For those people that attended Robert Garfoot's TechEd Europe session on end to end development in WP7, here is the source code for his demos. In order to run the demo code you will need VS2010, WP7 SDK, Azure SDK. Running for the first time Run VS2010 elevated (needed for Azure) and build...

AppFabric AutoStart feature is built on top of IIS 7.5 AutoStart feature. IIS 7.5 provides an extensibility point where you can specify your custom initialization providers which will be executed as part of application start-up and gives you the ability to perform costly initialization. For example,...

I recently had a query from a customer that was one of those ones that you think “Aha! That’s easy, you just do this”. Then you think a bit more about it and realise that if you want to do it properly it’s not quite as simple as you first thought. This particular query related...

A.K.A. “Why won’t the workflow designer use my data template?” I was on site with a customer today writing some custom activities and found a problem that wasn’t immediately obvious how I could get around it (and indeed it’s taken me some hours of head scratching and...

Of course, the ThreadPool isn't actually dead - it's just hiding. Or at least it should be. Long live the Task Parallel Library. During my career I've got to play with some reasonably serious parallel challenges. As a result, I've posted a number of articles on this very subject in the past on this...

What’s not to love about ClickOnce? I’ll tell you what… There’s no doubt that ClickOnce is a killer deployment technology with many of the benefits of web deployment combined with the rock-hard awesomeness of juicy-fat Windows applications. However, a little piece of me...

Validate, Act, Translate, and Respond. That’s about it. I’ve been trying to come up with a nice acronym for how to structure code in Actions for some time now, and this is the best I have managed. I wish it spelt a nice word – so if you’ve a better suggestion shout up. What...

Recently I've spoken with a few customers that have asked what a Lambda Expression is, which surprised me. It seems that a second wave of developers are now starting to use Lambdas (i.e. those that didn't adopt C# 3.0 immediately) and need some pointers, so this post is intended to help you understand...

I don’t know if you’re the same, but when coding away I often find myself wishing for a String.Unformat function – call it the evil twin of String.Format . With String.Format I can build up strings like this; var result = String .Format( "http://{0}:{1}/{2}" , "localhost" , "12345" , "TestPage...

Remember when you started playing with WPF? Remember when you coded your first binding? {Binding ElementName=slider, Path=Value} and then remember what you wanted to do next? Something like this I'm sure... {Binding ElementName=slider, Path=Value/2} (in case you missed it, I'm trying to divide Value...

Sometimes enumerations in .NET just don’t cut it. In the end they’re just a numeric value to which a piece of string metadata is attached to some of the values. Consider the following enumerations: public enum OfficeLocationNames { London, Edinburgh, Redmond } ...

The very first talk I gave on .NET was on custom attributes – some time way back in late 2000 or early 2001. At the time I was espousing the benefits of using custom attributes to add on details of unit tests and bug fixes. There have been many additions to .NET since then and I spied a couple of...

I was struggling with a rather complex ViewModel (from Model-View-ViewModel or MVVM) that was actually composed of a number of ViewModels. Most of the problems was internal notification of change - i.e one ViewModel wanted to know when another ViewModel changed. Sounds crazy but I'm comfortable it...

Is this a question of taste, or something more serious? [ Warning : this post won’t change your life J ] I found myself writing the following extension method yet again the other day; public static void ForEach<T>( this IEnumerable <T> source, Action <T> action) { ...

As astute colleague noticed something funny in my recent post . Specifically, this piece of code: postsWithCount.AsEnumerable().Select(pd => Rebuild(pd)); private void Rebuild(PostData postData) { Post post = postData.Post; post.User = postData.User; post.Comments.Attach(postData.Comments); } What...

This is the 9th post in the series 10 reasons to consider WPF for your next desktop application by Josh Twist, this part explores Printing in WPF. You can view the other reasons in the series below: Reason 1 - Rich Content Model Reason 2 - Databinding Reason 3 - DataTemplates Reason...

This is the 7th post in the series 10 reasons to consider WPF for your next desktop application by Josh Twist, this part explores the ListView in WPF. You can view the other reasons in the series below: Reason 1 - Rich Content Model Reason 2 - Databinding Reason 3 - DataTemplates Reason...

This is the 6th post in the series 10 reasons to consider WPF for your next desktop application by Josh Twist, this part explores layout ini WPF. You can view earliar posts in the series below: Reason 1 - Rich Content Model Reason 2 - Databinding Reason 3 - DataTemplates Reason 4 -...

Here is part 3 of Josh Twist's 10 part series on the reasons to consider WPF for your next desktop application, this part explores the topic of DataTemplates. Earlier I introduced a series of posts entitled 10 reasons to consider WPF for your next desktop application . If you haven't read the intro...

Stuart Leeks recently put together a great post on improving the 'Include' method on ObjectQuery<T> demonstrating how lambda expressions can be used to ensure type safety. Enjoy! One of the great features of LINQ To SQL and LINQ To Entities is that the queries you write are checked by the compiler...