One of the worst(*) bugs in VS2008SP1 finally fixed

As I work with a highly customized Visual Studio 2008 environment a bug introduced with SP1 for Visual Studio 2008 was one of the worst in history (for me): VS Dev Environment crash after undocking windows or changing layouts .

In case you are like me and did not have the luck to find this “not really visible fix”(tm) yet just click here and you’ll back to your normal-customized VS interface (yeah, multi-mon makes sense again, even for VS :D

Best regards,
 - t 

(*) = one of the worst bugs for me!

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Silverlight 3: Someone pulled the switch too early?

SL3

This could be just a little reminder on Silverlight 3 (you know MIX 09 yadda, yadda, yadda) but perhaps it can be a little bit more for you.

Check out any download in Microsofts Download Center for Silverlight 2 and you will see something like the following on the “Thank You” page which appears after the download itself.

 Silverlight 3 Tools

Clicking on this link brings you to a “coming soon” page. Might this be true for everybody? Perhaps you can just adjust you user-agent string to get access? I don’t know. If you have access to MS’ intranet, it looks like you can download SL3 Tools from here (found via this one).

Sorry, just a litte teaser ;) And look out for LOB functionality in SL3.

Best regards,
 - tobias

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Office “14″ is getting ready (first screens)

Looks like after the Windows 7 hype calmed down the attention shifts to Office 14. I currently do not have access to this build but I am more than eager to test it once I can get access. Would be interessting to see the integration of Bulldog in Sharepoint and how the client apps interact with Bulldog in an offline environment. Or if Bulldog is included at all?

 Office “14″ Alpha  

Office “14″ Alpha (2)

Actually in the client app the “Create Mobile Office Device” looks also quite interesting as it referes to an USB stick. As such it cannot be the same as the Windows Mobile based Office but has to be something else. Looks quite promising (office as an portable app)?

More screenshots at Source.

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Framework for DB-centric WPF LOB application is here

After reading a blog post today on the LOB in WPF topic and remembering the countless ones I read before I thought it might be the right time to present the world what I would like to call “the first framework for db-centric line-of-business applications built for WPF”: Trivadis Application Builder (TAB). The name already implies that there is more than just a framework.

While there are now powertoys out to create business WPF forms, we are already a step ahead of those. The business forms (master/detail, detail, etc.) in a TAB applications are either created dynamically at runtime without user interaction or XAML code is generated by a wizard at design time (which creates exactly the same XAML as the runtime generator does).

At lot of business application functionality like Lookups, Catalogs, Filters, Sorting, Translation Services, Multi-Layer validation, etc. is available in our framework which implements all of this in a M-V-VM pattern way and tries to force the developer to think in M-V-VM ways.

Trivadis Application Builder Demoapplication

Take this post as a teaser and come back for the next post in this new TAB series.

BTW: Version 1.0 is out in the wild and is already used in real-life customer projects. For more information concering projects with TAB please go to http://www.trivadis.com

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.net: You got the source, now grab it

You know the pity: You’re once again working on the train and have only a lousy HSDPA or UMTS connection but right a this point in time you would need to debug into the .net source code. You are actually able to get the source code since MSFT released it on 1/16/2008 but in this case your connection is to slow to grab ~10 MB of source files.

Two guys posted a .NET Source Code Mass Downloader on codeplex which might help you in those cases. The mass downloader enables you to download the .net source code while you are on the company’s network. After you’ve once downloaded the source there is no longer any need to download the files for every new debug session separately. Mission accomplished: You can debug into the source on the train even without any connection :)

Thanks to Kerem Kusmezer and John Robbins for releasing such a wonderful tool.

-t

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Framework Design

Brad Abrams wrote about the just released Framework Design Studio. Also there is not that much functionality included right now it already helped me to identify API changes between two milestones in an internal WPF framework we currently work on.

http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2008/04/04/framework-design-studio-published.aspx

 

FDS

In addition to the program itself you can download a 9 pages long excerpt from the book titled Framework Design Guidelines.

-t

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WPF: Code in XAML -> Width={Binding Height}*2?

This posting consists of two sections:

  1. cool but not really useable
  2. really cool and usable

lets start with the non-usable stuff [Code in XAML]:

Whenever you declare your UI in XAML you’ve to attach event handlers in the code behind file, right? I expected that there has to be another way to attach code as XAML is just XML which is used to generate .cs (g.cs) files. And, tada, there is one:

    1 <Window x:Class="App1.Window1"

    2   xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"

    3   xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"

    4   Title="Window1" Height="300" Width="300">

    5     <Grid>

    6 

    7         <x:Code>

    8             <![CDATA[

    9               private void ClickMe(Object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)

   10               {

   11                   MessageBox.Show("This is embedded code from a CDATA section!");

   12               }

   13             ]]>

   14         </x:Code>

   15 

   16         <Button Content="Click me" Click="ClickMe" />

   17     </Grid>

   18 </Window>

let me cite Uri Geller: unbelievable ;) This will become a mess if there’s more code involved. On the other hand: It should be possible to use this "approach" together with the XAML loader to implement a new type of plugin system: Your code gets part of the original code. Didn’t test it yet and I hope it doesn’t work as this might lead to new security holes.

Let’s go on with the second, the really usefull, section [Width={Binding Height}*2]:

As there are a lot of guys out there who are a lot smarter than I, let me concentrate on pasting the following links without any error in this post :D :

Both present ways to define converters for WPF in XAML. Yeah, you got it right, no more one-line converters. Now you can create bindings which can not only bind to properties but can also calculate on those properties.
Once again: unbelievable.

I hope this post is as useful for you as the above links were useful for me.

Regards,

-t

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