Sharing thoughts and experiences about software architecture, development practices, and engineering solutions.
July 01, 2025How to SSH into a Linux Machine from macOS Without Typing Everything Every Time If you're tired of repeatedly typing and entering your password every time you connect to a Linux machine from macOS, there's a much better and more secure way to…
June 15, 2025Introduction In this post, I want to share some reflections on how artificial intelligence can accelerate and enhance the full lifecycle of app development, using my recent project, PileupBuster, as a showcase. Designing the Initial Screens with Sora…
March 07, 2025A comprehensive guide on AWS Lambda concurrent execution quota, how to increase it, and best practices for managing reserved capacity.
February 27, 2025The Challenge with S3 File Updates in Terraform When managing infrastructure as code with Terraform, one common challenge is ensuring that file content in S3 buckets actually updates when the source files change. By default, Terraform will upload a…
February 14, 2025After many years of BlogEngine.NET, it's time for a change
July 24, 2023This python example searches for the oldest file in a bucket and prints same. Ensure to pip install boto3
June 07, 2023June 06, 2023eveloping serverless applications using AWS Lambda can be an exciting journey into the world of event-driven programming. However, testing and debugging these applications can be a slightly more intricate process than usual. Fortunately, AWS provides…
March 29, 2023Introduction AWS Glue is a fully managed, serverless data integration service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that simplifies the process of extracting, transforming, and loading (ETL) data for analytics purposes. With its scalable, pay-as-you…
December 05, 2022In the video I show you (with no/low code), how to: Download xml from a website Transform this data into csv Upload it to cloud storage
October 14, 2022In this video I demonstrate how to stream data over a httpresponse using a .netcore web api.
September 26, 2022Today I show you how to add header propagation in ASP net. “Header what?” I hear you say. Essentially it’s a mechanism whereby when you make Http requests via a HttpClient, you can automatically ‘forward’ headers that were issued to your endpoint…
August 19, 2022Picture this: You find yourself with a big list of resource identifiers You want to make get information for each id via a http request You want to batch the resource identifiers rather than making individual http calls You want to make multiple…
September 13, 2021Async/Await simplifies async code, use it everywhere and life becomes so simple right? While this is true I’ve seen situations where users either chose to, or had to, mix async and non async code and got themselves into a world of problems. One…
July 08, 2021In this video I show you how to add CORS support to an Azure Application Gateway Route
July 08, 2021Today while adding a new server to an Azure subscription I encountered the following error: The subscription is not registered to use namespace 'Microsoft.HybridCompute' In this video I show you how register the Hybrid Compute provider in your…
June 30, 2021In this video I show you how to use AWS API Gateway to quickly proxy an existing API.
June 30, 2021This video shows you how to create a websocket server in java Links: https://www.javainuse.com/spring/boot-websocket https://start.spring.io/ https://www.websocket.org/echo.html Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/web-pubsub/ https…
March 24, 2021So you’ve started using terraform You’ve progressed to creating terraform modules You’ve put your module in a private bitbucket repo Now you want to access it from a bitbucket build pipeline and you see the following | Solution In my case I…
March 03, 2021In this video I show you how to configure multiple origins for a single cloudfront distribution
January 29, 2021In this video I show you how move application secrets into Azure Key Vault without any code changes.I do this by using a vault access policy. Note: You'll have to ignore my managed identity references in this video I didn't use them.
January 19, 2021In this video I show you how to leverage Azure Managed Identities to allow access between Azure resources. (excuse the audio quality.. i need to improve on this)
January 06, 2021In computing, a materialized view is a database object that contains the results of a query. For example, it may be a local copy of data located remotely, or may be a subset of the rows and/or columns of a table or join result, or may be a summary…
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January 05, 2021testing
August 07, 2019It’s been a few years since I became certified in AWS and Azure and it’s now time for something new. I’ve rolled out a few Kubernetes clusters in recent years and believer I’ve a good handle on the pros and cons versus some of the public cloud native…
May 01, 2019I believe I’ve previously covered c# generics covariance and contravariance in the past, now it’s javas turn As you may or may not know The term PECS stands for “Producer Extends, Consumer Super,” which is an odd acronym coined by Joshua Block in his…
January 03, 2019Tip If you are debugging with VS2017/9 and want to pass environment variables to your container then read this post, if you are looking for picture of cats then sorry but leave a comment how you got here Step 1 Create a new text file, the name doesn…
December 27, 2018Hi Everyone, I thought it worth sharing how to configure Azure Active Directory to work with a .net core 2.2 webapi backend and an angular7 front end that uses ADAL (i.e. v1 of Azure AD) AD Versions As you may or may not be aware, Azure AD has two…
August 16, 2018The C# compiler defaults to the latest major version of the language that has been released. You may choose to compile any project using a new point release of the language. Choosing a newer version of the language enables your project to make use of…
August 15, 2018Imagine the scenario you are on a team race, there are a number of stages along the route however only once all you teammates have gotten the the end of a stage can anyone proceed to the next stage. Now imagine the competitors are threads/tasks and…
August 14, 2018In windows we have two types of semaphores, local and named system semaphores. You can think of a semaphore as a bounder in a nightclub, the responsibility is to only allow a number of people into the club at any one time. .net has a lightweight…
July 25, 2018Hi everyone, Recently I found myself using Azure managed Kubernetes (AKS), however the images I wanted to pull were in AWS ECR. If my k8s cluster was in AWS it would be transparent to me provided the IAM user had permission but, in order to pull such…
May 20, 2018If you see this post it means that BlogEngine.NET is running and the hard part of creating your own blog is done. There is only a few things left to do. Download Themes Official Website Donate Write Permissions To be able to log in, write posts and…
March 21, 2018So I’ve been looking for a serverless framework that can run on-prem and in the cloud, I’ve been leaning towards OpenFaaS as it appears to be gaining more traction, however I love Azure functions and though let’s see if this is a viable solution. I…
November 23, 2017I’ve been quite vocal in the past that the Java language syntax is low on my list of favourite languages. I believe this stems from the fact that I write lots of C# (and even Typescript) these days, and those languages are a lot nicer to work with…
July 17, 2017I’ve been thinking a lot about the state of software development recently and moreover taking a step back trying to identify and articulate where I stand on past, present, future trends or concepts and define how to employ these ideas and approaches…
April 25, 2017Hi all, I thought I would share with you this quick Powershell script I created to Export an oracle database, 7Zip it and then upload it to AmazonS3 Export.ps1 param([String]$dumpname=(get-date -format dd-MM-yyyy)) Set-Alias sz "$env:ProgramFiles\…
February 22, 2017Hi all, I’ve been pretty busy lately and have been struggling to get the time to write a few blog posts. So what I’ve decided to try do is create a few videos instead, I’m going for a warts and all approach so I’m not editing the videos before…
February 10, 2017After deploying ensure to configure CORS
January 03, 2017With 2016 drawing to a close and 2017 already in full swing for me, I thought this was a good opportunity to reflect on how 2016 went and what 2017 has in store for me from a technological point of view. 2016 If asked how 2016 was from a professional…
July 11, 2016This is a rather unusual post for me, while I’ve gone to the trouble of getting certified on both Azure and AWS platforms and try to make my posts on the same as unbiased as possible, the fact is that I’m pro Azure, and always have been, perhaps it’s…
June 08, 2016This demonstrates what is involved in writing and reading some text to an Azure and an AWS blob. Use case What i set out to achieve was to demonstrate how to read and write some text to a blob with the SDKs. Just to make it a little more interesting…
May 26, 2016It’s been a busy year and my blog posts have suffered while I’ve been preparing and sitting these exams. But I’ve got them both now, so expect my Azure vs AWS series of posts to continue.
April 14, 2016So you’d like to ensure that the VM, you so love keeps its assigned IP address, how do you do that? AWS AZURE
April 01, 2016So out of the blue I found myself giving Azure Media Indexing a trial run, for no other reason other than I could, this is why I love cloud tech so much, it brings something that would have been very difficult 5-10 years ago, within reach of anyone…
March 20, 2016The public cloud is fantastic for numerous reasons, if you’re not faced with some restriction such as where you data lives or other factors, then my advise is get away from private clouds and get to the public clouds as fast as your legs can carry…
March 15, 2016As promised, hereby the first instalment of the AWS vs Azure blog post saga, again I’m trying to remain impartial throughout. What I intend to outline is at this stage is the show to get started deploying a new application to AWS and to Azure from…
January 17, 2016History So way back circa 2008 I registered for AWS free tier, now back then I was working in a different industry that didn’t have much need for ‘the cloud’ I played with a few linux vm’s during that year but nothing came of it and my trial expired…
December 09, 2015When I started out writing this blog way back circa 2008 timeframe it was fully focused on .NET tech, things have changed with time and while .NET is still my second love (my first love was C++) I now find myself in a multiple of different language…
November 10, 2015So I’ve been looking at an issue for a client today where by an application working perfectly well on most browsers was failing on internet explorer 11. Users were presented with the following error: I think we can all agree that it’s not very…
July 06, 2015In this post I show you how to generate a shell for a web applications in both Java and .NET, while they are not directly a one to one mapping I think some of you will find this interesting should you have never created a web application on either…
April 22, 2015So I’ve started using OData in anger and pretty much immediately stumbled on a problem when using Data Transfer Objects (DTOs). This post explains that problem and the solution. Problem The following error is encountered when trying to access the…
April 16, 2015If you ever come across the problem of the IntelliJ Application Servers menu greyed out like this: This is simply because you need at least one Run Configuration. I’m using JBoss just now so here’s what I do to add a run config: Once this is done…
February 24, 2015and it's not because I'm Irish ;-) ODataController - 406 So I’m working on a project that returns some entities from an OData endpoint, I wanted to remove the unnecessary parts of my entities so I created some DTO’s (which in itself is a good idea…
January 18, 2015Problem I was faced with a problem this morning that took me a good 30 minutes to figure out.. I had created a website and associated SQL database. However I changed said database as part of some development work. The problem was that even though my…
January 01, 2015Appears to be the story of my life lately, just as I get excited and proficient on one stack I get side tracked with something else. The latest stack I’m playing with is the Ionic2 framework, but first some history. UX Stacks I’ve written UX…
October 27, 2014In this screencast I show you how to prevent a click event on a table cell content from propagating up to its parent. Screenshots
October 25, 2014Hi all, Ok this is my very first ever screencast, It’s not very polished but hopefully I’ll get into the swing of things with some more practise. The screen cast shows how to add validation to forms the Angular.JS way.
October 17, 2014So in my previous post I show you how to auth with a bearer token against WebApi2 with the OWIN middleware using a HttpClient. Next up I show you how to do the same with AngularJS. AngularJS True to form I’m not going to write a big long blog post on…
October 13, 2014Hi all, I’d like to introduce you to what appears to be a great tool for the .net platform. http://www.ndepend.com/ I’ve promised to write a review on this tool, however, I’ll be perfectly honest and admit, that I’ve just not got the time right now…
October 07, 2014Hi all, I know I promised my next post was going to be more Azure but I encountered a little task that took me a while to get working, the scenario was that I wanted to make a call to my WebAPI (MVC5) service using a C# HttpClient, the problem was…
August 15, 2014If you've seen my previous post then this post is quite similar, this time however I write to an Azure Queue and not to a blob. Code First of all you need an Azure storage account as before, but once this is setup, consider the following code… What…
August 14, 2014Anyone that’s dealt with Linq will undoubtedly have encountered expressions, this post how provide an expression in your class to consumers of this class. Scenario We would like to set some properties of an entity using expressions, also we’d like to…
July 29, 2014Tonight I’m going to follow up on my previous post where I promised to show you how to react on somone/something uploading a Blob. Please readhttp://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2014/06/18/announcing-the-0-3-0-beta-preview-of-microsoft-azure-webjobs-sdk…
July 26, 2014In the picture above you see a storage account in Azure, in the storage account we have an ecbfx (European Central Bank FX Rates) container. Now let’s see how to upload some data to this container using a C# console application. NUGET Given we are…
July 15, 2014View Full Album This is a post, that I've just not got time to explain in full yet... But if you are stuck on 1-2mbps ADSL and have a bit of time on your hands then its possible to get +20mbps broadband. I achieved this by load balancing a fixed…
May 26, 2014To the uninitiated this can be really confusing in JavaScript. Consider the following: The code above logs this three times, but what is this? The main source of confusion is a quirk of the language where depending on the invocation pattern this can…
May 23, 2014In this post I’m going to show you how to upload a file using Angular.js on the client side and Asp WebApi on the back end. Lets get started Create you project in visual studio, and add your angular.js app controllers etc. Interestingly enough I’ve…
April 28, 2014http://2014.javazone.no/videos.htmlAn ex colleague of mine sent me this link this morning. www.whyjavasucks.com Apparently I got associated with it, haha, yes at one time I used to shoot down java at every occurrence, this was most likely because I…
April 12, 2014I’ve gotten a few emails from last night’s post asking me why I’ve gone black (and will i go back?),, well you know what they say! Btw: I’ve Visual Studio, IntelliJ and WebsStorm on black/dracula themes at the moment and a week on I’m kinda sold, the…
April 11, 2014You won’t believe the amount on questions I’ve come across regarding the confusion between angular services factories and providers. This blog post attempts to help clarify same and get you started. Which should I use? Factory * if you don’t know…
March 08, 2014Another day, another post with me talking about something I barely know about. Today I’m going to show you my first second stab at a recursive Angular.js directive. Let’s first have a look at the end goal (forgive the as of yet unfinished css and bad…
January 31, 2014Take the following code, if you have ReSharper installed you’ll be warned that there is possible multiple enumeration of your IEnumerable, this means that Select will be repeated twice for everything in the array. ToArray() One solution is to…
January 31, 2014Talking to an ex colleague of mine this evening about some use cases for yield, it’s quite a handy little keyword, i often use it for splitting a large collection into smaller ones (Chunk). Efficiency I was presented with another use for yield. Take…
November 22, 2013Hi was reviewing some java code this week and came across this wonderful way of establishing structured enums. Code //Declaration private enum ServerType { DEV("https://server1:8001", "customservicesuser", "xzy"), TEST("http://server2:800…
November 07, 2013Hi guys, I’ve found myself discussing garbage collecting in the JVM a few times this week and though I’d share this information with everyone that ever wondered how all this works. Automatic Garbage Collection Automatic garbage collection is the…
September 24, 2013So I’ve splashed out the 600euro and got me a SIM free Samsung Galaxy S4 Android phone. Why? Well I find myself doing more and more JAVA these days (as if I wasn’t busy enough keeping up to speed on .NET and iOS too) and I’ll admit it’s starting to…
September 17, 2013Overview I’ve been looking at a c++ application that uses ACE library, now I’ve never used this library myself, I used to love BOOST when I was 100% c++ (way back in the day sniff sniff). C++ 11 has drastically improved life sure but it’s not got…
August 16, 2013Good evening, I’d like to share my solution for using MVC5 Owin security with VS2013 Update 1. I wanted to have my own DBContext contain both my own DBSets and also the security tables. Now I could find zero documentation on this and I actually…
July 31, 2013I’ve been shown a lovely little utility for testing with JUnit 4.11 whereby one can have a list of items performed as part of the single unit test. First set add the annotations you see below and set your inputs and expected outputs. (Arrange and…
June 13, 2013I’ve gotten my hands dirty, I’ve published v1.0 to the store I’ve gotten the best support I’ve ever seen from Xamarin I’ve gone back to Objective-C, BOOM! Bindings drove me daft The reason I walked away was that I found some nice Objective-C widgets…
May 17, 2013I was releasing an app to the the Apple App store tonight (actually two apps, I've done an Atley Hunter ;-) ) One of my apps encountered a problem when I tried to upload my archive: "This bundle is invalid. The UIDeviceFamily key must be present when…
May 04, 2013Xamarin vs XCode Anyone that reads this blog regularly or knows me, will know that I’m a C#/Java guy primarily, but I do love all other languages, especially javascript and objective-c (my objective-c is just about passable, mainly because I’ve only…
April 22, 2013I wish to follow up on my previous post Uploading a file in MVC4 C#5 .NET 4.5 I promised a few things here, an Ajax client, WinRT, iOs, Droid, This post addresses the ajax upload. First some background, I’m working on an expense tracking system at…
April 03, 2013So I’ve had a problem uploading a file using a HTML5 input of type file field. For love nor money could I see a problem with the code above (in my defence I’m working on this project late in the evening and have my First dose of Man Flu this year, I…
March 09, 2013There are two steps, the first step is to register a facebook application, after you register you will have a key and password. The next step will be to insert these into you application. Step 1. Enable OAuth login using Facebook, Twitter Steps to…
February 16, 2013Ok another Java post, they are few and far between, but I’ve already polluted this blog with objective-c, javascript and other non .net languages so why not. So I was lying in bed last night my wife was hogging the windows machine watching some film…
February 05, 2013If you’ve used Asp MVC Web Api then you are most likely familiar with the notion of content negotiation, this is the process where the content returned in the response is dictated by the accepts header in the request. In sort if you request xml you…
January 28, 2013After all these years, where I’ve modified connections strings etc in the web.config release folder. I’ve finally realised I can preview the transformation that Visual Studio Does. To be really honest I’m not sure if this is a new feature of VS201…
January 28, 2013Ok, so in my case it was not so sensitive, I had generated a publish profile for one of my projects, that said I don’t want the world and their aunty to be able to publish their apps to my server so I needed to remove my sensitive data from git. Here…
November 28, 2012So as I wait for my second iPhone application to be approved by the apple store, I start to wonder a few little things. How can I improve my existing apps through functionality and user experience. Given I’m pretty much a noob with iOS dev still…
October 30, 2012If you want to get a feel for the singleton pattern in C# one of the best resources I always revisit is on John Skeet’s (@jonskeet) website http://www.yoda.arachsys.com/csharp/singleton.html I encourage you to read the above article to appreciate the…
October 18, 2012In my previous post I showed you how to have the keyboard resign first responder status when Return is pressed. A little tip: is that you don’t need to set the delegate in code like my previous post, you can use the connections pane and Crtl drag…
October 17, 2012So I’ve just submitted an application to the apple app store. I’ve been using XCode snapshot feature and skydrive all along, now I wanted to use a source control system as I’ve done all my professional live. Given I’ve a github account it’s a good a…
September 18, 2012Ok this is another XCode/ Objective-c/ IOS post. Stop reading now if you feel sick MSFT fans Winking smile So you’ve written an app and you test out that new data entry field only to find out that the keyboard covers you action buttons and you can’t…
September 13, 2012At lunch today I created a little fun website and it only took about 15 minutes (as you can plainly see from the styling). Technologies The technologies involved were Azure (website) SignalR Asp MVC 4 .NET 4 (because at the time of writing Azure…
August 31, 2012So I’ve spend many a sleepless night this week knowing that the webapplication i was working was not doing server side paging… This morning I decided I needed to remedy that and was I in for an experience Smile At first I was thinking why oh why had…
August 30, 2012runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests To support DELETE verbs in MVC4 the webconfig should have runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests defined If you have an older project (like my project that I started in VS2012 RC) you may need to add this setting or…
August 23, 2012I’ve just been through the mill trying to get kendo grid working with a ASP MVC Web Api Http Post Action. I think it may help someone if I post my findings. OData If you use KendoUi you know that the datasource has v.good support of OData, but you’ll…
August 14, 2012Here’s a nice way of enabling a button on a form IFF the Accept T&C; checkbox has been clicked Knockout script So we have a simple acceptTerms variable that is observable Markup In the markup above you can see that the input of id “agree” has bound…
August 08, 2012So I’ll put it out there, I’m a novice Objective-C man, in fact I’m still sitting on the fence on whether I should write my iOS apps in C# (MonoTouch) or Objective-c (xcode), I’m leaning a little more towards the Monotouch approach and to be honest I…
July 22, 2012So the heading for this post is a little bit of a mouthful, but I want to tell you a story of how some of these technologies play together, so often in blog posts we are presented with a trivial example (I’m holding my hands up here too) and what we…
July 07, 2012So I’ve been working on Web application that uses the ASP MVC4 Web API. I like this approach especially as it will easily allow me to support other clients I/others may write in future, in so far as, it returns Json and is a RestAPI. Now I’ve never…
July 06, 2012Ok so you’ve been using ASP MVC3+ and using Ninject as your Dependency Injection resolver. Now you want to start leveraging the Asp.WebApi and continue to use Ninject. I was surprised to find it wouldn’t work out of the box! Ok I’m using the “out of…
May 31, 2012_I usually try avoid getting into the OS / Browser etc drama, yawn…. _ But I found this blog post on Pluralsite tonight, and I can help but laugh, I’m with the 72% it turns out, I am asking myself did I pick that option because it was just funny…
April 27, 2012Tonight ( <-- how sad is that). I started working on a work related REST API, and iPad client The Rest API will eventually sit in a Java Application server (JBoss/Wls etc). However even though I’ve done my fair share of java programming in recent…
April 17, 2012Hi all, I said I’d post this because I didn’t manage to find a suitable blog post or documentation indicating how to do this with the HttpClient (beta). (bleeding edge again ey). This post outlines how to create a simple test server that has a Json…
April 11, 2012With this post I’m back to my lovely OneNote screen clippings, my last few postings were done on Windows8 and I’d no OneNote installed. So you want to Deserialize Json in .NET! (C#) How do you go about it? There are a few approaches, many poeple are…
April 09, 2012What’s wrong with this? The problem is the variable name used for getting a single user the function would never be called. E.g. if we put http://localhost:65487/api/users/1 into our browser what will happen is the GetAll gets called! What we need to…
April 07, 2012I’m starting this post with a disclaimer. I’m not a RavenDb expect, actually far from it, in fact I’ve only started working with it this evening! I’m working on a pet project and getting the initial building blocks in place. I read about RavenDB in a…
April 05, 2012Here is an extension method that I just had to share, TBH I’ve forgotten what I robbed the initial idea from, it wasn’t mine, but it’s something I found that I use over and over. The problem is I want to use the Distinct() extension method. However…
April 05, 2012I’m working with an XML document all morning, and for the hell of it I decided to open in VS11. Guess what I found, some pretty cool xml/xsd/xslt support but the biggest feature I found is the following… Paste XML as classes! BOOM!! Loving VS11…
April 04, 2012Back on the bleeding edge again Hot smile I’m in the early stages of my next killer app and I’m investigating the pros and cons of using the new ASP WebApi. One of the features of this so called killer app will be to upload pictures (nothing special…
March 21, 2012Hi all, here’s an example of how to use jQuery UI Autocomplete in ASP MVC3. The sample app I will show actually connects to a work related webservice, but you could use any repository you so wish. Steps Create a MVC3 application Add jQuery UI (use…
March 14, 2012I previously wrote a post on MVC async controllers. Now I want to follow up on something that’s more cutting edge, unfortunately I’m one of those people that like nosing about with what new, how it will affect me and how I could leverage it in future…
March 04, 2012So my wife left me for a hen weekend and I needed something to do with my time. Friday night I dedicated to my real work to clear my conscience and then I went to play. Windows 8 I spent a few frustrating hours on Saturday working on a Win…
February 24, 2012As part of this WinRT comparison I’m doing, I next need to recreate my apps in html+js. This is my first WinRT app I’ve written in html+js and right off the mark I hit a problem with the WinRT sandbox. These days I won’t write a web app without…
February 24, 2012I left my last blog very indecisive, would I use CPP, would I use .NET or would it be html/js. Again I’m thinking Cpp is really for faster and better performance, and while it might even be the hands down winner on ARM architecture, I don’t expect to…
February 24, 2012Hi again, this is my last post were I compare the same WinRT application written in three different ways. C++ / Xaml C# / Xaml JavaScript / html My previous post covers c++ and c#, this one covers javascript. JavaScript / html I have to admit, this…
February 21, 2012Those of you that started out in windows c++ like me are likely familiar with COMPunch, COM+Ghost, DCOM Ninja If you stayed in unmanaged land then you’ve probably still very familiar with, ATL, HResults etc. However if on the other hand, like me, you…
February 09, 2012I’m was not sure what I’d installed but tonight I needed to create a few regular expressions, and as i started typing this appeared in VS2010 Pretty cool if I say so myself. A quick look at my extension manager and I see Visual Studio you rock! I…
February 05, 2012Previous post Overview The Event Programming Model (EPM from her on in) was introduced in .NET 2.0, it’s purpose was to serve as a simpler pattern for asynchronous operations than the Asynchronous Programming Model (APM / IAsyncResult, see my…
January 30, 2012So what is the strategy pattern? It’s one of the simplest object orientated design patterns, I find that it helps clean up day to day object orientated design. It’s purpose is to Encapsulate a family of related algorithms such that they are callable…
January 01, 2012Those of you have have already used .net 4.5 developer preview will know that tasks are becoming more common in the API, especially with the advent of the async await keywords. But many of you (including me) can’t really advocate .net 4.5 in the…
December 29, 2011When creating an Azure queue, you specify a lock duration, once a message is read from the queue it’s marked as invisible for other readers for a period of time, e.g. one minute. Choosing the invisibility time is a trade-off between expected…
December 28, 2011When communicating between roles in an Azure application we’ve a few options; to name a few: Http Tcp Queues While Http and Tcp are tried and trusted they do come with some limitations that queues help overcome. In the last few months Microsoft have…
December 27, 2011Here’s one way to migrate your SqlServer Database to the Azure platform. Get the SQL Azure Migration Wizard http://sqlazuremw.codeplex.com/ Start the wizard and select SQL Database Migrate option Select your source database Choose the objects you…
December 21, 2011This evening I decided I’d install the new Azure tools after watching the latest vids that have appeared. I right click on my MVC3 app and choose to: Add Windows Azure Deployment Project Then I hit F5 to run the project and I get an error Microsoft…
December 04, 2011Earlier today I happened to lend a hand to a friend of mine that was experiencing a race condition in an ASP.MVC application, like a rag to a bull is multithreading to me. Here’s the scenario; my friend was calling two web services using methods like…
November 27, 2011I’m still working on the LiveResume website, just something I’m playing with in my free time, no I’m not looking for a job Smile just have an idea that I’ve not seen anywhere else (no I’m not telling you what it is until the site is live Winking…
November 26, 2011Hi all, This has probably been beaten to death elsewhere, but somehow it’s the first time I’ve ever come across it. I’m working on the LiveResume website this evening (hey it was this or watch XFactor. Anyway, I wanted to ensure that all different…
November 16, 2011Hi all, Ok, so I did a bit of googling to see if this had been done by someone else, turns out I failed to find a suitable solution, just many frustrated people. So this post is an attempt to make those people a little happier. The solutions is as…
November 07, 2011So I’m still working on the Live CV website I’m creating in my spare time. The idea is pretty simple the web application will let users create an online CV, I’ll not get into the details of it until I’ve something more interesting to show. Of course…
November 02, 2011I’ve discovered a nice set of jQuery filter selectors. Take this example of selecting the checked radio button in a group Markup Script There are many many others, e.g. @contains, :disabled, :not(selector), :parent, :password, etc etc, more info…
October 19, 2011I’m executing a windows process from java and I was bitten by a nasty oversight in one of my project today. Everything’s been working fine for some time, but today the application I’m calling started spitting out errors to the error stream. However I…
October 10, 2011If you’ve been following the changes in the C++11 standard you may have heard of Variadic templates. In layman’s terms: var arg template parameters. Lets take c# to explain what we’re talking about: Take the Action generic delegate, there’ 16 of them…
September 22, 2011September 19, 2011You know what? I love Silverlight! The only reason I don’t spend more time in it is the ASP is more suited to non enterprise applications. However tonight for you dear reader I’ve got an enterprise application (below) (because every enterprise had…
September 10, 2011So have you ever found yourself doing this? Well no there’s a nicer alternative whereby you can build up your mail in html. Check out the MVCMailer package on Nuget. PM> Install-Package MvcMailer Attempting to resolve dependency 'T4Scaffolding (≥…
August 30, 2011So it took me 2 hours (downloads on 2mbps included) to create an Android app in eclipse. Wonder is that something I should be proud of giving I’ve been in software for nearly 15 years now…. 2 hours for a hello world… Listening to .net rocks and…
August 28, 2011If you’ve upgraded to Entity Framework 4.1 you may have noticed the following no longer compiles. (the line of code that causes the database to drop and recreate on schema change). Solution
August 24, 2011So tonight I’m going to show you one way on calling async workflows from ASP.net. I’ve decided to use web forms this time as I’m living in MVC land and it’ll help me keep the finger in. So lets take a look at the app we’re trying to build Client is a…
August 15, 2011So does your browser support the html5 audio tag when it comes to MP3s? Browsers in order of my preference IE9 – Nope Firefox 5 – Nope, Moreover doesn't gracefully degrade to my fallback text! Chrome 13 – Sure Safari 5 – Arguably the best default…
August 12, 2011Darn it but I’ve being doing a lot of Java recently and u know what, I’m no expert but it I think I could even a raise the rating on my C.V. at this stage. My first experience of Java was reading a book back in 2001 belonging to a student friend of…
August 10, 2011Ok, forget about mvvm, that’s not the point of this quick post… Have a look at that, ain’t it a thing of beauty!? No more having to get back onto the gui thread, even webforms people have to do it with Control.Invoke (or sync context). Parallel task…
August 07, 2011So how hard is it to draw on a html5 canvas? Well if you ever lived in a GDI+ world like I once did, then it’s pretty simple. In fact it’s somewhat familiar to silverlight/wpf people too, the parameters passed to draw a rectangle for example are…
August 07, 2011Ok so it’s not the var keyword in c++, but in C++11 it’s called **auto. ** This is something I love in c#, life would be miserable without it Smile, it’s magnificent especially in linq, infact linq could become quite painful without it (and also…
August 05, 2011Is there a better way? Or at least a more generic way to leverage the dispose pattern? Well here’s one I thought of tonight Sample usage: P.s. I know creating an object to reset a boolean is a bit of overkill, but see my comments and argument for…
August 04, 2011To be honest, it’s been a long time since I did any real c++, however I’ve been reading a Java book lately and it’s made me kinda lonesome for C++, the Java book goes into a lot of detail about core language structure, it’s not a book on hibernate…
August 04, 2011Ok, only you can decide if this is something you want to do, keeping in mind the security concerns. Here’s how: Press the Windows key + R on your keyboard to launch the “Run” dialog box. Type in control userpasswords2 + ENTER The User Accounts window…
August 03, 2011So what are MVC Filters? To quote Professional ASP.NET MVC2 ISBN 978-0-470-64318-1 ”Filters are a declarative attribute-based means of providing cross-cutting behavior to an action method.” So what are MVC Filters? Sarcastic smile Well lets discuss…
July 16, 2011Ok you’ve finally got you MVC controller and models all wired up, you BL is fine, now you want to pretty up those views, so you’ll start to use some css and javascript. Here’s how you can specify html attributes with your html helpers. Button sample…
July 15, 2011If you’ve been to a HTML5 session or lived in the html5 world for any length of time you’ll have come across the term “Progressive Enhancement”. It’s about taking a base application that works on downstream browsers and detecting features and…
July 05, 2011Nothing, really ground breaking, but don’t it look neat! (if i say so myself). (that facebook link will be going up alongside flicker/twitter when i get around to it.). Site written in asp mvc3/ jQuery / razor / graphics in photoshop and content…
July 04, 2011So you want to draw a chart in MVC and don’t know where to start? Step 1) Create a new MVC3 project Step 2) Open NuGet and add a library reference to “microsoft-web-helpers” Step 3) Change your action method to create a new chart and write it to…
June 25, 2011This evening while I was helping an ex colleague of mine, who was venturing onto the web platform for the first time, an interesting thing happened, he taught me a thing or two! Neil had been researching web forms and MVC, given it was a green field…
June 16, 2011This sample shows you how to hijack the default behaviour of the anchor tag and do something different. The interesting part is that we use the event arg in the click function, once we have this actual arg we can call preventDefault(); on it to stop…
June 16, 2011Part1 – Setting up your database I did some work with an interesting piece of tech lately, Microsoft Syncronization services 4.0 CTP. This post aims to give an overview of where to start, but firstly, let me describe the how all this plugs together…
June 15, 2011. Here’s a run through on how to create a data driven web application in under a minute. I’m going to create a simple part tracking system as to manage the vast amount of helicopter parts lying about my garage. Some parts I ’ll never use, some parts…
June 13, 2011So whose faster? Well C# or Java if you are talking “RAD”, but who executes faster? IMO, C# and Java can be just as fast or faster because the JIT compiler (JIT or just in time is a compiler that compiles your IL the first time it's executed). JIT…
June 12, 2011If like me you prefer to learn keyboard shortcuts and sell your soul in order to avoid moving the mouse, then you’ll like these shortcuts that I’ve stumbled upon this evening. Win]+[Left Arrow] : Dock the active window to the left of the screen [Win…
June 10, 2011Yesterday I read an interesting article on a flight home from Amsterdam and though I would share it with you. One of the generally excepted approaches of writing functions is to validate you input arguments before using them, If-Then-Throw pattern…
June 07, 2011Straight to screenshot Ok so I’m here in a hotel in Germany, been stuck in java all day so I needed .net like a drug this evening. Let me describe what you see above. The screenshot is from WebMatrix it shows the default webpage where I’m presenting…
June 05, 20111. When Chuck Norris throws exceptions, it’s across the room. 2. All arrays Chuck Norris declares are of infinite size, because Chuck Norris knows no bounds. 3. Chuck Norris doesn’t have disk latency because the hard drive knows to hurry the hell up…
May 17, 2011Hi all, I’m sitting here waiting for a 50meg upload to finish,,, god my internet is slow. May as well add a post ey Smile So I’ll show you how you can request some JSON data from a MVC action using jQuery, You are probably familiar with AJAX…
May 09, 2011Spent some of the weekend mucking about with getting a website to go with an iPhone and WP7 app I’m developing with one mister Tomas McGuinness, the whole idea is a wonderful combination of the MS stack of love with a bit of xcode thrown in for good…
April 27, 2011Hi all, I’ve previously blogged about how mind blowing WCF RIA Services are here This week i found myself working with RIA Services again and this time I’ve got to show you just how easy it is (is case you didn’t take my advise and go look it up Punk…
April 20, 2011Now there’s a pretty sweet way of looking at what’s happening on your server, I’ve picked this tip up from watching SHanselmans MS Stack Of Love (recommended watch) @ MIX11 this year. Here’s how, (pardon the screenshot file sizes as usual ..) Create…
April 19, 2011I’ve been playing (seriously playing) with Visual Studio LightSwitch for the last few weeks and I have to say it’s knocking my socks off, not since I programmed in MS Access (am I allowed to say that? Should I even admit where it all started for me…
April 19, 2011WCF not only provides SOAP, it’s also capable of providing RESTful services through use of the WebGet and WebInvoke attributes in the System.ServiceModel.Web assembly in conjunction with the webHttpBinding and webHttp behaviour. In fact, WebGet…
April 16, 2011Not many comments needed I imagine. The “ThenBy” extension method is what you’re looking for.
April 11, 2011When you crate a new MVC project a view called Error.aspx is created for you in the Views/Shared folder. To instruct controller actions to use this Error handler you need to use the HandlErrorAttribute action filter, this is the default exception…
March 08, 2011This is just a quick sample to show you can use Linq in 2 different yet identical ways. The task is to show the count of people that have the same ages in our sample input data
March 05, 2011Mucking about more and more with jQuery now that’s it’s pretty much become the industry standard, so I needed a little project to work on. I’ve previously created my online c.v. in a Silverlight4 app (must dig that out and add it to the site); this…
March 03, 2011Took a little time out tonight from the web application I’m working on as I want to create a little dashboard prototype that has to be desktop based as a result of where it will be used. I’ve got a server JBPM (Java business process management…
February 28, 2011When you create a MVC view for data entry it already has the scaffolding in place to handle client side validation (and server) However you need to specify the data annotations you need. You’ve two options. Modify the T4 code generation templates Use…
February 27, 2011You may wonder why you would create a view for the delete action One reason is to prevent webcrawlers interfering with your data, so create those delete views!
February 27, 2011When you modify a table in SqlServer and this change requires the table to be dropped and recreated, it’s necessary that SSMS is configured to allow this. Go to SSMS/Tools/Options designers and uncheck this option. See below
February 23, 2011Lets say you have simple UPDATE command Now, lets assume that two end users of your system have already requested information for SEC_USER Bill whose a male janitor. End user 1 updates Bills Department as he’s been promoted to CEO (hey it not…
February 23, 2011The cool hip thing these days is MVC, hang ur head in shame if you are still plodding along with plain old asp.net. Actually that’s not quite right, in fact it couldn’t be further from the truth, asp.net is alive and strong and will be for a long…
February 22, 2011The "Works on My Machine" Certification Program Joseph Cooney had a brilliant idea for a new application certification program. But Vista's bland white-on-gray badge, in my opinion, doesn't properly communicate the.. authoritative.. nature of said…
February 21, 2011It pains me to say it, but ASP.NET MVC 3 introduces an ugly regression in routing from ASP.NET MVC 2. The good news is that there’s an easy workaround. The bug manifests when you have a route with two consecutive optional URL parameters and you…
February 21, 2011Was having a conversation this evening with an ex colleague of mine, he’s recently ventured into the world of Silverlight which he loves, for him; even though it didn’t start out that way; this has become a stepping stone to the the wonderful world…
February 10, 2011Here’s a neat little trick. Declare a helper function in your view with the @helper syntax Note: you will get intellisense when you type the @ listing the GiveHigh5 function. Here’s the output: enjoyThumbs up
February 09, 2011For those of you that don’t know DRY : Don’t Repeat Yourself. Take the following two screens They are nearly identical. MVC3/Razor provides two ways to make things DRYer. Layouts (same as asp.net master pages, not covered in this post) Partial…
February 08, 2011Unless you’ve been living under a rock lately, you’ll at least have heard of MVC and Razor even if you don’t really know what they are… ASP.NET MVC 3 is the next major release of ASP.NET MVC. ASP.NET MVC is a part of the ASP.NET Web application…
January 28, 2011Couldn’t tell you! Installed it and got the following Sick smile
January 26, 2011I’ve been playing with the idea of writing an currency converter for my new Windows Phone 7. Stumbled across a tweet by Scot Hanselman regarding http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun. Turns out someone else beat me to it with the BING “api” (more of a…
January 23, 2011Download and install Windows Phone Developer Tools Select the registration in the start menu Enter your live id (ensure you’re registered at the developer portal to create wp7/xbox apps http://create.msdn.com/en-US/ (remember have your phone…
January 21, 2011Received my first windows phone today, just had to try an app after finishing work.. Wrote a little app to search the subnet looking for some jboss application servers, works just as well on my phone connected to wifi Rolling on the floor laughing…
January 19, 2011SqlServer 2008 has a short hand/compact way of assigning calculation variables. e.g Sql2005 DECLARE @val INT set @val = 1; set @val = @val + 1; Sql2008 DECLARE @val INT set @val = 1; set @val += 1; Same applies to other operators, *=, –=, /=
January 19, 2011In a visual studio 2010 asp page, start typing
January 17, 2011On IIS, the .NET Framework maintains a pool of threads that are used to service ASP.NET requests. When a request arrives, a thread from the pool is dispatched to process that request. If the request is processed synchronously, the thread that…
January 16, 2011Probably like a lot of other computer people I find myself working with more than one computer. There in lies the problem, is it worth the overhead of manually having to synchronize all these pcs? Sure source code is and always has been handled by a…
January 13, 2011Cassini; We’ve all used it and loved it, now it’s the end of the road for the visual studio webserver. It gets replaced by IIS 7.5 Express You can install it on its own. It's IIS, except it runs as a user process rather than a service. Cassini…
January 13, 2011Today Microsoft announced the (actual, final, honest) releases of: ASP.NET MVC3 with Razor Lots of new features, the new Razor syntax, more extensibility hooks, new JavaScript features, better validation, easier caching, better dynamic support, and…
January 13, 2011Have updated a host of new features on my blog, (running Blog Engine 2.0 released on 1st January) I’m now writing my blogs offline with Wndows Live Writer, and click of the mouse posting them to www.briankeating.net, no more manually fighting with…
January 07, 2011Was asked how to do this the best today... http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9dfb1773-5594-44a9-869f-a891629f80a5&displaylang;=en
January 04, 2011How to create an oracle user/schema and resore an existing database to this new schema. drop tablespace xxx_demo_data including contents and datafiles; CREATE TABLESPACE xxx_demo_data DATAFILE 'd:\oradata\abci\xxx_demo.DBF ' SIZE 10M AUTOEXTEND ON…
January 04, 2011If you've had a look at the MVC3 preview generated code you will notice the Url.IsLocalUrl method getting called from the LogOn action. [code:c#] [HttpPost] public ActionResult LogOn(LogOnModel model, string returnUrl) { if (ModelState.IsValid) { if…
January 02, 2011Anyone that's ever written UX/GUI code will know that while it once was acceptable (unavoidable) to block the UX thread with long running operations, it's now almost always done in a background thread/task etc. Well with WF4 it's pretty much the same…
December 20, 2010If you've attempted to host the workflow designer in .net <= 3.5 you'll remember it's not such an easy achievement. However doing so in wpf .net 4.0 is quite trivial. Have a look at the Visual Studio 2010 .NET 4 training kit and you'll see for your…
December 20, 2010Here's an easy one to get caught out on. Say you remove a constraint on a table to do some maintainance ect. e.g. ALTER TABLE BANDWIDTH NOCHECK CONSTRAINT FKUserLimits; When you wish to bring the constraint back on stream you may be surprised to find…
December 17, 2010If you wish to test specific writelines on a console application: you can do so by adding a StringWriter object to the workflow extensions. The writeline activity will use the textwriter if it exists as opposed to the console. [TestMethod] public…
December 15, 2010Hi all. I've discovered this is not as simple as it would appear to be. Infact it's worse; in "order" to do this you will need to jump through a few hoops...; in a particular order! 1. Add an activity library project 2. Add a reference to this new…
December 13, 2010We've all created API libraries, and libraries by their nature encourage resuse. However what happens if you want to be selective in who else uses your assembly? One simplistic approach would be to ensure that the calling assembly has the same public…
December 06, 2010Here's one I'm ashamed to admit caught me as I was finishing up work this evening, it's been a good few weeks since I've gone near wpf/silverlight given I was on holidays and spend my time playing with WF4 and MVC2. Anyway in screenshot below.. vs…
November 18, 2010How many of you create your own mocks? I've recently been using Mocq and I give it the thumbs up :-) Note it's using .net 3.5; time for an upgrade? I can't stress enough how much I love linq, today worked on a problem for a client that were using 3.…
November 17, 2010Register now! Learn about the future of Silverlight from Corporate Vice President, Scott Guthrie and other experts, direct from Microsoft’s HQ. http://www.silverlight.net/news/events/firestarter/ If you are a INETA User Group Leader or INETA Country…
October 24, 2010A word of warning: Don't do it :-) I'm v.guilty for using all the latest technologies so a few weeks back I installed IE9 Beta. Problems encountered: MVC2 projects getting 404 a lot, I did see this discussed in an interview with Phil Hack and there…
October 10, 2010There are a few options when restricting what properties of a type get automatically bound by the framework. Take the Loler type seen in my other MVC2 blog posts. [code:c#] [Bind(Include="ID,Name,Description")] public class Loler { //entity framework…
October 09, 2010Below are two screenshots of two alternative mechanisms for handling a MVC2 post.
October 03, 2010Take some time to explore the new vs2010 debugger. Those of you to have experience with multithreading know that it can be a right old PIA (and i'm not talking Primary interop assembly here!). Try the parallel tasks/stacks in vs2010 and see just how…
September 25, 2010A quick sample of how to use linq in your webpages [code:c#] <% Model.ToList().ForEach(item => { %> <%: Html.ActionLink("Edit", "Edit", new { id = item.AlbumId })%> | <%: Html.ActionLink("Delete", "Delete", new { id = item.AlbumId })%> | <%: Html…
September 10, 2010So you've started up your very first 4.0 Workflow application. You've added some arguments and want to know how to pass some information.. You can either use the Dictionary approach that exists since 3.0 or you can use the properites you've just…
September 08, 2010Hi All, Been a while since I've writen some posts, been pretty hectic hours at work and weekends building a house so my chances to blog have been limited. I intend over the coming few days to give a few tips and tricks on MCV2. Here's on gottya.. Be…
September 08, 2010A sample of using SyncronizationContext to post a message back to the UX thread [code:c#] private void Window_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { SynchronizationContext ctx = SynchronizationContext.Current; ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(…
August 11, 2010http://url/abc.svc .svc at the end of url makes it user unfriendly. It also makes it Low REST service as it donot follow the REST URI principle. Till date developers have to overcome this limitation by implementing URLReWrite module in IIS. Writing…
June 29, 2010Pre .NET 4.O Prior to ASP.NET 4.0 (and especially with MVC) when a user outputted information to a webpage they used <%= Server.HtmlEncode(modelViewStore.Content) %> The reason for the Encoding is primiarily to prevent XSS (cross site script…
June 03, 2010Ever wondered how to display the correct cursor in an application that is databinded to async methods? Pretty easy solution, just databind the cursor on the window itself. Here's how: Add an IsBusy property on the DataContext (and implement…
May 13, 2010Those of you that use INotifyPropertyChanged may have noticed it's easy to break the code if you choose to refactor/rename as the property name string does not get refactored. Here is a mechanism to catch this problem at the implementation stage…
May 12, 2010If you're interested to see how to attach commands to listview items for use with an implementation of the MVVM pattern, have a look at this. [code:c#] TargetType="{x:Type ListViewItem}"> Value="MouseDoubleClick" /> Value="{Binding ElementName…
May 11, 2010Ever want to find out from c# where some "special" folders are located so you can use them in your desktop application? Here's how. [code:c#] Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.LocalApplicationData) [/code] See Environment…
May 03, 2010I was just about to write up a little blog on the how and why of Exposing OData (Open Data Protocol) in WCF 4.0. But seeming it being a Bank Holiday and, if you follow any of my posts, you'll know I don't spend a lot of time writing them up, they are…
April 29, 2010Xaml Serialization to the rescue. The following sample code will persist the current Listview state to disk and restore it the next time the control is loaded. [code:c#] xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http…
April 26, 2010A sample how to read a Excel 2007/2010 using Open XML SDK V2 (forgive the bad syntax highlighting) [code:c#] using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using DocumentFormat.OpenXml.Spreadsheet; using…
April 16, 2010Optimistic Concurrency In a multiuser environment, there are two models for updating data in a database: optimistic concurrency, and pessimistic concurrency. The DataSet object is designed to encourage the use of optimistic concurrency for long…
April 16, 2010If you've not used nor know what LINQPad is...... tut tut tut Download it form here http://www.linqpad.net/ it will make your life easier, infact you'll wonder whatever you did without it... So how does it help...? try it and see :-)
April 16, 2010Beginning with the .NET Framework version 4, the common language runtime supports embedding type information for COM types directly into managed assemblies, instead of requiring the managed assemblies to obtain type information for COM types from…
March 24, 2010I'm really loving this declarative approach with silverlight and wpf... (ask me why and I can't tell you ! :-) Anyway I've just stumbled across a way of managing RiaDataContexts Declaratively I found it on the Telerik samples.... If you've not looked…
March 23, 2010A few people have asked me what's the easiest way of doing transitions on Silverlight. One of the easiest ways has to be to use the VisualStateManager with Expression Blend, see screen show for sample logged in state. If you don't know how to use…
March 23, 2010If you wish to prevent clients accessing your data [code:c#] [RequiresAuthentication] [EnableClientAccess()] public class LolerService : LinqToSqlDomainService [/code]
March 17, 2010Here is come code to show a popup in wpf, i've nothing in the popup at the moment, just a gradient background and border. [code:c#] Width="{Binding ElementName=bdrCalendar, Path=ActualWidth, Converter={StaticResource MarginValueConverter}}" Height…
March 15, 2010Over the w/end I was helping a mate with his Data-driven Silverlight app. I was gobsmacked that his developer spent days and weeks writing plumbing code, hand coding infrastructure code and even worse my friend had to pay for it. Being able to focus…
March 06, 2010Ever want to filter data in Silverlight? here's a simple example that uses a lambda expression to search on name (case sensitive) [code:c#] ComboBox cbx = ((ComboBox)sender); ICollectionView dataView = CollectionViewSource.GetDefaultView(this…
March 03, 2010Tonight I've stumbled across an interesting Blog on cimgf. http://www.cimgf.com/2010/02/12/accessing-the-cloud-from-cocoa-touch/#more-909 It's been many years since I wrote PHP, so I'd naturally use asp.net serverside (or if i had a pc powerfull…
March 03, 2010If you've got a data driven application, databinding is the infrastructure of choice that makes the link between data and your UX Silverlight 4 has a few improvments that brings it closer to WPF TargetNullValue - lets you specify the what to display…
March 02, 2010Tonight I tried to use the FlowDocument that you'll know well if you are familiar with WPF.... Important part above "tried to use" .... but ... silverlight version 3 doesn't support it :-( Thats a second thing I've found lacking as I move some code…
February 25, 2010In my early WPF days I noticed the magic that having two different controls bound to the Same ObservableCollection meant that when I selected an item in one control, the same item got selected in the other.... which i I didn't want…
February 24, 2010"object x" is a shorthand for "System.Object x". This declares the variable x to have the type System.Object, this is strongly typed. And since C# provides autoboxing, you can assign anything you want to this variable. "var x = E" declares a variable…
February 24, 2010Recently I've noticed that the country has gone iPhone mad and I'm starting to buy into it myself... my blackberry days may be numbered as the only distinct advantage I see is that bandwidth is not used retrieving emails... but nowadays bandwidth is…
February 23, 2010Here's how to ensure that databinding happens when the value of a textbox changes. (as apposed to loosing forcus for example) [code:c#] [/code]
February 22, 2010Just a sample that may catch you eye as unusual.. [code:c#] class WorkItem { public WaitCallback Callback; public object State; public ExecutionContext Context; private static ContextCallback _contextCallback = s => { var item = s as WorkItem; item…
February 22, 2010· Authentication · Access control · Auditing Authentication. One of the critical requirements of any LOB application ia authentication; before the user can use any function he will authenticate by giving a user id and password. In ASP.NET web…
February 21, 2010When you wish to know if you are on the UI thread and you've no access to any UIElement how do you do it? [code:c#] static bool IsUiThread() { return Deployment.Current.Dispatcher.CheckAssess(); } [/code]
February 17, 2010Here's a bit of code that i'm using in an application to give this result (Checked GroupBox) [code:c#] Validity [/code]
February 14, 2010Here's one way to do validation in silverlight. This is a pretty straight method using exceptions (if you're from the camp that allows exceptions in your Data objects Cool) [code:c#] public string Name { get { return _name; } set { if ( value.Length…
February 02, 2010A nice little trick to save you always checking for null when firing custom events Initialize to anonymous delegate. Ok.. we've an extra call in the invocation list so use judiciously [code:c#] public event CompleteTaskExecutionHandler…
February 02, 2010Requirment: Nothwind Sql Database Advantages of Linq to SQL While everything with Linq to Sql ca be done with Ado.Net, there are a few advantages Less code: you don't need to write ADO.NET code for querying the database. You can use a tool to…
February 01, 2010You can now start using the ajax toolkit/library without having any sever support Laughing
January 29, 2010Pretty cool app to pass a minute or so http://chriscavanagh.wordpress.com/
January 28, 2010Extension Method [code:c#] internal static class InteropExtensions { public static bool? ShowDialog(this System.Windows.Window win, IntPtr handle) { WindowInteropHelper helper = new WindowInteropHelper(win); helper.Owner = handle; return win…
January 26, 2010I've been playing with a workflow service hosted here /PSService/PSService.svc Feel free to give it a bash [August 2012, removed]) Endpoint is using basic http binding. Tonight I whipped a Sql Server Compact Database out of another little app I have…
January 15, 2010Addin splitters to the WPF grid couldn't be easier. Veritcal Horizontal ResizeDirection="Rows" Background="Transparent" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" VerticalAlignment="Stretch" Grid.Row="1" />
January 07, 2010Ever have a control on a window and want to be able to receive button clicks from this child control? More than one I've done this the hard way, but now..... [code:c#] public VariablesWindow() { this.InitializeComponent(); variables.AddHandler(Button…
December 22, 2009Recently I used PInvoke to check if the SHIFT key was pressed while i was doing a drag operation...... what I should have done then and have done now is [code:c#] if((Keyboard.Modifiers & ModifierKeys.Shift) != ModifierKeys.None) Trace.WriteLine…
December 05, 2009Recently I've been working with a 3rd party diagramming library written in windows forms. It's been great and it's pretty fast in building 80% of the application I'm working on. [Update August 2012: I never got around to doing much with the…
December 04, 2009Today I needed to control the enabled property of a button "Remove Item" on my form depending on weather there was a selected item in a Listbox. Here's how [code:c#] [/code]
December 03, 2009If you've created a new WPF project in VS2008 and then you try to design your UX in Expression Blend 3 you'll find that you get xaml view only. What is required is to add {60dc8134-eba5-43b8-bcc9-bb4bc16c2548};{FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC…
December 02, 2009With .NET 1.1 when we receive a UTC DateTime in a SOAP response from a Webservice it used to get converted to Local time. With .NET 2.0 when we receive a UTC DateTime in a SOAP response it stays in UTC. If you need it in local time make sure to call…
November 25, 2009Announced at PDC this week http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6806e466-dd25-482b-a9b3-3f93d2599699&displaylang;=en Finally a version of blend that will open vs2010 projects (and of course handle Wpf4 and Silverlight 4) It will…
November 05, 2009It's true what they say, to learn new technologies it's simple a matter of ABC (Always be coding), I've watched many the video, read many the book but it's only when I went to try to do something the it sinks in. Like tonight while trying to host a…
November 05, 2009I've had a few people asking me how did I host Silverlight 3 in blog engine. Silverlight Usercontrol It was pretty simple really (when you know how) Basically Silverlight3 needs an tag. So I created a user control with the object tag and some script…
November 05, 2009One approach for validating child controls on windows froms is to Validation. Add a Validated event handler to all child controls you're interested in. On a button event handler call this.ValidateChildren(); This will ensure the validation routine on…
November 05, 2009http://errorlist.codeplex.com/ ErrorList I recently wrote a control that tries to replicate the error list seen in Visual studio. The control is dependant on .NET 3.5 SP1. because it uses the WPFToolkit. I'm hosting a sample here. [Update August 201…
November 04, 2009A quick example of inline xml and Linq Code [code:c#] void LinqToXmlSample() { Console.WriteLine("{0} : Start", new StackTrace(0, true).GetFrame(0).GetMethod().Name); XDocument xDocument = new XDocument( new XElement("people", new XElement("person…
November 03, 2009Here's a video from Steve White, a program manager in expression blend. He shows how to Style a button in Silverlight using expression blend 3. <http://electricbeach.org/apps/Silverlight Button Control Styling Tips/Default.html> Brian.
November 03, 2009A neat way of always cleaning up resources is to use Lambdas as data. Take the following Source [code:c#] internal interface ITryCatchReport { void Try(Action action); } internal class TryCatchReport : ITryCatchReport { public TryCatchReport(IServer…
November 03, 2009Adding project dependencies on Visual studio is done automatically with .NET projects when Add Reference dialog chooses another project from your solution. However you can get Visual Studio to add project dependencies if no explicit intra project…
November 01, 2009Hello and welcome. So I've started blogging... lets see how long this lasts Why the change? About 5 months ago I started writing my own Blog engine, This was a great idea when the only thing (.NET wise) that I wanted to improve upon was my ASP.NET…
November 01, 2009Testing the syntax highlighting option with the blog engine. [code:c#] int test = 0; [/code]
November 01, 2009My first (public silverlight application).. Had quite a bit of fun getting this Silverlight 3.0 application hosted in Blog Engine .. More to come.. time for some sleep now.. 02:20am... [usercontrol:~/User controls/SilverlightControl.ascx]
November 01, 2009Ok, forget what you learned about workflow in 3.5. Windows Workflow 4.0 4.0 changes everything you thought you knew about workflow. WF 4.0 represents a bottom-up rewrite with entirely new thinking. The gains are enormous: custom activities take…