wintellect-blogs|Jul 15, 2010

Silverlight Profiling Part 2: The Easy Way

After posting about profiling Silverlight 4 out of the box, the author of a tool was kind enough to share with me his free .NET profiling tool. It’s free, and it does a lot more than Silverlight. The manual is very straightforward but I wanted to make a quick an easy “light tour” to show…
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Blogs|Jul 14, 2010

Performance Profiling Silverlight 4 Step-by-Step

It turns out you can profile Silverlight 4 applications. Really! But the steps are scattered about the web in bits and pieces, so I wrote this to pull them all together. I’m going to use my reference X-Fit application for this, but you can obviously insert your own. Here we go! Set up PowerShell Yeah,…
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Blogs|Jul 14, 2010

A Cool WinDBG/SOS Hidden Feature

Every once in a while you run across an undocumented trick that totally and completely makes your day. A great example of that is the ability to debug MSBuild scripts in Visual Studio. Today I ran across another amazingly useful feature in WinDBG and SOS for .NET 4.0 that will save you countless hours of…
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wintellect-blogs|Jul 13, 2010

What YOU Are Interested In

I was very excited to see two of my blog posts featured in the 900th issue of Silverlight Cream which ranked the top articles of 2010 thus far. These were Top 10 Silverlight Myths and Facts to Bust Them (#4) and Simple Dialog Service in Silverlight (#17). I appreciate your interest and out of curiosity…
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wintellect-blogs|Jul 9, 2010

Building a component that works with different versions of a library

It’s common to want to build a .NET component that works with different versions of a particular library. It is also common for newer versions of the library to introduce new methods that your component might want to call. However, if you build your component against the oldest version of the library you support, then…
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Blogs|Jul 8, 2010

Paraffin 3.13 and an Ask for Help

Before I get into the quick new features for Paraffin 3.13 (download here), I need to ask for your help. Pretty much from the first day I released Paraffin, I’ve been consistently getting the following question: I want to be able to uninstall obsolete components during minor upgrades. For this I would like to have…
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Blogs|Jul 8, 2010

Super Cool MSBuild Debugging In the VS IDE!

Have you ever tried to figure out why your MSBuild-based build is failing? While the diagnostic output is OK, it really isn’t an each task (no pun intended) to debug what’s going on in an MSBuild file with the traditional means of <Message> tasks. Fortunately, Dan Mosely, one of the MSBuild developers, had some time…
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Blogs|Jul 6, 2010

Updated PowerShell Script for Setting Your Symbol Paths

Here’s my latest script for setting up a user’s_NT_SYMBOL_PATH environment variable as well as Visual Studio 2010’s symbolsettings. In a previous version of this script, I wasn’t setting the publicsymbol server cache directory in Visual Studio so you could end up with downloadedsymbols in C:SYMBOLSPUBLIC instead ofC:SYMBOLSPUBLICMICROSOFTPUBLICSYMBOLS. #requires -version 2.0 #Wintellect .NET Debugging Code #(c)…
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wintellect-blogs|Jul 1, 2010

Customer IApplicationService for Silverlight Applications

In my experience working with Silverlight applications, probably one of the most underused features I’ve witnessed is the ability to abstract application-level functionality using the IApplicationService and IApplicationLifetimeAware interfaces. This, in turn, results in the over-use (and abuse) of the Startup and Exit events in the Application object. Before you get angry with me shaking…
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Blogs|Jun 29, 2010

Unit Testing Dynamic XAP Files

By now, you probably are aware that you can dynamically load XAP files using the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) within your Silverlight applications. Have you been scratching your head, however, and wondering how on earth you would actually test something like that? It is possible, and here’s a quick post to show one way you…
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