Blogs|Sep 9, 2010

Want a free copy of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with a full MSDN Subscription?

Do you want all that IntelliTrace goodness as well as all the OS/Tools that MSDN offers? For free? Of course you do! Head over to Wintellect’s Marketing Director Bethany Vananda’s blog (https://training.atmosera.com/CS/blogs/bvananda/archive/2010/09/09/devscovery-sponsor-thank-you-wintellect-contest-join-the-fun-win-prizes.aspx) for all the details. Best of luck to you!
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Blogs|Sep 9, 2010

Design-Time Friendly ViewModels with MEF

The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is a very powerful tool for building modular, extensible Silverlight applications. If you’ve followed this blog, you’ll know that it is not just for applications that anticipate plug-ins, but can be used as an inversion of control container, can facilitate region management, and much more. In preparing the material for…
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Blogs|Sep 1, 2010

Using AppDomains to make Non-Threadsafe code Threadsafe

Recently, I was involved in a Wintellect consulting engagement where a customer had some class library code that was created years ago. The code in this class library was not designed to work well in a multithreaded environment. Specifically, this means that if two or more threads called into the class library code at the…
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Blogs|Aug 31, 2010

Zen of Paraffin

With Paraffin 3.5, I included this document, but thought it would be worth posting as well for those of you that aren’t familiar with Paraffin. You can download the lastest release here: https://training.atmosera.com/CS/files/folders/18310/download.aspx Introduction When building WiX-based installers, you quickly run into the problem of maintaining the list of files you want to install. The…
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Blogs|Aug 27, 2010

Fluent Validation with MEF and PRISM

Validation is a topic that comes up quite frequently. One concern is how to honor DRY (don’t repeat yourself) principles and create a framework that is reusable across layers. There are some very robust and tested frameworks out there, but sometimes they might be more than what you are looking for. In this post, I’ll…
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Blogs|Aug 5, 2010

Unit Testing XAML Data-Bindings in Silverlight

In an interview earlier this year with MSDN geekSpeak, I discussed unit testing for Silverlight and some of the frameworks that are available. One audience member raised a very important question: “How do we test the XAML?” Specifically, what happens when we hand off XAML to a designer or another developer, and they accidently remove…
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Blogs|Aug 3, 2010

Using Reactive Extensions (Rx) to Simplify Asynchronous Tests

Reactive Extensions (Rx) is a product from Microsoft Research that simplifies the management and composition of asynchronous events. If you read my earlier post on Asynchronous Workflows, you’ll understand why the asynchronous programming model can sometimes lead to confusing and hard-to-maintain code. There is nothing wrong with the model, but the fact that you must…
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Blogs|Jul 26, 2010

Silverlight UI Automation Testing using Prism 4.0

One popular gripe about Silverlight has been the lack of integrated testing tools. There are several types of tests you may perform against a software project. Unit tests can be performed with the aid of the Silverlight Unit Testing Framework and automated with a third-party tool such as StatLight. Automation testing involves hosting the actual…
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Blogs|Jul 25, 2010

Using Hints for Generic MEF Exports

It is very common to have base classes and interfaces that use generic types to define standard behaviors across business applications. One challenge with the Managed Extensibility Framework is that it doesn’t directly support generic exports and imports: in other words, there is no way to effectively do the following: ... [ImportMany(AllowRecomposition=true)] public IService<,>[] GenericService…
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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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