Why adorners? In the last sample, I showed how to allow the users to drag and drop shapes in a Canvas, and how to create a preview effect for the operation. One problem with this code is that it only works on Canvas panels. In this post, we'll look...

One way in which you can expose additional resources from your ADO.NET Data Service is to implement "service operations" on your WebDataService subclass. For example, let's say we want to return all customers in a given city in a pre-baked entry point...

This post talks a bit about updates from the last post on the URI format . In that post, we discussed how we were considering having a "full form" and a "compressed form" for syntax. With the convergence of using ATOM and JSON as the serialization...

A few days ago a friend of mine asked for some books I could recommend about developing databases. This is my personal list based on personal likes – to be extra clear, this is not an endorsement from my employer. An Introduction to Database Systems...

Today, beloved readers, I will weave a story of powerful forces in conflict with each other through time, and how Avalon saves the day... As time goes by, screens are getting better resolution for the same physical size. This means we get smaller content...

Ha! Check out the blog title - it's so... so... alliterative . I'm so witty, sometimes I wonder why I'm not making millons on SNL . Lately it seems everyone around me wants to know more about drag drop in Avalon. So, after sending little samples around...

One of the features that impressed PDC attendees was the built-in spell checker in Windows Presentation Foundation. Activating it is just as simple as setting the IsSpellCheckEnabled property to true on a TextBox or RichTextBox control. <DockPanel...

When you are working with ADO.NET Data Services, errors are returned through the HTTP mechanism. Right now the most straightforward way of handling any errors on the client is by catching a WebException and using it. Something that is a bit obscure...

I spent a little bit of time with this the other day, and I thought I'd pass the learnings on, in hopes it helps someone. This is the layout what I was trying to accomplish with WPF. In a section of my window, I wanted a bit of text at the top, and...

A slightly different look, which increases the body width a bit. It's a balancing act between too narrow a column - which makes code snippets wrap and makes them confusing; or too wide a column, which makes it harder to read and scan the text. I'm...

In case you haven't visited lately, www.live.com has been doing for a while this thing where each day they'll have a different background picture, usually a gorgeous photo, and then when you hover over the picture with your mouse different areas will...

Dare to turn off the Outlook Reading Pane. I tried it - by accident - and now I can go through my emails so much faster. Even though I always could delete stuff that wasn't interesting by looking at the title, the Reading Pane encouraged me to take a...

The site is over at http://www.getpivot.com/ , and the video is short and very much worth watching. As a developer, I can only wonder what MSDN would look like with Pivot like they showed for Wikipedia. Enjoy!

Today's post is about a very simple rule for API design: don't lie. This seems relatively straightforward, but there are a number of ways in which APIs may end up lying or misleading their consumers. What do I mean by lying? The obvious case is an API...

Last week I drove up to Vancouver to get a new visa. Lovely city. I staid in the downtown area, and was able to walk everywhere - which is a good thing, because finding a place to park is hard (although not impossible). There was a bit of waiting involved...

This is going to be a long post, so get yourself some coffee or your development beverage of choice before you start. This is something that was brought up during the PDC, and so I'm following up with one of the solutions suggested. The problem is...

Here at Microsoft you hear a lot of talk about diversity . You can get some kind of fluffy idea of what I'm talking about from the link, but the fact that is that by being written in corporate-speak it loses some impact. Let me try to put it into my own...

If you're currently looking at the ADO.NET Data Services functionality that is available through the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview download, you'll notice that using the project item to add a new service is fabulously simple. If you're not doing anything...

Changing subjects for a bit from ADO.NET Data Services to an easy way to impress your friends... If you've never heard about this, you're in for a treat. The Microsoft Speech API (SAPI) is very, very easy to automate, and can come in handy when you...

This is the first in a series of post exploring that beloved UI gesture: dragging and dropping things around. In this first post, I'll take a look at the simplest, most striaghtforward approach: adding a bunch of event handlers to your window and updating...

I find it interesting that even after working on .NET code for years, I still keep evolving my usage of the platform and style. Today's post is an example of such a thing. Hopefully you already know about the Debug.Assert API. This allows you to make...

The MIT campus map at http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg has some very, very funny messages displayed as you zoom in and out. Even despite the comment on large Seattle-based companies (thankfully Microsoft is Redmond-based), you'll surely appreciate the...

C# allows you to create nested classes - that is, classes that exist "within" a different class. Depending on what visibility you give these classes, they can be just as public as anything else (the Environment.SpecialFolder enumeration is such an example...

I won't be doing any more posts for the rest of the year. With over one hundred posts, this has certainly been a prolific twelve months for me! There have been a lot of topics: ADO.NET Data Services, native XML, managed XML, general development stuff...

Yes, it's available now , in all its yummy-licious editions. If you can't wait for your IT department to upgrade, you can always start building desktop / mobile applications with the free Express or Compact editions. Enjoy!