DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by spavkov

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.

Asymmetric Encryption and Signing with RSA in Silverlight

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 22:42:06 GMT

While Silverlight is a powerful tool for rich client applications, it lacks the ability to perform asymmetric encryption out of the box. In this article, I'm going to share a cryptography class library I've been working on and show you how to use it to perform standards compliant RSA Encryption in Silverlight that is cross compatible with .NET's built in RSACryptoServiceProvider, allowing you to encrypt from Silverlight using my library and decrypt on your website using the RSACryptoServiceProvider. For brevity, only examples using my class library will be shown except for a few examples that show equivelant functionality from the RSACryptoServiceProvider (RSACSP).

NDC2010: Michael Feathers - The deep synergy between good design and t

Sat, 13 Nov 2010 09:40:33 GMT

Review of the NDC2010: Michael Feathers presentation - The deep synergy between good design and testability.

Naked MVVM - simplest MVVM architecture

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 12:00:08 GMT

Article showing the concepts behind very simple MVVM implementation.

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...

5 Reasons to be Excited about ASP.NET MVC 3

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 13:30:52 GMT

It's already been 6 months since ASP.NET MVC 2 was released and version 3 is already taking shape. I, personally, am thrilled about that because this version seems to put ASP.NET MVC, in terms of maturity and functionality, on the first line along with other MVC frameworks out there like RoR. I've put together 5 main reasons why I'm excited about this upcoming version. What about you?

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...

What is wrong with Cosmopolitan theme

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 11:58:12 GMT

am HUGHE fan of Metro design paradigm, so I was more then excited to check out Silverlight business application theme pack containing the Metro theme template ("Cosmopolitan") which was released officially couple of days ago. I am not designer but still wanted to share with community my initial impression and that is: WTF. Here is picture illustrating why..

Cool INotifyPropertyChanged implementation for Silverlight and WPF

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 11:41:24 GMT

While working on a little MVVM thingy the other day, I ran into a sweet little piece of code that I wanted to share. I have seen several version of this around the web, but this is where I found this particular version. The piece of code gets rid of the ugly part of the INotifyPropertyChanged interface.

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

The Silverlight 4 Release Candidate

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:42:16 GMT

The Silverlight 4 Release Candidate is now available for download. Beside all the great new features that were added, it's now finally possible to use the Visual Studio 2010 RC for Silverlight 4 development. Oh, and the final Silverlight 4 version will be available next month (April 2010)! The blog post contains a summary of all the new features that were added since the Silverlight 4 Beta to the Silverlight 4 RC and the breaking changes that naturally come along with betas. Plus some details about the CaptureSource's new capture usage pattern.

Understanding Validation in Silverlight

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 13:00:11 GMT

This article attempts to explain how validation in Silverlight works (beyond validation code in property setters). It draws some conclusions on what's possible and the ramifications. And it peeks at the changes with SL4.

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.

Generics With Type Uknown At Compile Time

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:34:46 GMT

How to invoke methods and retrieve properties on a generic type when the type is known only at run tim.

60+ .Net libraries every developer should know about

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 12:45:03 GMT

Every good developer knows never to re-invent the wheel, especially if there is software out there that has been tested by others, and has an established track record. As a developer using the .NET framework I've found some of these libraries invaluable, so I'm sharing them for some of the other dev's out there with a brief outline of how to use.

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).

Matrix3DEx 1.0 - When PlaneProjection is not enough

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:52:37 GMT

Rene Schulte announced a new open source project that extends Silverlight's Matrix3D struct: The Matrix3DEx library is a collection of extension and factory methods for Silverlight's Matrix3D struct. The Matrix3D struct represents a 4x4 matrix that is used in combination with the Matrix3DProjection to apply more complex semi-3D scenarios to any UIElement than are possible with the simple PlaneProjection. This makes it possible to apply arbitrary model transformation matrices and perspective matrices to Silverlight elements. The Matrix3D struct is very minimalistic and has only a few members. The Matrix3DEx library tries to compensate that with extension and factory methods for common transformation matrices that are easy to use like built in methods.

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).