The day has finally arrived. My good friend and colleague, Lori Lalonde and I have co-authored a book for Apress that is focused on developing applications for Windows Phone 8. It’s been quite the adventure and was a lot more work than I ever would have expected. Windows Phone 8 Recipes is a problem-solution based guide to the Windows Phone 8 platform. ......

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Don’t ask me why I did it because I don’t have a good answer. Just because I can probably. I have a solution with several DLL projects some of which depend on others. They all reference (via project references) a common “Library” project for instance. All of these are then referenced by the main application project. It occurred to me to set the “Copy ......

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I’m currently working for a client on a PowerBuilder to WPF migration. It’s one of those “I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you” kind of clients and the quick-lime pits are currently occupied by the EMC tech…but I’ve said too much already. At approximately 3 or 4 pm that day users of the Batman[1] application here in Gotham[1] started to experience ......

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Let’s say that you have a list of objects that contains duplicate items and you want to extract a subset of distinct items. This is pretty straight forward in the trivial case where the duplicate objects are considered the same such as in the following example: List<int> ages = new List<int> { 21, 46, 46, 55, 17, 21, 55, 55 }; IEnumerable<int> ......

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Watch THIS. There’s no better description of it than the one posted by the person that uploaded the video. Microsoft sent this tape to retailers to explain the benefits of Windows 386. Boring until the 7 minute mark when the production is taken over by crack-smoking monkeys. Watch it from the start to get the full effect but be warned: The goggles do ......

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You’re reading a post over on The Old New Thing (first clue) and come across the following comment (second clue, you’re actually reading the comments) from Jason Truesdell: Redmond, WA, circa 2010. Forced to deal with misbehaving apps that use undocumented methods to force invocation of application compatibility shims, the app compatibility team created ......

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I’ve posted in the Entity Framework forum about this but I wanted to document it here as well because when I was researching this problem I found very little information. Here’s the deal: I have a single project with multiple models. Some of the models have entities that are mapped back to the same tables in the store. (i.e. two models have a Customer ......

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On its face, enabling the account lockout policy seems like a good idea. Get the password wrong (n) times and you’re ok, get it wrong (n + 1) times and your account is locked out for a period of time; typically 30 minutes. Sometimes a call to the help desk is required to reset the password if the lockout duration has not been defined. Even if it is ......

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You’ve heard good things about Visual Studio 2010 but you still need to answer the question “What’s in it for me?” You need to justify the cost the new software as well as the not insignificant cost of migration. The Entity Framework is a powerful tool for creating a conceptual model of your data store and abstract away the details of data access. Exposing ......

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Just started working with the Entity Designer Database Generation Power Pack and I must say it is a very solid first offering. Model first design is something new in EF4/VS 2010 and it's great to see a tool available that has evolved alongside VS 2010. I was very happy to see that it comes with the ability to synchronize with a database project right ......

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Instead of just letting your application crash, you can attach a method to the DispatcherUnhandledExceptio... and one to the AppDomain.Current.Unhandled... You wire these up in the code behind of your application which by default is App.xaml.cs. You can log these errors or throw up a message box and tell the user what happened. Then ......

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I'm looking at an xml document that gets passed to a COM object (yes, I said the "C" word) to save a new record. You can tell by the "new|" at the top of the file before the xml declaration. If we were saving, there would be "edit|" at the top. Couldn't you just have a root element with something like: <myRootElement mode="new"> Ah, here's why ......

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Exploits to jailbreak the iPhone are well known. The iPad runs on the iPhone 3.2 firmware. What this means is that the iPad was shipped with known security vulnerabilities that would allow someone to gain root access to the device. Nice. It’s not like these are security vulnerabilities that are known but have no exploits. The exploits are numerous and ......

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I mean seriously. Let’s imagine for a moment that by some stroke of luck or genius or cosmic accident that you come to be the owner of sex.com. You’d think you had won the lottery. That would be like having a license to print money. I mean really. Sex is the most searched term on the entire Internet. Even without any SEO you’d think that your site would ......

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I have a headache and it’s not even 9AM yet. Well, ok, it’s nearly ten here now in GMT –5 but it’s before nine somewhere still. Sometimes people will miss the point of something so utterly and completely that one is left wondering how such a person can even dress themselves. Writing an application using WPF and the Composite Application Library (Prism) ......

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