DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by deedee

Lighthouse - Silverlight Unit Test Runner Project released

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 23:37:57 GMT

Since the initial release of Silverlight i was really annoyed by the fact that Unit Testing had very slim support. Even later when Silverlight Unit Testing Framework was introduced by Microsoft things became little better but still it was far from good. You could create Unit Tests, but you had to start your Visual Studio in order to run them - eventually looking at the results of tests in your favorite Web Browser...

Microsoft Silverlight 4 Certification, is it worth the ride?

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 23:20:02 GMT

Now some good news folks: I received the confirmation that I successfully passed the Silverlight 4 Microsoft Certification. I was too busy to immediately brag about it and write a show-off post so I will here just quickly share my thoughts on how all this went before my brain moves these impressions to non-accessible-memory-banks-prepared-for-deletion.

Introducing the Prism Navigation Framework for Silverlight MVVM Apps

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 16:06:05 GMT

After receiving a lot of positive feedback and requests for source code for my previous post on Prism navigation i decided to release the code i had as open source project. This is how Prism Navigation Framework project was born. My intention was to create simple-to-use but powerful-and-feature-full Navigation Framework for building Silverlight MVVM applications with Prism...

Combining Silverlight Navigation Framework & Prism to create MVVM Apps

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 10:30:52 GMT

This is introductory post for a series of posts where i will try to tackle the holy grail of MVVM applications - Navigation. To do this I will be using Prism from Microsoft's Patterns and Practices team (Silverlight version - latest drop) combined with Silverlight Navigation Framework and i will build small navigation framework on top of that...

How to find Geographical Coordinates in Silverlight

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 11:15:52 GMT

In this article I will explain how to find geographical coordinates: Latitude and Longitude of an address in Silverlight application. So that address can be displayed on the Bing Map.

Silverlight TextBox Control that immediately updates Text field

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 06:45:52 GMT

Standard Silverlight TextBox control is very useful but has one strange behavior: if you use TwoWay data binding and bind some property to controls Text property, when users type text into the control, this change is not propagated to the bound property until the control loses its focus. Lets see how to solve that problem easily...

Silverlight MergedDictionaries - styles & resources from Class Libs

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 06:00:51 GMT

If you were developing larger Silverlight/WPF applications and trying to keep things like styles, control templates and other resources organized it can become really hard. Prior to Silverlight 3 it was hell to be honest. But then nice people from Microsoft introduced lovely little feature called MergedDictionaries that allows you to combine the resources from different places in your application.

5 reasons why Silverlight sucks in LOB (compared to WPF)

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 15:45:52 GMT

This post discus what technology suits better LOB applications Silverlight or WPF and provides 5 reasons why WPF makes more sense.

Unit Testing Modal Dialogs in MVVM and Silverlight 4

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 10:30:52 GMT

As feedback to my recent post on Modal Dialogs in MVVM and Silverlight 4 I have received comments that the solution is not easy to Unit Test so i decided to create small blog posts on this subject just to show how simple and clean it is to do this...

Unit Testable WCF Web Services in MVVM and Silverlight 4

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 13:15:07 GMT

I figured that there has to be a better way to solve this everyday problem so while working on my personal MVVM framework (yes, everyone is building one these days) i was setting these goals regarding the Web Service calls from my MVVM applications: 1. simplify as much as possible asynchronous invocation of Web Service methods (avoid writing boring boilerplate code for each call) 2. get rid of the Add Service Reference approach completely if possible 3. make the Web Services unit testable (hide them behind some interface so we can mock them in our unit tests) 4. simplify exception handling 5. fault tolerance (if web service client is faulted by exception it should be automatically recreated) ...

How to run, ON THE CHEAP, an IIS7 hosted website on Amazon EC2

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 05:00:00 GMT

Its beautiful.... This article shows step by step, with clear instructions and lots of images, how to host your asp.net website on Amazon's EC2. I'm shocked at how easy it is. 1) Create account 2) Select image 3) do a little dance 4) publish your website to the cloud

Unit testing and mocking internal interfaces with RhinoMocks

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 12:00:01 GMT

Im not the kind of purist that will avoid unit testing internal classes. If its some very important code i want to test it even if its internal. Another case when i want to access internal classes is when i want to test some public class that uses some internal classes (via their interfaces). In this scenario i need to be able to mock those internal interfaces that the public class is using in order to be able to instantiate it and unit test it.

Binding UI Events from View to commands in ViewModel in Silverlight 4

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 11:15:17 GMT

In previous two posts we covered wiring up the Views and ViewModels and Blendability and showing ModalDialogs in MVVM way. Today we will touch another problem that people starting with MVVM very often fail to address properly: Handling the UI Events of the View in the ViewModel while avoiding placing any logic in code behind of the View. So our design goals for this post are: * We want to be able to wire-up UI Events to the commands in ViewModel via DataBinding in Xaml without any code behind in the View * View should not be aware of the ViewModel's type or any other details of its existence - View should just use Silverlight's DataBinding to access its ViewModel public properties (its DataContext) regardless of what is actually set to be there * We want to be able to handle any event that occurs in View (that includes not only Button clicks but also Mouse events, Drag and Drop events, Loaded events etc).

Modal dialogs with MVVM and Silverlight 4

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 10:30:07 GMT

In this post i would like to tackle another problem that is very common in MVVM and yet very rarely done correctly. I will try to provide simple and platform agnostic way of showing Modal Dialogs in MVVM manner without any code in View (later in the post we will reuse same concept and provide way to show simple message dialogs in the same way).

Wiring up View and Viewmodel in MVVM and Silverlight 4 - Blendability

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 09:19:21 GMT

Im a BIG fan of Silverlight and also i really like the Model View ViewModel pattern. Nice part is that those two fit perfectly. The downside is that everyone is doing MVVM the way they like it or the way they think they like it. There is no strict guidance, there are no 'Bible' kind of books written on the subject, there is only a enormous pile of information (of varying quality) on the web contributed by developers all over the world trying to (ab)use this pattern in their everyday practice. (probably you can take this post as just another small contribution to that information pile on the MVVM).

Silverlight 4 WebCam Motion Detector demo

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 13:35:51 GMT

Silverlight 4 WebCam Motion Detector demo done in VS2010 Beta 2

Old school demo effect Plasma - in Silverlight 3 with WriteableBitmap

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 20:32:55 GMT

just to make your eyes dizzy... :)

How to add "Open with reflector" to your right-click actions

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 23:45:00 GMT

A tip for convenience, this post provides instructions on how to easily add "Open with reflector" to your windows explorer right-click menu so you can right-click and open any DLL with reflector.

What is that IGrouping result returned from group by LINQ queries?

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 19:59:20 GMT

I dont know how much you people use LINQ but for me it was like a blessing. Since I figured out how helpful it is I never really looked back. But this post is not about obvious usefulness of LINQ, everyone should know that by now!!! I would like to clarify some exotic details on the results we get from group by queries with LINQ and explain a little bit more on that infamous IGrouping collection.

Silverlight 3 Released! What is new/changed?

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:00:00 GMT

At last, Silverlight 3 is released! It has been a long road.wait a minute, actually it's only been 8 months since the last release! Whoa, that's some wicked supersonic Microsoft time there! Anyhow, we are finally released. A while back I wrote a post on What's New in Silverlight 3 and it still all applies. I'd encourage you to read that post as well. There are, of course, some subtle changes in a few things from an implementation side of things, but those are all documented in the release.

Google Talk (GTalk) Autoreply using .NET

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 14:00:01 GMT

In this article, we will see how you can develop a simple Gtalk client using .NET using which you can notify your users that you are away from your desk.

error "Failed to generate a user instance of SQL Server due to a..."

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 11:55:18 GMT

Have you ever tried to create a user instance database from Visual Studio on SQL Server 2005 Express (or above) and got this terrible (can it be more confusing?) message: "Failed to generate a user instance of SQL Server due to a failure in starting the process for the user instance. The connection will be closed." If you did and tried to find how to resolve this you probably Googled (or Binged) for hours without being able to find the solution that really works. Well lets put an end to that. Two simple things need to be done...

Ruby inspired C# Extension Methods for natural DateTime operations

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:16:02 GMT

FluentDateTime is a open source library of Ruby inspired C# Extension Methods for easier and more natural DateTime handling and operations in .NET that allows you to write code like this: DateTime.Now + 1.Week() + 3.Days + 14.Minutes(); 3.Days().Ago(); 5.Days().After(new DateTime(2000, 1, 1)); DateTime.Now.NextDay(); DateTime.Now.WeekAfter(); DateTime.Now.Midnight(); DateTime.Now.SetTime(11, 55, 0);

Fun with Empty string.

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 20:16:27 GMT

Which is the fastest / most readable way to compare to an Empty string?

How to Create a Drag & Drop / Move, Zoom In & Out Content Control

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 21:46:03 GMT

As the Headline says, I will show you how to make a Drag and Drop / Move Content control. for this example I will use a canvas and an Image. But you can easily make it more generic by using a Content Control instead of the image.