David Sackstein's Blog

Clean Code or Working Code? by David Sackstein

I was working on a legacy project with a friend and I sorely bemoaned the messiness of the code. Later, the friend sent me this link and warmly recommended I keep the balance in life. If you cant be bother to read the article, the short of it is that we developers should have more respect for legacy code that works. I acknowledge the underlying truth presented in the article, but I don’t think it gives the whole picture. Just because you can make catastrophic mistakes while disrespectfully accusing...

Visual Studio 2010 and Eclipse by David Sackstein

From time to time I do some work in C++ for Linux using Eclipse. Many developers say that Eclipse is the state of the art IDE for C++ development on Linux. From my experience, I can say that Eclipse simply pales in comparison with Visual Studio 2010 when it comes to an integrated, streamlined development experience out of the box. Rather than compare the pros and cons of both IDEs I would like to share with you a VS 2010 experience that I enjoy that is often taken for granted by Windows developers...

MVVM : Injecting INotifyPropertyChanged Into an Existing Class by David Sackstein

Download the source code for this post here . Using MVVM in Silverlight and WPF I often encounter the following problem. I have a business class that needs to be exposed through the ViewModel. For this, it needs to implement INotifyPropertyChanged or expose Dependency properties. I take the side of those who prefer to keep WPF dependencies out of the ViewModel, so I usually take the path of writing a proxy that delegates properties to the business object and implementing INotifyPropertyChanged. I...

How to Bind to the Index of a Collection in WPF by David Sackstein

Let's say you have a customer class and you are binding a DataGrid to a collection of customers. You would like the index of the customer in the collection to appear in the first column, like so: One way to do this might be to add an Index property to the Customer class and bind to that. I prefer not to go that way because it would pollute our business layer with presentation layer constraints. Solution Here is a different approach using a MultiBinding. You can download the source code for this...

Hierarchical Grid with WPF by David Sackstein

A TreeView handles hierarchical data well, and a DataGrid handles tabular data. But what about hierarchical tabular data? A simple example of such a source is a System.IO.DirectoryInfo. Each item can have zero or more children of the same type, enumerated by EnumerateDirectories. I would like to have it displayed like this: Solution You can download the source code for this solution here . The inspiration for this solution came from Delay's Blog by David Anson. I think David's idea of measuring...

Project Packager Add-In for Visual Studio 2010 by David Sackstein

This Add-In for Visual Studio 2010 will package up your solution (actually, any folder you choose) into a zip file excluding any files with extensions you specify and any folders whose names you specify.I cant upload msi files to this blog, so in order to install you will need to build the project. I packaged up the Add-In solution using the Add-In itself and uploaded it here . Download the solution, open with Visual Studio 2010 and Build All. Right click the setup project and select Install. Close...

John Bryce Lab Zone at Developer Academy 4 by David Sackstein

Today, John Bryce hosted a very successful Lab Zone at Developer Academy 4. This year's zone was larger than ever before with 40 computers installed with 11 labs on the latest and greatest Microsoft technologies! Over 1600 people attended the conference, and many of them came to the Lab Zone to get invaluable hands on experience with Windows Azure, SharePoint 2010, Windows 7, WCF 4, WPF 4 and Silverlight 4. For further study, I recommend you take a look at John Bryce's site for a list of...

Windows 7 and WPF 4 at Developer Academy 4 by David Sackstein

Today at Developer Academy I gave a demonstration session called Capture the Windows 7 User Experience with Windows Presentation Foundation 4. In the demo I showed how to integrate the following Windows 7 taskbar features into Windows applications using WPF 4: Specifying the area of the application visible in the Thumbnail Preview Controlling the Progress Bar overlay in the Task Bar Adding Taskbar Buttons to an application on the Task Bar Adding Icon Overlays Adding Jump List items to the context...

Top Tips for Rapid Application Development by David Sackstein

In recent weeks I have been busy on a number of projects with very tight, almost impossible schedules. When schedules are tight, there is simply not enough time to implement all the steps of a formal development procedure. But I have found that some good practices shine through as time savers every time. Not only do they save time, but they also help produce exensible, maintainable code – which also saves time in the long run. So here are my top tips for Rapid Application Development. Document the...

Received my MCT Credentials Today by David Sackstein

Earlier this year I completed the MCPD certification - today I earned my MCT ! Over the year I have trained classes on C++, .Net 2.0, WPF, WF, WCF, Silverlight and Design Patterns. This has just got to be the fastest and most effective way to learn : )

WPF Explorer View with TreeView by David Sackstein

In this post we will see how to use WPF’s TreeView with the WPF Tookit’s DataGrid to present an Explorer-like view of a file system folder. We will use databinding with the HierarchicalDataTemplate, a sprinkling of LINQ and as little code as possible. You can download the source code here . User Interface Layout As in Explorer, we will present a window with two vertical panes. The left pane will show the directory structure as a tree; the right pane will show the files in the folder that is selected...

Silverlight Client With Sockets - Barebones Sample by David Sackstein

Dan Wahlin wrote an excellent article on Silverlight Client with Sockets - accompanied by a sample application. My objective in this post is simply to reduce Dan’s application to the bare minimum so that it is easier to reuse. You can download my reduced sample here . Changes These are the differences between my sample and Dan’s. There are now only three projects: The Silverlight control, the hosting Web site and the server. I reduced the Silverlight client to contain a single text box displaying...

Cross-Domain Policy Files for Flash and Silverlight with WCF by David Sackstein

Introduction In an earlier blog I described my motivation for upgrading an ASMX Web Service to WCF in a particular project . In that project the client was a Flash client hosted in a web page. The upgrade was simple and, as long as I ran the client from within Flex Builder , it had no problem consuming the new self-hosted WCF service instead of the ASMX. Allowing Cross-Domain Access However, once I deployed the package outside the Flex Builder, all calls to the service failed. The reason was that...

Enabling RESTful Services with WCF by David Sackstein

I came across a number of sources that describe how to support RESTful Services with WCF, but unfortunately, I couldnt find one source that had all the small print. So, here it is – all in one place. Objective Let’s say you have a WCF Web Service exposed at an endpoint with this address: www.mycompany.com/Services/ProductsService.svc . And let’s say that in addition to speaking sophisticated SOAP with some clients you would also like to respond to GET requests from simple clients that need to retrieve...

Case Study: Upgrading from ASMX to WCF by David Sackstein

Introduction In this post I will share my considerations for upgrading an ASMX Web Service to WCF in an existing product. Following the upgrade I encountered a little hitch with Flash and cross domain policies . In this later post I demonstrate how overcome the hitch with WCF . Motivation for the Upgrade When I started working on the project , the architecture had been set and a first version of the product had already been released. A Flash client interacted with an ASMX Web Service hosted by ASP...