Blogs|Jan 22, 2012

Video: Getting Started with Jounce MVVM and MEF for Silverlight 5

I created a quick video to help you get started with using Jounce. The video starts with a blank slate, steps through installation of Jounce and the creation of a sample view model for a simple contact record that includes validation. You can access the video directly at http://vimeo.com/jeremylikness/jounce-getting-started, or view it below: Jounce: Getting…
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Blogs|Jan 16, 2012

Visual Studio 2010 Extensions Recommendations

The other day I was asked which extensions for Visual Studio I use so in an effort to save keystrokes, I thought I’d list them here so I can refer people to this list. There’s no way this is a comprehensive list and I do add and remove extensions all the time. However, these are…
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Blogs|Jan 15, 2012

Setting the Power Plan with PowerShell

Edit: Make sure to read the comments from Shay Levy and Richard on clarifying my mistaken assumptions about how things work in PowerShell. Thanks to Richard & Shay for the clarifications! As I’m a command line kind of guy, I look for every opportunity to stay in a PowerShell window at all times. “Why grab…
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Blogs|Jan 7, 2012

CRUD it’s now CQRS … or is it?

In 1983 author James Martin published a book called Managing the Data-Base Environment. It’s interesting the term database is hyphenated in the title; it hadn’t quite settled down as a mainstream term yet. I have not read this book myself, but my understanding is that he presented the concept of the “CRUD Matrix” for engineering…
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Blogs|Dec 28, 2011

Windows 8 Slate Review

About a week ago, I purchased a Samsung Series 7 Slate PC to learn more about the Windows 8 operating system and to test applications I will be developing primarily with C# and Xaml. The laptop ships with Windows 7 installed, but I quickly wiped the existing install and overlaid it with Windows 8. The…
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Blogs|Dec 16, 2011

NuGet Nugget: File-System Based Package Stores

A recent network “hiccup” posed a bit of a challenge to a demo that was built around showing how the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone (WATWP) NuGet packages make it easy to add Windows Azure cloud features to a Windows Phone 7 application.  So how do you access NuGet content when a network connection…
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Blogs|Dec 9, 2011

Silverlight 5 Released: Myth vs. Fact

It is very exciting to see the release of Silverlight 5 today, despite all of the rumors flying around the Web. Read the original release announcement from the Silverlight Team here. This is proof positive the team made a commitment to release a new version by the end of the year and stuck to it.…
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Blogs|Oct 29, 2011

Is That a WeakReference In Your Gen 2 or Are You Just Glad to See Me?

Sometimes it’s easy to see why your .NET server application is using so much memory, but other times it makes no sense at all. I was at Microsoft earlier this week and someone who’d taken my debugging class stopped me and asked an excellent question. The scenario they had was their service memory would just…
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Blogs|Oct 17, 2011

Working with PivotViewer and the CxmlCollectionSource

Microsoft’s PivotViewer control is an amazing tool for visualizing data and creating a unique UI for your application.  The one issue everyone seems to have with it, however, is its lack of styling capability.  In fact, working with PivotViewer in Expression Blend yields little in the way of styling or templating.  There are only a…
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Blogs|Oct 7, 2011

Using Visual States to Set Focus on a Control

A common problem encountered in Silverlight applications is how to set the focus properly when transitioning between controls. For example, in the reference application I’m writing for the book Designing Silverlight Business Applications there is the option to either edit an existing record or create a new one. The result of clicking the appropriate button…
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Blogs|Sep 20, 2011

Core .NET Types Usable from a Metro Style Application

When you create a new .NET Metro style application in Visual Studio, it spits out a project template that doesn’t reference any .NET assemblies. Well, this isn’t completely true, because when you run the C# compiler it references MSCorLib.dll by default. For a Metro style application, the referenced MSCorLib.dll contains a bunch of TypeForwardedToAttribute attributes…
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Blogs|Sep 20, 2011

Using the Windows Runtime from a Non-Metro Application

I know a lot of people believe that the new Windows Runtime APIs included in Windows 8 can only be accessed from Metro style applications. A big part of the reason why people believe this is because the version of Visual Studio that ships with the Windows 8 Developer Preview only supports creating Metro style…
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