Sometimes I love how a little reflection can work magic. In this case I was building what I'll call a ''non-intrusive'' validation system. The project contains entities that are generated by templates, and it would be extremely difficult to crack open those templates to put in a lot of custom validation code. So I decided to approach it using a ...

Fluent interfaces make code easier to read, understand, and use. They can also provide a layer of separation and decoupling to make it easier to reuse components in a straightforward fashion. In this post I will walk through the scenario of creating a fluent interface with a ''backwards design.'' This means I'll start with the end in mind: what I ...

One of the most common examples to help learn a language or framework is an RSS Reader. This is an ideal mini-project because it includes networking, parsing XML, and binding to data elements such as lists. I wanted to provide an example that shows some more interesting solutions that are possible using C# in Silverlight. This is the first part in ...

One reason a developer would use a technology like MEF is to, as the name implies, make an application extensible through a process called discovery. Discovery is simply a method for locating classes, types, or other resources in an assembly. MEF uses the Export tag to flag items for discovery, and the composition process then aggregates those ...