12 Absolutely and Insanely Essential Utilities For Programmers

In every era in recent times there has been one profession that for a short while you could enter without formal training. Autodidacts in the 19th century could read the law without recourse to formal education (see Abe Lincoln). In the early 20th [..]

Announcing 2nd CTP of XAML Toolkit

We are happy to announce the release of the second CTP of the XAMLToolkit. Where do i get it: LINK The toolkit comprises of: A XAML DOM Fxcop rule authoring support for XAML SilverlightSchemaContext that enables System.Xaml to parse SL XAML. We [..]

One From The Vault: Ranting About Editors

This week’s One From The Vault is a rant on arbitrary and incorrect “rules” of English insisted upon by some teachers, editors and pedants: There is no excuse for thinking that you can’t start a sentence with “There is.”  And I [..]

Portland Silverlight User Group 10 Aug 2010

On 10 Aug 2010, Adam Kinney and I will be presenting at the Portland Silverlight User Group. As you know I work on the WPF & Silverlight Designer in Visual Studio as part of the Expression Team. This session will provide guidance for writing [..]

Data Validation And Templating in Silverlight 4

This is the fifth in a series on Templates and DataValidation. [ First In Series Previous In Series ] In this and the next posting I will create an application that will demonstrate how to modify the Visual State for invalid data. Along the way we [..]

Video recordings for first Windows Phone 7 Jumpstart event

  This week, MS learning did the first delivery of our Windows Phone 7 Jumpstart training.  The JumpStart is a four part deep-dive into Windows Phone.  The four sessions included: An Introduction to the Windows Phone Platform [..]

Events and Delegates Under The Hood – Q&A

In the comments from this morning’s post, Andrew raised two questions important enough that I wanted to answer them in a post, rather than in comments…. [In the original version of the posting] you had some code showing that you could use “=” with [..]

Events and Delegates Under The Hood – Reposted

Many programmers come to Silverlight with little prior experience with C#, and thus conceptualize events as a response to an action that is “hooked up” using somewhat arbitrary syntax.  All of that is fine, until it isn’t, and so this post will dive [..]

Events and Delegates Under The Hood

Many programmers come to Silverlight with little prior experience with C#, and thus conceptualize events as a response to an action that is “hooked up” using somewhat arbitrary syntax.  All of that is fine, until it isn’t, and so this post will [..]

Teaching An Old Control New Tricks With Templates

This is the fourth in a short series on Templates and DataValidation. [ First In Series    Previous In Series ] You will remember that in the previous post in this small series, we created a new button template with a new appearance [..]

The Great Much More Signal, Much Less Noise Challenge of 2010

Starting today and running through the end of the year, I am challenging myself to post at least one useful, interesting or worthwhile entry every single day – (Yikes!) You are the judges. I will measure my success/failure on visits,  pageviews and [..]

Portland .NET User Group 3 Aug 2010 + Mole 2010

I’m very excited to announce that I’ll be speaking at the Portland .NET User Group on 3 Aug 2010.  This will be my first time visiting Portland and I’m looking forward to it!  This wide open night will close out with the first time [..]

The Disasters of Visual Design Tools

Many years ago — about the time that visual design tools were being introduced into our programming environments — I promised that I would never believe myself to be teaching programming if I were writing sentences like "Now drag the [..]

Templates, Visual State and Fun With Controls

This is the third (if you count Sunday’s update!) in my short series on Templates and Data Validation. [ First In Series.  Previous In Series ] Today we’re going to create a templated  Button that changes the appearance and visual state behavior of [..]

Manipulation Events Update for the WP7 Beta

Always start with the good news: The good news is that the Manipulation events in the July beta of the Windows Phone 7 development tools no longer have the orientation problem I discussed in my blog entry Basic Manipulation Event Handling in [..]

Windows Phone 7 Development Tools Now in Beta

As of yesterday, Windows Phone 7 is in beta, which means there are updated development tools to be downloaded and installed. ... more ...

Tips for uninstalling the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTPs and moving to beta

To install the Windows Phone Developer Tools beta, you will first need to uninstall the older CTP (if you had it installed). The process is straight forward if you get the order right and don’t have other pre-release bits [..]

Awarded Silverlight Cream’s Best Blog Post of 2010

I’m incredibly proud that Silverlight Cream (required reading for anyone interested in Silverlight) rated one of my blog posts #1 for 2010.    The pride results only from the fact  that Dave does such an incredible job every day culling the [..]

New Video: Introduction to Xaml

In my new video An Introduction To Xaml, I recreate the form used in Adding Controls To An Application, but this time using Xaml rather than drag and drop. Part of the ongoing video series: Getting Started With Silverlight.   [30]

Getting Request.Form Data Out of XDomainRequest In ASP.NET

I am using the XDomainRequest object in IE8 and IE9 to do cross domain posting.  However, I hit an issue where I couldn't seem to get at the data I was posting: the Request.Form collection contained nothing yet I was clearly sending it. I then [..]

Eulogy

The following is from the eulogy I gave for my mother in law. Posted here in the hope you might find some of it valuable. Speak no ill of the dead. It used to make me crazy to sit at a memorial service and listen to the Rabbi who had never met my [..]

Styles (followup)

Yesterday’s post did not include source, and left fleshing out the styles as an exercise… this quick follow-up will provide a link to the full code and a quick walkthrough of the styles I ended up creating. The tricky part is that there is not a [..]

Visual State Manager A-Z

This is the first of a multipart series on the Visual State Manager which will cover Styles Resources Templates Custom Controls Customizing data validation Let’s start with the form that is used in my Getting Started With Silverlight video: Adding [..]

Serializing Request.ServerVariables to JSON: JavaScriptSerializer vs. DataContractJsonSerializer

I needed to serialize Request.ServerVariables to JSON.  I tried both  JavaScriptSerializer nor DataContractJsonSerializer without any luck.  But I thought both would work, as Request.ServerVariables is of type NameValueCollection [..]

Non-Linear Navigation in Silverlight 4

In the last Seattle Silverlight User Group meeting I spoke about Non-Linear Navigation in Silverlight.  This blog post is a proof-of-concept for Non-Linear Navigation in Silverlight 4 Navigation Applications.  When I was first exploring [..]