you declare a Mutex, try to dispose it, and get this message:Error    'System.Threading.WaitHandle.Dispose(bool)' is inaccessible due to ...

Read it once a month to remember why you're agile! http://waterfall2006.com/gorman.html http://waterfall2006.com/Refuctoring.pdf  

I don't like to call out individual blame, but sometimes a bit o' shame is what it takes... this query, when run against the (2008 version) version control database in TFS will give you a nice summary and detail pair that can be dropped into excel, or whatever.   select     i.DisplayName Person,    COUNT( ...

Went to ArcReady today, which was supposed to be about software + services, but it turned into a nice discussion of Microformats. As a result, I did more investigation. Larry's right... this is going to be hot (if he's wrong, so am I!) More when I dig in. 

Really easy thing that I thought would be in the nMock framework somewhere, but couldn't find: A way to call custom validation code against the matched object. With .NET2's anonymous delegates, it was pretty easy to whip up just such a beast (with a bonus matcher thrown in for good measure):     internal delegate bool ...