Matt Dotson's .NET Tips & Tricks

Many of us are familiar with frozen cells in Excel, but it is typically quite difficult to implement something like that HTML. In this “Real World GridViews”, we investigate adding this functionality to GridView to make frozen headers easy to reuse across pages. Though I am only going to go over freezing headers here, once you get the idea, it is a short step to freeze columns (right or left) and footers. ...

Do you ever get sick of hunting through a dropdown that has hundreds of items in no particular order. I do!! I've seen far too many LOB apps that feel the need to have hundreds items in a dropdown. So this week, I created the expander dropdown to at least...

Fluid Dynamics in Windows Presentation Foundation. Part 1....

SynchronizationContext is new in .NET 2.0, and I haven't found too much written about it yet. It is used by classes like BackgroundWorker and some other built-in classes, and I wanted to show how you can use it in your code as well. ...

Windows exposes several types of synchronization primitives (Mutexes, Events, etc.), but in .NET 1.1 we were limited in our use of them. Sure, we had AutoResetEvent and ManualResetEvent, but the framework did not expose the "named" version of these. The 2.0 framework brings us nearly the full gamut!!...

If you're interested in allowing users to edit multiple rows of a gridview ... check out my new article. http://blogs.msdn.com/mattdotson/articles/490868.aspx

Until I started looking at C# 3.0, I had never heard of lambda expressions. A quick glance at Wikipedia tells me that they seem to pre-date computers, and languages like Lisp and Ruby seem to be based on them. But what the heck are lambda expressions??...

Yup. I heard you (eventually). You wanted easier access to the source code of Real World GridView. Well, now you have it. CodePlex is Microsoft's new shared source development platform, and it should be much easier to use. Give it a try, here's the link...

GridView is a great control, and out of the box it does a lot of wonderful stuff, but I haven't worked on a project yet where it did everything I needed. "Real World GridView" is an attempt to share some of the common customizations I end up doing to GridView on a regular basis....

Choosing a design pattern for the user interface of your application involves weighing trade-offs between testability, complexity, developer tool support, and capabilities. There are two very prominent camps in user interface patterns: Forms & Controls...

In part one we looked at the concept of a presentation model. In this post we are going to going to start putting together some crude code to scaffold out our presentation model base classes. This article should give you the basic idea how things are...

I saw this post http://www.longhornblogs.com/robert/archive/2005/11/11/15246.aspx and just had to help out. Here is something I quickly threw together. It uses SAPI 5.1 & Avalon. To use this, you need to add a reference to the SAPI com component ...

I saw the Windows RSS API was published the other day and so I just had to create something with it. What better than a podcast receiver!! ...

I've seen a lot of people stumped while trying to mount the Vista Beta1 iso image for thier VPC. VPC gives some sort of error that the disc is no good. Some people have figured out that if you actually burn the ISO image to DVD then mount the physical...

One thing I always find myself doing is showing people the little indisposable tools in my toolbox. Here's a list of some I couldn't live without. Reflector ( http://www.aisto.com/roeder/dotnet/ ) - If you only get one tool, this is the one to choose...

I get lots of questions about books I recommend for learning WPF. Adam Nathan's Windows Presentation Foundation Unleashed (WPF) has been around for a while, but I still think it's the best WPF book available. I have my copy on my Kindle

If you'd like to make a report in TFS that compares the estimated time to complete a task with the actual time, you've probably come across the problem of Microsoft.VSTS.CMMI.Estimate not being reportable. This is a real pain and very surprising that...

I've been doing a lot of globalization work lately, so to capture some of my best practices around globalization, I've created a CodePlex project. Matt Dotson's Global Toolkit ( http://www.codeplex.com/GlobalToolkit ) is where I'll be posting code which...

I have been doing a lot of work on globalized applications lately and I have learned a lot. I thought I'd try to share some of what I've learned with everyone. One of the first issues we ran into was managing formatting of data for different scenarios...

We're starting a new local community for Windows Azure Developers in Los Angeles! If you're an active Windows Azure developer or just someone that's interested in learning more about Windows Azure, join our new group. We're hosting our first Azure Devs...