DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by DrWatson

WP7: Learning how to handle Tombstoning

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 16:26:15 GMT

Taking a look at how to handle tombstoning (when your application is not longer in focus, but is not shut down yet) in your WP7 application. When building out a WP7 application it is critical that your application can handle Tombstoning and rebuild itself as needed. This is to allow the user to have their work flow interrupted by an action, but still gives them the ability to back into your app and resume from there last usage point. In fact if you fail to take Tombstoning into account your application will fail certification.

Going Out Of Browser w/ Silverlight

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 19:30:52 GMT

Taking a look at how we can use the take our in-browser silverlight application and allow it to run Out of Browser (OOB). We will take a look at how we can let silverlight perform the lifting as well as how we can provide coding to create the OOB application.

Going Lazy<T> with System.Lazy

Tue, 25 May 2010 19:30:52 GMT

Taking a look at the how to use the System.Lazy namespace in .Net 4.0. One of the pretty cool new nuggets inside the .Net 4.0 framework is System.Lazy and System.Lazy. What System.Lazy brings to the table is a way to create objects which may need to perform intensive operations and defer the execution of the operation until it is 100% absolutely needed.

Code Contracts: Learning to use Interface Contracts

Wed, 19 May 2010 12:05:33 GMT

Taking a look at how to utilize some additional features in the Code Contracts library to validate the state of our application. We are going to focus this episode on the feature of adding contracts to interfaces via buddy classes. This is a powerful feature as it allows us to inherit our contracts from interfaces.

Understanding Navigation on Windows Phone 7

Thu, 13 May 2010 15:00:52 GMT

Taking a look at the Windows Phone 7 Api and understanding how to navigate between pages. In this episode we are going to focus on learning about the various ways you can navigate from page to page within your application. Because WP7 is based off of Silverlight 3.x you are able to utilize all the native silverlight navigation techniques such as static routing (hard wiring the .xaml path), using routes and using the NavigationService.

Setting Up Basic Mappings w/ Fluent NHibernate

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 09:55:41 GMT

We continue to take a look at Fluent Nhibernate. We are going to focus this episode on setting up basic mappings for NHibernate. We will focus on setting up Many-to-One (References) and One-To-Many (HasMany) references as these are the most common mappings you will need to setup.

Setting Up Fluent NHibernate for your project

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:15:00 GMT

Taking a look at how to use setup and configure Fluent NHibernate for usage. We will focus on how to setup your database settings as well as how to get your Fluent NHibernate mappings registered into the system.

jQuery Custom Element and Global Events

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 18:15:52 GMT

Custom events make it easier to keep complex pages under control. They are a pillar for loosely-coupled UI scripts. jQuery has a very powerful event framework, including support for custom events. It may escape you that there are also Global custom events that can be handled on any element's context.

Code coverage reports with NCover and MSBuild

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 13:28:01 GMT

The key is to separate the code coverage profiling (which is done by NCover while it runs all the unit tests with NUnit) from the rendering of the reports. That way we only run the code coverage once; and that can sometimes take a good chunk of time to produce the coverage data. Rendering the reports is much quicker since the NCover reporting engine can feed off the coverage data as many times as we need, very quickly. Once we have the coverage data we can choose which report types we want to create, the thresholds for sufficient coverage (or to fail the build), which assemblies/types/methods we want to include/exclude from each report and where to save each of them.

Learning how to use a Web Cam with Silverlight

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:15:11 GMT

Taking a look at how you can setup and use a web camera in Silverlight. We will walk you though how to capture both the raw video as well as how to take snap shots of the video.

A deeper look into AutoMapper: Projection and Flattening Objects

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:00:00 GMT

Continue our look at the AutoMapper framework. AutoMapper is a framework which uses a convention-based matching algorithm to match up source to destination values. In this episode we are going to take a deeper look at how you can flatten your model during transformation or perform projection during transformation.

Learning how to use Named Content Areas w/ Spark

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 17:15:00 GMT

Taking a look at the how to setup and use Named Content Areas w/ the Spark view Engine. Named Content areas allow for an easy and simple way to organize the content or structure of you website.

How to host a WCF Service inside your Windows Service

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 17:15:00 GMT

Taking a look how to host your WCF service inside your Windows Service. In many situations hosting WCF inside of IIS may not be the best solution for you or your team. When this is the case hosting inside a windows service may be the best solution and in this episode we will take a look at how you can accomplish this.

Introduction to MEF, Getting rolling with basic usage

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:00:01 GMT

Taking a quick look at the new plugin framework from Microsoft the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF for short). In this episode we will explore how to setup your first MEF based plug-in system and show how easy it can be.

Test-Driving a new feature for JavaScript

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 02:49:48 GMT

But, instead of going through the normal trial and error approach, I chose to flex my TDD muscle and try to create the Array.indexOf method using a test-first routine. For this exercise, I chose QUnit as the unit testing framework.

Introduction to NDepend, adding NDepend to your Nant Script

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Taking a quick look at NDepend and how to do a simple fly-by of how to setup and run NDepend. Once we have our simple project up and running we are going to turn our focus at takig a look at how to run NDepend from our NAnt scripts. Running NDepend as part of our builds will allow us to have a clear picture of the state of our code with each build.

Getting started with Lucene.Net Search Library

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 12:30:00 GMT

Taking a look at the Lucene.Net Search Engine Library. Lucene.Net is a source code, class-per-class, API-per-API and algorithmatic port of the Java Lucene search engine to the C# and .NET platform utilizing Microsoft .NET Framework. In this episode we will learn the basics needed to simply get Lucene.net up and running.

Isolation Frameworks: Learning to use Partial Mocks

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:15:01 GMT

Taking a look at how to use Partial Mocks to test abstract classes and methods within a concrete class

Learning Nant: Creating Token Driving Configuration Files

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:45:00 GMT

Taking a look at how we can create dynamic config files by putting tokens in your files and letting Nant replace those tokens for each user based on their unique settings.

Using Reflection TO invoke members

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:15:04 GMT

Taking a look at how to use the reflection to invoke members on an object. Reflection can allow you to call methods, properties, etc of any scope on an object. This can be a very, very useful tool for the tool-belt for the times this is needed.

It's Generic, not Multipurpose

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 10:58:53 GMT

Sometimes I think API designers are just trying too hard to use generics. I mean, if there's a way to get the data they need by way of a type identifier, no matter how unnatural that be, a generic function will be born. Paraphrasing what someone already said: When a new language feature is your hammer, everything starts to look like your thumb.

ASP.NET MVC with jQuery SuperLoad

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 14:46:15 GMT

The challenge on the server side is to come up with a sustainable method of reusing existing actions and combine them in a single action result, formatted to SuperLoad's liking and returned to the browser. To address that issue the sample comes with an implementation of a composite action result class specifically built for the response format we are trying to create.

jQuery SuperLoad

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 23:28:16 GMT

jQuery SuperLoad came out of the necessity to update more than one element in a page without needing to do everything with JavaScript (and you know I'm not the one that avoids JavaScript). All of the page elements I needed to update with Ajax came from page segments (partials, user controls, etc) that I had available on my server side. It seemed appropriate to go back to the server to get updated versions of that same HTML. But I didn't want to issue a separate $.ajax() or $(elem).load for each one of them.

Top 10 signs you've fallen into circular refactoring

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 12:30:01 GMT

How do you tell when you're being a victim of this variation of the premature optimization monster? Well, here's a start.

Refactoring Techniques: Learning the Wrap Method

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:15:02 GMT

Taking a look at the Wrap Method refactoring technique outlined in detail in Working Effectively with Legacy Code. We will walk though this technique and take a look at how it can help you to create better and more maintainable code.