Yet Another Coding Blog

A Redmond dev blog... from Sydney; by Avi Pilosof.

Development Tip – Dispatching calls to the UI thread

In Silverlight and WPF, if you wanted to update the UI from a thread you had launched, it was...

Author: AviP Date: 09/28/2011

Development Tip – Packaging and loading files

In Windows 8 I want to have a file in my solution which is packaged as part of the application, then...

Author: AviP Date: 09/18/2011

Development Tip - ObservableCollection doesn't work

NOTE: This post applied in an the early preview of Win8. It's no longer applicable because the bug...

Author: AviP Date: 09/17/2011

A simple pattern for AJAX with MVC

This is mostly brainstorming; I’ve written some proof-of-concept (POC) code, and would love...

Author: AviP Date: 08/11/2011

Windows Phone App 4: BabySoother

They say necessity is the mother of invention... A new baby plus a few weeks of paternity leave were...

Author: AviP Date: 12/15/2010

Windows Phone App 3: Fact-Of-The-Day

No prizes for guessing what this application does, but I will reveal it just in case: When you start...

Author: AviP Date: 10/28/2010

Windows Phone App 1: Feedr, an RSS reader.

My favorite way to learn a platform/language/technique is to just dive in and experiment, so for...

Author: AviP Date: 10/28/2010

Expression Design: Problems with exporting slices, wrong image sizes.

These little things can drive you nuts… I found a great blog post that makes it trivial to...

Author: AviP Date: 10/28/2010

Programmatically supporting Windows Phone themes with differing colors for text

The marketplace guys just rejected my application because the text was unreadable when the user...

Author: AviP Date: 10/13/2010

Windows Phone: Taking screenshots for marketplace submissions

When you submit your application to the marketplace, there’s an option for including screenshots....

Author: AviP Date: 10/13/2010

Windows Phone: Frame/Page navigation and transitions using the TransitioningContentControl

Windows Phone 7 supports the built-in Silverlight Frame/Page navigation system, which is easy to use...

Author: AviP Date: 04/02/2010

MVVM – This might hurt a little…

This is an attempt at a collaborative post; I’ll fill in more data if/when people make suggestions;...

Author: AviP Date: 11/13/2009

Real-time list filtering with Silverlight, MVVM, and PagedCollectionView

The Model-View-ViewModel pattern is very good for forcing clean UI code. Ideally, you want to end up...

Author: AviP Date: 10/29/2009

Useful C# method for unit testing

I’m unit testing a UI that needs to show some lists in various sorted orders, and I wanted to ensure...

Author: AviP Date: 07/15/2009

Silverlight RPG: Steel Saga

My friend Darren who wrote the hilarious Buddy Knavery game has released a preview of his new...

Author: AviP Date: 03/24/2009

Live Mesh Applications – whoah.

I’ve been playing with Live Mesh for a long time now, and have been loving it. During this time I’d...

Author: AviP Date: 02/16/2009

Silverlight Game Contest: $5000 prize

The site is a little low on details/rules, but the prize seems pretty sweet:...

Author: AviP Date: 02/15/2009

Be Paranoid. Be Very Paranoid.

Do you maintain an application with a backend database? Does that application ever write to the...

Author: AviP Date: 12/02/2008

WPF: Allow your users to define their own styles using XAML

An application I’ve been working on has the vague property of “displaying items on the screen”, and...

Author: AviP Date: 10/26/2008

WPF: Supporting command line arguments and file extensions

Traditionally, handling command-line args in an app has been a simple case of reading arguments from...

Author: AviP Date: 10/26/2008

You’re asking for the wrong thing.

Just stumbled upon this article by John Dvorak titled “My Windows 7 Wish List”, and I see the same...

Author: AviP Date: 10/15/2008

Trivial but useful extension method

Don’t know why I didn’t write this before; it makes code very readable. Often when you write...

Author: AviP Date: 09/30/2008

On using Arrays

Eric Lippert has a great article on arrays:...

Author: AviP Date: 09/22/2008

Microsoft Bacon Home Edition, RC0

Totally unrelated to programming, but I deem this worthy of a blog post. A few weeks ago I decided...

Author: AviP Date: 09/11/2008

Getting Code Coverage to Work in Visual Studio

Are you sick of seeing this error?: "Code coverage is not enabled for this test run" I was working...

Author: AviP Date: 08/17/2008

Creating Testable Applications Using the MVP Pattern

(The following post talks about ASP.NET, but it actually applies to all UI-based applications, web...

Author: AviP Date: 08/02/2008

Code commenting? Try Business Commenting.

Jeff has a good post here about code comments and that they shouldn't be used as crutches: Coding...

Author: AviP Date: 07/24/2008

Drawing Fractal Trees - Part 3

The Application Itself Firstly, here's what we're aiming towards: Live demo: Click to view live....

Author: AviP Date: 07/23/2008

Turn down the ugly...

I've always struggled with making my apps look decent. In my head I can picture how it should look,...

Author: AviP Date: 07/22/2008

Drawing Fractal Trees - Part 2

L-Systems We've established that drawing the tree will use the concept of self-similarity. To put...

Author: AviP Date: 07/18/2008

Drawing Fractal Trees - Part 1

Table Of Contents Part 1: Basic fractal theory (this page) Part 2: L-Systems - drawing trees. Part...

Author: AviP Date: 07/18/2008

Australia is going to France!

(Bonus points for misleading title) The Australian Team SOAK just made it into the finals of the...

Author: AviP Date: 07/07/2008

Can Software be Reliable?

Just read a post (permalink is broken) regarding how software engineering is nowhere near the level...

Author: AviP Date: 06/27/2008

Trivial Physics Simulations (...in Silverlight) - Part 5

The finished product: I'm having trouble finding a way to embed the SL app inside this page, so...

Author: AviP Date: 06/23/2008

Trivial Physics Simulations (...in Silverlight) - Part 4

Tying it all together has zip to do with the physics simulation, but there are a couple of...

Author: AviP Date: 06/23/2008

Trivial Physics Simulations (...in Silverlight) - Part 3

So now that we have vectors, we need to do something with them. We're going to use the concept of a...

Author: AviP Date: 06/23/2008

Trivial Physics Simulations (...in Silverlight) - Part 2

If you know how vectors work, this isn't going to be interesting. If you've never seen one before,...

Author: AviP Date: 06/22/2008

Trivial Physics Simulations (...in Silverlight) - Part 1

Table of Contents: Part 1: Introduction to simple physics and vectors. Part 2: Details of the...

Author: AviP Date: 06/22/2008

Programming Poker

A fascinating series of posts about how this guy built a bot to play online poker (for real money)....

Author: AviP Date: 06/17/2008

The Computing Client's Yo-Yo Diet

Thin, fat, thin, fat, thin, fat... Take a look at a simplified evolution of "The Client", as it's...

Author: AviP Date: 06/16/2008

The Underhanded C Contest

Of course I've heard of the Obfuscated C Contest, but this is the first I've heard of the...

Author: AviP Date: 06/16/2008

Buddy Knavery - The Killer Riffs

Some Silverlight goodness. My friend Darren wrote this amazing game that has strong ties to those...

Author: AviP Date: 06/12/2008

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