Folks, Thanks to all of you who read my blog posts, and especially those who take the time to submit your feedback! That is what keeps me going in dedicating 10-20 hours per week of my personal time on this blog... I have decided to take some time...

I just read this rational advice from the 2007 Calendar For Women Who Do Too Much: “Structure is something we create for our use. It does not own us.”

By now, we all have learned to call Control.InvokeRequired to avoid the following error when updating UI from another thread or calling other apartment threaded objects that expect to be called on a thread they were created on: The calling thread...

Wuthering means blustery and turbulent, and often describes the fierce, noisy winds that blow across the moors. This word was used in northern England, where the novel by Emily Bronte Wuthering Heights was set. Source: The 365 Amazing Trivia Facts...

I’m sure you’ve heard this saying many times before – “the hard disk space is cheap now – save everything”… With that, many companies create paired (or buddy) tables for all transactional data, i.e. for every transactional table (i.e. not lookups, a.k...

Yesterday, I came across the following example demonstrating the power of WPF commands written by Adam Nathan and published in his book “Windows Presentation Foundation Unleashed” (I’ve made some small formatting changes): < Window x:Class =...

Often, developers add LastUpdatedDataTime (or LastUpdatedTimestamp) and LastUpdatedByUser columns to tables in relational databases. And, as one might guess, these fields are often created to be not nullable with default values set by using SQL...

“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is mystery, today is a gift – that’s why it’s called the present.”

Did you notices that there are a lot of events that start with word ‘Preview’, and all of them seem to have a “buddy” event with same name but without the ‘Preview’ prefix? For example, the following paired events are defined by the System.Windows.Window...

Answer: Camu-camu (Mycaria dubia) -- a low-growing shrub found in swampy or flooded areas of the Amazon rainforest. In addition to vitamin C, it provides iron, niacin, riboflavin, phosphorus, potassium, beta-carotene, calcium, leucine, protein, serine...

If you’re anything like me, you spend 10+ hours in front of your computer… often with only one or two bathroom breaks. You know, you’re working on a problem and before you know, it’s totally dark outside. No wonder you have back pain, your eyes might...

To prevent eye fatigue, you should stand up and look 20 feet away for 20 seconds every 20 minutes (a.k.a. the 20/20/20 rule).

Whether you’re dealing with routed events or trying to figure out why your styling is not working quite as expected, you’ll need to understand these two new concepts in WPF… So, here it goes… Consider the following XAML: < Window x:Class ...

“Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.” – Aristotle

In SYSK 108 I briefly talked about what is XPS (XML Paper Specification). If you’re using Windows Vista and/or Office 2007, then you may want to know what makes XPS-aware drivers better than ones that don’t support XPS natively: WYSIWYG (what...

Did you know that fresh eggs contain very little air, so they sink in cold water, while old eggs float?

As you know, XAML allows you to give a name to declared elements. For example: < TextBox Name = " tb1 " ></ TextBox > In essence, you’re setting the Name property of the TextBox class to ‘tb1’. Why is it important? Because if you...