missing-export|Jan 24, 2010

Introduction to Debugging Silverlight Applications with WinDbg

I’ve had a few users ask me about finding memory leaks and understanding what happens with references in Silverlight. One very powerful tool to use when debugging Silverlight applications is the Windows Debugging Tools. You can download the 32-bit (x86) version side-by-side with the 64-bit (x64) version. Both WPF and Silverlight ship with an extension…
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Blogs|Jan 23, 2010

Simple Dialog Service in Silverlight

I noticed on the forums there are a lot of users not comfortable with asynchronous programming who struggle a bit in Silverlight with getting their arms around the concept of a dialog box. In other environments, you can simply shoot out a dialog, wait for the response, and continue. In Silverlight, of course, the action…
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missing-export|Jan 22, 2010

Amazing .NET Reference Visualizations

Half the battle when tracking down memory problems in a .NET application is seeing the reference chain so you can see why an object is still in use. You can use SOS and its !gcroot command to track them down, but that can bring new definitions to tedious. If there were only away to see…
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Blogs|Jan 20, 2010

New Silverlight 3 Version Released (3.0.50106.0)

A new version of Silverlight 3 has been released. You can download the latest control here. If you are a developer, then you’ll want to use the developer installer that is available here. This version fixes some issues related to hardware acceleration in the graphics processing unit (GPU), certain cases that cause Deep Zoom to…
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Blogs|Jan 16, 2010

Making Your Own 8K Homegrown Inversion of Control Container

If you develop software, chances are you you’ve worked with Inversion of Control containers and the Dependency Injection pattern. Many frameworks exist to address how to marry concrete implementations to abstract classes and interfaces. A few popular ones on the .NET platform include: Autofac Castle Windsor Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) Ninject StructureMap Unity Download the…
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Blogs|Jan 12, 2010

Quick Tip: Embedding and Accessing Schemas in .NET

I have a project I’m working on that requires the use of some extensive XML manipulation. While XML can be very powerful, XML without a schema is like JavaScript objects: no strong typing and the wild west as far as standards are concerned. A good, solid XML document will have a valid schema to validate…
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Blogs|Jan 10, 2010

Auto-Discoverable Views using Fluent PRISM in Silverlight

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…
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wintellect-blogs|Jan 9, 2010

Silverlight 4’s New Notification Windows

Silverlight 4 includes a slew of features designed to make out-of-browser applications richer. One of those features is notification windows, also known as “toast” windows. This feature is available to all OOBs, regardless of whether they are trusted. It is not available to applications that run inside the browser. A notification window is one that…
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Blogs|Jan 9, 2010

Automated Silverlight Unit Testing Using StatLight

One concern with the Silverlight Unit Testing Framework is that it runs on a UI thread and requires a browser to function. This makes it difficult to integrate into automated or continuous integration testing. Difficult, but not impossible. A solution is provided by the project called StatLight which not only supports Silverlight testing automation, but…
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Blogs|Jan 7, 2010

Silverlight Unit Testing Framework: Asynchronous Testing of Behaviors

Last month, I bogged about Unit Testing ViewModels AND Views using the Silverlight Unit Testing Framework. I wanted to take that post a step further and talk about some more advanced testing scenarios that are possible. The site itself provides a lot of information about how to get started and what is available with the…
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wintellect-blogs|Jan 4, 2010

Silverlight 4’s New Managed Extensibility Framework

One of the less-talked-about features of Silverlight 4 is the new Managed Extensibility Framework, or MEF. MEF has been evolving on CodePlex for a while now. It’s slated to be integrated into .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4, and as such is something with which developers should be familiar. As its name implies, MEF is a framework…
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