wintellect-blogs|Sep 5, 2011

TFS 2010 Build Numbers & File Versions from Inside Your C# and C++ Projects

A while ago, I showed using MSBuild 4.0 to create build version files with the TFS build number so that build number could be included in your binaries. While you can use Jim Lamb’s excellent custom workflow activity, I liked doing the version numbers with MSBuild because you could have the same build for both…
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wintellect-blogs|Sep 1, 2011

Silverlight 5 RC – Using the Task Parallel Library (TPL)

One enhancement that quietly slipped into the Silverlight 5 RC is the inclusion of Tasks. This is not the full-blown Task Parallel Library (TPL) to my knowledge (as it lacks the Parallel class and extensions) but it does provide Task, its related factories, and the functionality to chain and monitor tasks. The purpose of the…
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wintellect-blogs|Sep 1, 2011

Silverlight 5 RC Released – Using PInvoke

It’s exciting to see the progress of Silverlight 5 toward the final release that has been slated towards the end of the year. Today, the Silverlight Team announced the release of the Silverlight 5 Release Candidate. While it does not yet have a go-live license, it integrates many new features that were not available with…
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wintellect-blogs|Aug 30, 2011

Properties or Fields?

There was a great conversation on Twitter today about properties and fields. The discussion was about whether it makes sense to expose variables as fields and not bother with the overhead of properties. After all, it’s quick and easy and you can always change it later, right? One participant suggested there could be design “assumptions…
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wintellect-blogs|Aug 29, 2011

Windows 7 Hang with FireWire 800 Drive Fix

Recently I bought a smoking fast external SSD enclosures from Other World Computing. My plan was to use the FireWire 800 connection to the drive so I can get the best portable speed possible. Alas, on all my machines as soon as I tried to do anything on the drive, Windows 7 hangs completely. That’s…
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wintellect-blogs|Aug 28, 2011

Boston Azure User Group Presentation Materials

Many thanks to the organizers and attendees of the Boston Azure User Group where I had the chance to speak this past week on Developing Cloud-Enabled Windows Phone Applications with Windows Azure.  I hope everyone who attended enjoyed the presentation as much as I enjoyed doing it.  I certainly appreciate everybody having stuck through considering…
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wintellect-blogs|Aug 20, 2011

Tablet Development with Microsoft Silverlight

On August 6th I gave a presentation for ReMix South about tablet development with Silverlight. It was a fun presentation to give. I presented using a Motion Computing CL900 to demonstrate the difference between standard applications and ones that are touch-optimized. I also spoke quite a bit about why Silverlight was the strategic choice for…
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wintellect-blogs|Aug 15, 2011

Silverlight 5 Incompatibility: Play by the Rules

I’ve been using the Silverlight 5 beta for some time now with no issues, so it was a surprise when I came across a project that did not work. It was definitely a backwards compatibility issue because it would run fine in Silverlight 4, but once installed the version 5 runtime, no luck. I started…
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wintellect-blogs|Aug 12, 2011

Using Attribute Validation in Silverlight with WCF RIA Services Example

I’m not a big fan of attribute-based validation because I find there are often complex requirements that involve asynchronous operations that often break the attribute model. I prefer more fluent validation using rules that can be shared between the client and server and can handle asynchronous scenarios. For those times when I do have to…
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wintellect-blogs|Jul 29, 2011

Reflection, Lambda, and Expression Magic

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…
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wintellect-blogs|Jul 26, 2011

Where’s my DataContext?

Every now and then a question comes up concerning a missing DataContext.  The questions usually center around a ViewModel being set to a View properly, but then developer can not bind some command or property to a FrameworkElement.  And typically the FrameworkElement in question is nested within an ItemsControl’s ItemTemplate or other similar structure. First…
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azure-and-cloud-computing|Jul 25, 2011

How to Scale a jQuery Mobile Site for iOS

I was recently working on a jQuery Mobile application and everything looked great on my 21” touch monitor on several browsers, but when I deployed to the server and then hit the page on my iPhone, I ran into a few issues that I needed to work through in order to make the site what…
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