Blogs|Aug 6, 2009

WPF – Animating multiple elements simultaneously

A question appeared on StackOverflow asking how to animate a property on multiple elements from one or more trigger mechanisms (i.e. a button click or list box selection).  The traditional approach (for brevity’s sake, I omitted the Xaml comprising the actual UI elements) is rather straight-forward: <Window.Resources> <Storyboard x:Key="OnClick1"> <DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames BeginTime="00:00:00" Storyboard.TargetName="textBlock1" Storyboard.TargetProperty="(UIElement.Opacity)"> <SplineDoubleKeyFrame KeyTime="00:00:00"…
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missing-export|Jul 27, 2009

More on Backup and Restore

On my post about restoring with Windows Home Server, Bill Tudor had an excellent comment that I felt everyone needed to read concerning backup and restore: Don’t overlook the build-in image-based backup available in the better SKU’s of Vista and Win7. It took me less than 10 minutes to recover a machine when replacing a…
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Blogs|Jul 24, 2009

Windows Home Server Restore Hint

Messing around I managed to wipe out one of my machines. Fortunately, I have rock solid backups with Windows Home Server, which I highly recommend. When disaster strikes, all you need to do is pop in the WHS Restore CD, follow the prompts, and you’re computer comes magically back to life. It truly is that…
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Blogs|Jul 17, 2009

Automatically Freezing Threads (Brrrrr)

Looks like many people liked my macros that made multithreaded debugging easier. One of the comments on the article from Sam was worth exploring deeper: John, Great post! Would you have any idea how to make VS do this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/837869/is-there-a-shortcut-in-vs-for-next-statement-in-current-thread This very common problem comes up the more threads you have. The gist of the…
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Blogs|Jul 17, 2009

Fun with SaveFileDialog and WriteableBitmap

I’ve been wanting to build a sample that spotlights Silverlight 3’s new SaveFileDialog, but I wanted the sample to actually do something. So I built a Silverlight app that lets you load photos, remove red eyes, and save the edited photos back to disk in PNG format. Silverlight 3’s new WriteableBitmap class provides the pixel-addressable API needed…
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wintellect-blogs|Jul 15, 2009

Ode to Wicked Code

A lot has happened since I last put pen to paper in my blog. Silverlight 3 has shipped, and I’ve been in the proverbial cone of silence while I worked with non-public builds of the product. I’ll be publishing lots of new and updated Silverlight samples in coming weeks highlighting the best new features of…
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wintellect-blogs|Jul 12, 2009

Easier Multithreaded Debugging

Last week I was working at Symantec and one of the people I was working with asked me the following: “When you’re debugging heavily multithreaded applicatons, Visual Studio doesn’t handle it too well. You can’t see multiple thread call stacks and locals windows at the same time. Worst of all, once you find that interesting…
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missing-export|Jul 8, 2009

Compiling and Installing AzureServicesManagement Tools on Vista

Microsoft provides an MMC SnapIn for managing Azure Services as C# source code and a set of scripts. The tool allows the management and configuration of .NET Access Control Services, .NET Service Bus, and .NET Workflow Services [now on hold until .net 4.0 matures]. The download can be found here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/AzureManagementTools When following the Readme.docx…
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Blogs|Jul 2, 2009

The Swedes and Tourists

The estimable Raymond Chen posted a funny story today about an experience he had in Sweden. (Make sure you read Raymond’s post so you can understand one of the greatest blog comments ever!) Anyway, I had to laugh out loud because I had something similar happen to me in Sweden as well. A number of…
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missing-export|Jul 1, 2009

Prism Presentation – Code and Slides

I recently had the pleasure of speaking at CodeStock 2009 and was very impressed with the conference overall.  The folks behind this conference put in a lot of work and did a really great job.  I got the chance to see some really good presentations as well.  I look forward to attending CodeStock in the…
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wintellect-blogs|Jun 28, 2009

Paraffin3.1: New and Improved!

Aren’t “New and Improved” the most over used, and contradictory, terms in the marketer’s dictionary? How can something and be new, but yet improved because if it is improved that cancels out the new. My point is that I want to tout an updated release of Paraffin, but I guess I’m being too much of…
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