Blogs|Oct 29, 2011

Is That a WeakReference In Your Gen 2 or Are You Just Glad to See Me?

Sometimes it’s easy to see why your .NET server application is using so much memory, but other times it makes no sense at all. I was at Microsoft earlier this week and someone who’d taken my debugging class stopped me and asked an excellent question. The scenario they had was their service memory would just…
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wintellect-blogs|Oct 21, 2011

Using Jounce Navigation to Create OOB Child Windows in Silverlight 5

One of the reasons I prefer to manage navigation as an event, rather than a strongly typed interface or handler, is because it allows for so much flexibility and extensibility in the navigation pipeline. In my Jounce framework, for example, the basic navigation event simply wires up an instance of a view to a view…
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Blogs|Oct 17, 2011

Working with PivotViewer and the CxmlCollectionSource

Microsoft’s PivotViewer control is an amazing tool for visualizing data and creating a unique UI for your application.  The one issue everyone seems to have with it, however, is its lack of styling capability.  In fact, working with PivotViewer in Expression Blend yields little in the way of styling or templating.  There are only a…
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missing-export|Oct 13, 2011

Boston Phone Camp Presentation Materials

I had a great time talking about the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone at the Windows Phone Camp event in Cambridge, MA earlier today.  I have posted the slide deck here for those who are interested in getting at the web links it contains. If you missed the event and/or are interested in other…
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wintellect-blogs|Oct 11, 2011

Quick Tip: Design-Time Views for Regions

If you’ve worked with the Region Management pattern before, one source of frustration can be the lack of a design-time view. While you can compose individual views to be designer-friendly, the aggregate views that mark regions often end up devoid of anything useful. A simple little trick, however, can change that. You may be familiar…
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Blogs|Oct 7, 2011

Using Visual States to Set Focus on a Control

A common problem encountered in Silverlight applications is how to set the focus properly when transitioning between controls. For example, in the reference application I’m writing for the book Designing Silverlight Business Applications there is the option to either edit an existing record or create a new one. The result of clicking the appropriate button…
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Blogs|Sep 20, 2011

Core .NET Types Usable from a Metro Style Application

When you create a new .NET Metro style application in Visual Studio, it spits out a project template that doesn’t reference any .NET assemblies. Well, this isn’t completely true, because when you run the C# compiler it references MSCorLib.dll by default. For a Metro style application, the referenced MSCorLib.dll contains a bunch of TypeForwardedToAttribute attributes…
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Blogs|Sep 20, 2011

Using the Windows Runtime from a Non-Metro Application

I know a lot of people believe that the new Windows Runtime APIs included in Windows 8 can only be accessed from Metro style applications. A big part of the reason why people believe this is because the version of Visual Studio that ships with the Windows 8 Developer Preview only supports creating Metro style…
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Blogs|Sep 20, 2011

Windows 8 Start Menu Toggle

Since getting my hands on Windows 8 this past week, I (like many others) have really grappled with the constant accidental returning to the metro tiles every time I try to search for something in the new neutered Start Menu that appears in the Developer’s Preview of Windows 8.  To say I hate that would…
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missing-export|Sep 15, 2011

The Cascade Game: From Silverlight to HTML5 (part 2)

Game Loops and Timer-Based Animations Previous Entries in Series Part 1 – Introduction and Game Layout My next short term goal was to get some of spheres to show and animate. And that was going to entail using HTML5’s new <canvas> tag. I saw two ways of going about animating the spheres. The first way…
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missing-export|Sep 15, 2011

If Silverlight is Dead…

Once again speculation and worry has developers around the world biting their fingers and lamenting the end of a new era. It almost seems developers want to stick a fork in their Silverlight development because so many are latching onto the hype wagon, calling .NET “legacy” and refusing to see the bigger picture. Microsoft announces…
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missing-export|Sep 14, 2011

Windows 8: What you Need to Know

If you are trying to follow the hash tag for the //BUILD conference you are probably dizzy by now. I don’t blame you for trying to sort through all the messages about standing in line for the toilet or what someone is having for breakfast. I thought it might be a good time to step…
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