Rockford Lhotka

Magenic’s own Code Master

Rockford Lhotka — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:13:20 GMT

If you go to http://www.microsoft.com/net/dotnetstories/ you’ll see many compelling stories of people using Microsoft .NET to do cool things.

This includes Andy Schwartz, a colleague of mine at Magenic. Andy is not only a great technologist, but he has a couple real black belts in martial arts.

I love working with such great people! :)

DataAnnotations not in the client profile

Rockford Lhotka — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:41:13 GMT

In Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 Microsoft is amping up the visibility of the “client profile” concept. In fact, when you install the 4.0 client profile on a machine, it doesn’t drag the rest of the framework to that client later – they just get the client profile. And when you create a WPF or Windows Forms project in VS10 you default to targeting the client profile.

That’s all good – great in fact!!

But I’ve fallen in love with the validation attribute concepts in System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.dll. These attributes are designed specifically to enable a UI framework author (or a business layer framework author – like me with CSLA .NET) to automatically create a rich user experience based on the attributes decorating business objects.

This concept was first fully realized in Silverlight 3 – a client technology – and is now fully supported in .NET 4.0 full profile. But it is a client side technology, and so should be in the client profile.

I’ve logged this issue on connect, and recommend you vote for this to be resolved:

https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=502807

CSLA .NET 3.8.0 released and available!

Rockford Lhotka — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 02:48:50 GMT

CSLA .NET version 3.8.0 is now released and is available for download.

For Windows Forms and Web Forms users there are not any major new features, but some of the bug fixes may be valuable. Upgrading from 3.7 to 3.8 should be painless for these UI types (as well as XML services and workflow interfaces).

If you use WPF or Silverlight, you will almost certainly want to take a look at the features in 3.8. The downside is that there are several breaking changes in the XAML controls, but the upside is that the new XAML control implementations are far superior to previous versions. Controls impacted include:

PropertyStatus – now supports a “pull model” so a UI control can bind to properties of PropertyStatus, rather than having PropertyStatus directly manipulate the UI control’s IsReadOnly and IsEnabled properties. Also in Silverlight, PropertyStatus now makes use of the Silverlight 3 binding capabilities.
InvokeMethod – can now be triggered by any UI event, and can invoke a couple different method signatures on the DataContext. Also, MethodParameter is now bindable. The end result is that InvokeMethod provides really good support for both the CslaDataProvider model and the MVVM design pattern.
Execute – a new control that is a trigger action that works in the Blend 3 Interactivity model. This is very similar to InvokeMethod, but works with the Blend 3 scheme.
ViewModelBase<T> – provides a base class to make it easy to build a viewmodel class when using the MVVM pattern.
ViewModel<T> – provides a base class to make it easy to build a viewmodel class that works with InvokeMethod/Execute when using the MVVM pattern.
CslaDataProvider – the ObjectInstance property is now bindable, so it is possible to create master-detail (parent-child) relationships in the UI between different data provider controls.

See this blog post for more MVVM information.

Other important or interesting features include:

Support for System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations validation attributes. This blog post has information about the change.
A CSLA .NET specific model binder for ASP.NET MVC, enabling the use of CSLA .NET rule methods and DataAnnotation validation attributes in the same object, with the UI displaying combined results.
Performance enhancements for MobileFormatter, including the use of binary XML. This forum thread has some great comparative information around binary XML and compression.
Better support for altering the behavior of IsDirty when using managed backing fields. This blog post has good information about using the changes.
All the samples have been updated to build with 3.8.0, and the MVVMexperiment projects for WPF and Silverlight illustrate most of the new MVVM features.

There are also numerous bug fixes, including a solution to the memory leak issue with BusyAnimation and a null reference issue with LINQ to CSLA. See the change logs for more details about bug fixes.

It is only 8, how can it be legacy???

Rockford Lhotka — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 03:20:16 GMT

Of course I’m referring to Windows Forms, which is about 8 years old. Even in dog years that’s not old. But in software years it is pretty old I’m afraid…

I’m writing this post because here and in other venues I’ve recently referred to Windows Forms as “legacy”, along with asmx and even possibly Web Forms. This has caused a certain amount of alarm, but I’m not here to apologize or mollify.

Technologies come and go. That’s just life in our industry. I was a DEC VAX guy for many years (I hear Ted Neward laughing now, he loves these stories), but I could see the end coming years before it faded away, so I switched to the woefully immature Windows platform (Windows 3.0 – what a step backward from the VAX!). I know many FoxPro people who transitioned, albeit painfully, to VB or other tools/languages. The same with Clipper/dBase/etc. Most PowerBuilder people transitioned to Java or .NET (though much to my surprise I recently learned that PowerBuilder still actually exists – like you can still buy it!!).

All through my career I’ve been lucky or observant enough to jump ship before any technology came down on my head. I switched to Windows before the VAX collapsed, and switched to .NET before VB6 collapsed, etc. And honestly I can’t think of a case where I didn’t feel like I was stepping back in time to use the “new technology” because it was so immature compared to the old stuff. But every single time it was worth the effort, because I avoided being trapped on a slowly fading platform/technology with my skills becoming less relevant every day.

But what is “legacy”? I once heard a consultant say “legacy is anything you’ve put in production”. Which might be good for a laugh, but isn’t terribly useful in any practical sense.

I think “legacy” refers to a technology or platform that is no longer an area of focus or investment by the creator/maintainer. In our world that mostly means Microsoft, and so the question is where is Microsoft focused, where are they spending their money and what are they enhancing?

The answers are pretty clear:

Azure
Silverlight
ASP.NET MVC
WPF (to a lesser degree)
ADO.NET EF
WCF

These are the areas where the research, development, marketing and general energy are all focused. Ask a Microsoft guy what’s cool or hot and you’ll hear about Azure or Silverlight, maybe ADO.NET EF or ASP.NET MVC and possibly WPF or WCF. But you won’t hear Windows Forms, Web Forms, asmx web services, Enterprise Services, Remoting, LINQ to SQL, DataSet/TableAdapter/DataTable or numerous other technologies.

Some of those other technologies aren’t legacy – they aren’t going away, they just aren’t sexy. Raw ADO.NET, for example. Nobody talks about that, but ADO.NET EF can’t exist without it, so it is safe. But in theory ADO.NET EF competes with the DataSet (poorly, but still) and so the DataSet is a strong candidate for the “legacy” label.

Silverlight and WPF both compete with Windows Forms. Poor Windows Forms is getting no love, no meaningful enhancements or new features. It is just there. At the same time, Silverlight gets a new release in less than 12 month cycles, and WPF gets all sorts of amazingly cool new features for Windows 7. You tell me whether Windows Forms is legacy. But whatever you decide, I’m surely spending zero cycles of my time on it.

asmx is obvious legacy too. Has been ever since WCF showed up, though WCF’s configuration issues have been a plague on its existence. I rather suspect .NET 4.0 will address those shortcomings though, making WCF as easy to use as asmx and driving the final nail in the asmx coffin.

Web Forms isn’t so clear to me. All the buzz is on ASP.NET MVC. That’s the technology all the cool kids are using, and it really is some nice technology – I like it as much as I’ll probably ever like a web technology. But if you look at .NET 4.0, Microsoft has done some really nice things in Web Forms. So while it isn’t getting the hype of MVC, it is still getting some very real love from the Microsoft development group that owns the technology. So I don’t think Web Forms is legacy now or in .NET 4.0, but beyond that it is hard to say. I strongly suspect the fate of Web Forms lies mostly in its user base and whether they fight for it, whether they make Microsoft believe it continues to be worth serious investment and improvement into the .NET 5.0 timeframe.

For my part, I can tell you that it is amazingly (impossibly?) time-consuming to be an expert on 7-9 different interface technologies (UI, service, workflow, etc). Sure CSLA .NET supports all of them, but there are increasing tensions between the stagnant technologies (most notably Windows Forms) and the vibrant technologies like Silverlight and WPF. It is no longer possible, for example, to create a collection object that works with all the interface technologies – you just can’t do it. And the time needed to deeply understand the different binding models and subtle differences grows with each release of .NET.

CSLA .NET 4.0 will absolutely still support all the interface technologies. But it would be foolish to cut off the future to protect the past – that way lies doom. So in CSLA .NET 4.0 you should expect to see support for Windows Forms still there, but probably moved into another namespace (Csla.Windows or something), while the main Csla namespace provides support for modern interface technologies like WPF, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight, etc.

I am absolutely committed to providing a window of time where Windows Forms users can migrate their apps to WPF or Silverlight while still enjoying the value of CSLA .NET. And I really hope to make that reasonably smooth – ideally you’ll just have to change your base class types for your business objects when you switch the UI for the object from Windows Forms to XAML – though I suspect other minor tweaks may be necessary as well in some edge cases.

But let’s face it, at some point CSLA .NET does have to drop legacy technologies. I’m just one guy, and even with Magenic being such a great patron it isn’t realistic to support every technology ever invented for .NET :) I don’t think the time to drop Windows Forms is in 4.0, because there are way too many people who need to migrate to WPF over the next 2-3 years.

On the other hand, if you and your organization aren’t developing a strategy to move off Windows Forms in the next few years I suspect you’ll eventually wake up one day and realize you are in a bad spot. One of those spots where you can’t hire anyone because no one else has done your technology for years, and nobody really remembers how it works (or at least won’t admit they do unless you offer them huge sums of money).

I don’t see this as bad. People who want stability shouldn’t be in computing. They should be in something like accounts receivable or accounts payable – parts of business that haven’t changed substantially for decades, or perhaps centuries.

Prioritizing CSLA .NET work items

Rockford Lhotka — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:25:17 GMT

When I sit down to work on CSLA .NET I look at the wish list, and I tend to order my work based on a few priorities:

Is it a bug with no workaround?
Will it help a Magenic client/project?
Is it fun/interesting/intellectually stimulating to me?
Will it help make the lives of a reasonable number of users better?
Is it easy (low-hanging fruit)?
Does it make CSLA more "complete"? (like the recent MVVM work)

And there are some anti-priorities:

Is it boring? Or worse, boring and time consuming?
Does it increase complexity without amazing payoff in productivity/flexibility?
Does it increase my testing/support surface area?
Does it focus on "legacy" technologies (now including Windows Forms, Remoting, asmx, Enterprise Services and maybe Web Forms)?
Does it solve a problem that's already been solved? (like ORM stuff or UI framework stuff)

These priorities are especially important during point releases, but they certainly factor into major releases (like 4.0) as well. Though the "fun factor" becomes a much bigger priority for major releases, and tactical things like bug fixes or specific Magenic client requirements are usually not as big an issue.

I guess this is one advantage of working on a free framework. Since I’m not directly making money by selling the framework, I can prioritize what I do based on my own intellectual stimulation and fun as much as anything else.

CSLA .NET 3.8.0 Beta 3 available

Rockford Lhotka — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 23:07:05 GMT

CSLA .NET 3.8.0 Beta 3 is now available for download

Beta 3 includes fixes for some bugs found in Beta 2 (mostly in ViewModelBase and BusyAnimation), and two more significant changes:

InvokeMethod no longer attempts to manage the attached UI control’s IsEnabled property; this is a breaking change, but was necessary to avoid an otherwise unavoidable memory leak. It wasn’t a good practice anyway, so this implementation is both safer and better.
There’s a new Csla.Web.Mvc.CslaModelBinder class; it addresses a key issue around the data annotation validation attributes and how their validation information is reported back to the ASP.NET MVC framework. (I know I said Beta 1 was feature-complete, but this was too important to hold back…)

I’ve also continued to update samples, and I think all the C# samples are now updated, as are some of the VB ones. Hopefully I can get the rest of the VB ones updated before final release.

I am still on track to release 3.8.0 in about a week – hopefully Nov 6 or 9.

SOA Manifesto

Rockford Lhotka — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:23:13 GMT

I’m not too sure about all this “manifesto” stuff these days. Certain right-wing politicians from days gone by are surely rolling in their graves. Then again, today’s highly communist/socialist oriented open source worldview would have gotten many of us into a lot of trouble just a few decades ago…

Regardless, there’s now the SOA Manifesto. And it seems to capture the spirit of SOA in a concise manner.

In fact, its opening statement, talking about putting business value above technology and so forth, seems to make sense for any software endeavor, not just ones that are service-oriented.

If you consider that SOA is much more of an enterprise architecture than it is an application architecture, this all makes a great deal of sense. The idea that applications should use service-oriented communication when they need to interact with each other is exactly the sweet spot for service-orientation.

In that context, saying things like external uniformity and internal diversity are good is clearly correct; because different applications may require different technologies or implementation choices, but they all need to work with some enterprise-standardized message-based service model.

I still suspect SOA may ultimately make a big difference in our industry. But I also think it will take decades to do so, just like object-orientation. People were working on object-orientation for well over 20 years before the ideas became mainstream. SOA is (if you are really generous) maybe a decade old, so it is probably time to work on some formalism so it is ready to become mainstream 10-15 years from now :)

CSLA .NET 3.8.0 Beta 2 available

Rockford Lhotka — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 04:37:49 GMT

I have put CSLA .NET 3.8.0 Beta 2 online for download.

This completes the work for version 3.8.0, and (barring anyone finding a show-stopping issue) I plan to release 3.8 in just a couple weeks.

PropertyStatus – now supports a “pull model” so a UI control can bind to properties of PropertyStatus, rather than having PropertyStatus directly manipulate the UI control’s IsReadOnly and IsEnabled properties. Also in Silverlight, PropertyStatus now makes use of the Silverlight 3 binding capabilities.
InvokeMethod – can now be triggered by any UI event, and can invoke a couple different method signatures on the DataContext. Also, MethodParameter is now bindable. The end result is that InvokeMethod provides really good support for both the CslaDataProvider model and the MVVM design pattern.
Execute – a new control that is a trigger action that works in the Blend 3 Interactivity model. This is very similar to InvokeMethod, but works with the Blend 3 scheme.
ViewModelBase<T> – provides a base class to make it easy to build a viewmodel class when using the MVVM pattern.
ViewModel<T> – provides a base class to make it easy to build a viewmodel class that works with InvokeMethod/Execute when using the MVVM pattern.
CslaDataProvider – the ObjectInstance property is now bindable, so it is possible to create master-detail (parent-child) relationships in the UI between different data provider controls.

See this blog post for more MVVM information.

Other important or interesting features include:

Support for System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations validation attributes.
Performance enhancements for MobileFormatter, including the use of binary XML.
Better support for altering the behavior of IsDirty when using managed backing fields.

There are also numerous bug fixes, including (hopefully) a solution to the memory leak issue with BusyAnimation. See the change logs for more details about bug fixes.

CSLA .NET 3.8 Beta 2 MVVM support

Rockford Lhotka — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 04:23:04 GMT

I’ve blogged about MVVM several times over the past few months. If you watch my posts you’ll see that I started out pretty skeptical of the pattern, and then worked through it trying to find the shiny silver lining that was promised.

One of the biggest challenges with patterns is that people expect them to be a recipe, when in reality they are just a vague formalization of a concept. Just look at MVC, an incredibly mature pattern, and all the radically different ways it gets implemented (for better or often worse) in applications. While MVVM isn’t nearly as mature as MVC, it turns out that it really is a good concept – when “applied correctly”.

In my view a pattern should only be used if its positive consequences outweigh its negative consequences. Many patterns, oddly enough, require extra code and/or configuration over what you’d normally write – which is a negative consequence. And in some interpretations of MVVM this is very much the case – which was the primary reason for my initial skepticism.

On the other hand, with some thought, foresight and work it is often possible to mitigate some of the more negative consequences of many of the more popular patterns. This turns out to be absolutely true for MVVM.

To me, the real sweet spot for a pattern is if it can provide its positive consequences with little or no negative impact at all.

My time with CSLA .NET 3.8 has been divided into just a few areas:

Bug fixes (minor)
DataAnnotations (minor – but really nice)
Silverlight 3 element binding (major – also really nice)
MVVM support (major – and very cool)

In the end, I think I’ve got something that enables the use of the MVVM design pattern, probably in several variations, to work swimmingly with CSLA .NET. I’ll go so far as to say that I think this implementation of MVVM makes developing Silverlight and WPF apps easier than out-of-the-box coding (drag-and-drop, handling UI events, using data provider controls). And by easier I mean no more code, often less code, and easier to read/test/maintain code. So the pattern is purely helpful, with no negative consequences of note. Exactly what you’d hope for.

What does this look like?

CSLA .NET MVVM Support

First, you must realize that CSLA .NET helps you create what’s called a rich model as opposed to various other technologies (like Add Service Reference) that help you create an anemic model. Using MVVM with an anemic model is useful, but can require a lot of work, because your viewmodel object needs to compensate for all the stuff the model doesn’t do. But with a rich model, the viewmodel requires far less work because the model is already first-class citizen.

To this end, CSLA .NET provides some helper types that you may optionally use to enable a rich model MVVM implementation. At the same time, I fully recognize that many (most?) people will find/build and use an MVVM UI framework, so the CSLA .NET helper types can be used individually, all together or not at all – as you choose.

Two parts of MVVM already (mostly) exist if you are using CSLA .NET and Silverlight or WPF. CSLA .NET helps you create business domain objects that are your Model, and XAML helps you create your View (with a little help). So in my mind those are essentially a given. What’s left is the need to create the ViewModel.

Notice that I said XAML gives you the view – with a little help. This is because WPF commanding isn’t quite enough to do MVVM, and Silverlight doesn’t even have commanding. So the “little help” is something that handles arbitrary UI events and transforms them into arbitrary method calls on the DataContext (presumably your viewmodel). I would expect any decent MVVM UI framework to solve this most basic problem, and of course they do. Sadly there’s no standard solution, so each UI framework does their own thing.

View Event Handling

While not a UI framework, CSLA .NET does provide a basic solution to this one critical problem with using XAML to create a view. In fact it provides two solutions: InvokeMethod and Execute.

InvokeMethod is an attached property that understands how to handle an arbitrary UI event and to call an arbitrary method on the DataContext when that event is raised. As an attached property, you can attach it to any UIElement (FrameworkElement in Silverlight) to handle any event to call any method on the DataContext. Here’s a simple example:

<Button Content=”Save”
csla:InvokeMethod.TriggerEvent=”Click”
csla:InvokeMethod.MethodName=”SaveData” />

Execute is similar, but relies on the Blend 3 System.Windows.Interactivity event trigger concept to detect that the event was raised:

<Button Content="Save">
<i:Interaction.Triggers>
    <i:EventTrigger EventName="Click">
      <csla:Execute MethodName="SaveData" />
    </i:EventTrigger>
</i:Interaction.Triggers>
</Button>

The advantage of using InvokeMethod is that it has several options around data binding that simply aren’t available to a trigger action like Execute. Most notably, InvokeMethod has a MethodParameter property that can be bound using a binding expression – so it can pull values from other UI controls, resources, the DataContext, etc. There’s no way to do this with a trigger action like Execute.

The advantage of using Execute is that trigger actions are something the Blend 3 designer understands. So InvokeMethod pretty much requires typing XAML, while Execute integrates more naturally into the Blend design experience.

In either case, the method on your viewmodel looks like this:

public void SaveData()
{
}

Or this:

public void SaveData(object sender, ExecuteEventArgs e)
{
}

Either one is fine, as InvokeMethod and Execute will work with either method signature. If you use the second option, the args parameter contains information about the control the raises the event, the event’s args and an optional MethodParameter value.

Creating a ViewModel

When using a rich model, I believe that a good viewmodel object will expose the model as a property, so the View can bind directly against the Model and still have access to the viewmodel. This way the viewmodel can extend and enhance the model without any extra effort. This works particularly well if the model already understands data binding – which is one of the primary features of CSLA .NET.

CSLA .NET includes ViewModelBase<T> and ViewModel<T>, both of which are base classes designed to make it easy to build a viewmodel for a CSLA .NET business object.

ViewModelBase has a public Model property, a handful of other useful public properties (like CanSave), and a whole bunch of protected methods. Again, my assumption is that many people will use some MVVM UI framework, and that framework will have its own constraints on how public methods must be implemented for their particular “commanding equivalent” functionality. The ViewModelBase class allows you to create public methods matching your UI framework’s requirements, but you can usually just delegate those calls to existing protected methods that do most of the work. These methods include:

DoRefresh	(WPF only) Synchronously invokes a static factory method to create/fetch the Model.
BeginRefresh	Asynchronously invokes a static factory method to create/fetch the Model.
DoSave	(WPF only) Synchronously saves the Model (if it is a root object).
BeginSave	Asynchronously saves the Model (if it is a root object).
AddItem	Adds an item to the collection (if the Model is a BusinessListBase).
Remove	Removes an item from the collection (if the Model is a BusinessListBase).
Delete	Marks the Model for deletion (if the Model is a root BusinessBase).
Cancel	Cancels any changes that have been made to the Model (if ManageObjectLifetime is true).

ViewModel is a subclass of ViewModelBase that implements public methods for use by InvokeMethod and/or Execute. If you use InvokeMethod/Execute, then you’ll want to create your viewmodel objects by subclassing ViewModel:

public class CustomerViewModel : ViewModel<Customer>
{
public CustomerViewModel()
{
BeginRefresh(“NewCustomer”);
}
}

In many cases the constructor is all you’ll need to write, since the ViewModel<T> base class already implements the methods necessary to build a standard data entry form.

Again, if you are using an MVVM UI framework, you’ll probably want to create your own base class, somewhat like ViewModel<T>, by subclassing ViewModelBase<T> and implementing your public methods to match the requirements of the UI framework. You can use the code in ViewModel<T> as an example of how to do this.

I should also point out that the Model property is bindable. This means you can create “child viewmodel” objects that get their Model value by being bound to the property of some “parent viewmodel” or parent model. For example, you might have a form for working with SalesOrder objects, so your top level viewmodel exposes a SalesOrder object through its Model property. The following would be the XAML to set up the viewmodel for the form:

<UserControl.Resources>
<this:SalesOrderViewModel x:Key="ViewModel" />
</UserControl.Resources>
<Grid Name=”LayoutRoot” DataContext=”{Binding Source={StaticResource ViewModel}}”>

Now you could just bind the detail region of the form (where you show the line items) to the LineItems property of the business object, and that works fine.

But suppose you want to bind a button or hyperlink control to an AddItem() method so the user can add items to the LineItems collection. How do you do that without writing code? The answer is that you set up a viewmodel (probably LineItemsViewModel) for that child region of the form, and you have the Model property of LineItemsViewModel bound to the LineItems property of the SalesOrder business object. In the child region you’d do something like this:

<Grid Name=”ChildRegionContainer”>
<Grid.Resources>
<this:LineItemsViewModel x:Key=”LineItemsViewModel”
Model=”{Binding Path=Model.LineItems}”/>
</Grid.Resources>
<Grid Name=”ChildRegion” DataContext=”{Binding Source={StaticResource LineItemsViewModel}}”>

The advantage of this is that any controls inside the ChildRegion grid can invoke methods on LineItemsViewModel – such as AddItem() or Remove() to add and remove items from the collection – all with no coding on your part.

Creating the Model

This is the part where I just smile. Because you already have the model if you used CSLA .NET and good object-oriented design to build your business domain objects. The same business objects you may already be using for Windows Forms or Web Forms will almost certainly just work in your WPF or Silverlight application (assuming you are using CSLA .NET 3.5 or higher – and can upgrade to CSLA .NET 3.8).

The primary goal of CSLA .NET, first and foremost, is to enable you to create a business layer that encapsulates your business, validation and authorization logic into a set of business domain objects. By doing so, you end up with a formal business layer on top of which you can build Silverlight, WPF, ASP.NET MVC, Web Forms, Windows Forms, asmx service or WCF service interfaces.

So the whole point of having this business layer is that when something like XAML comes along all you need to worry about is how to rebuild the UI, possibly using MVVM. But you don’t need to worry about rebuilding the business layer, or the data access layer or the database.

I’m pretty happy with the way CSLA .NET 3.8 enables the MVVM design pattern in Silverlight and WPF. As I said to start with, you’d hope that a pattern gives you positive consequences with little or no downside. With the support of InvokeMethod, Execute, ViewModelBase and ViewModel I think CSLA .NET makes MVVM meet that goal. And in fact, I think it allows you to build a UI with less code than many, seemingly simpler, alternatives.

Windows 7 features in .NET

Rockford Lhotka — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:56:24 GMT

I was just complaining that the cool new Windows 7 features weren’t available to me as a .NET developer – at least not without painful p/invoke calls.

My complaints were ill-founded however, as it turns out there’s a solution in the form of the Windows API Code Pack.

This makes me happy (though I haven’t tried it yet, so I’m just assuming it works) because I want access to Jump Lists and some other Windows shell integration concepts – which appear to be nicely included in the code pack.

Klingon Christmas Carol

Rockford Lhotka — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 03:20:36 GMT

If you didn’t know, I’m an uber-geek in a family of uber-geeks, and that (of course) includes Star Trek, as well as supporting and being involved in the local fan community.

My wife is the fight choreographer for this play (and setting up fights with a batleth is really fun!). And the show itself is very good; good acting, well written script and a nice mix of action and comedy. It is a novel twist on an old story :)

About the Klingon Christmas Carol:

Scrooge has no honor, nor any courage. Can three ghosts help him to become the true warrior he ought to be in time to save Tiny Tim from a horrible fate? Performed in the Original Klingon with English Supertitles, and narrative analysis from The Vulcan Institute of Cultural Anthropology.

The Dickens classic tale of ghosts and redemption adapted to reflect the Warrior Code of Honor and then translated into tlhIngan Hol (That's the Klingon Language).

A co-production of Commedia Beauregard and the IKV RakeHell of the Klingon Assault Group.

If you are in the upper-midwest region, I suggest you attend a show and see (according to the Klingons) the original Christmas Carol story.

CSLA .NET training – Nov 2009

Rockford Lhotka — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:28:14 GMT

Dunn Training is offering their CSLA Master Class next month in Atlanta

http://www.dunntraining.com/training/cslamasterclass.htm

If you want to get up to speed fast with CSLA .NET this is the class for you. Instructor Miguel Castro is a CSLA .NET expert and has contributed elements to the framework itself, as well as being the author of the courseware used for the class.

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 Beta 2 – and CSLA .NET

Rockford Lhotka — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 19:41:33 GMT

Microsoft has made Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 Beta 2 available for download to MSDN subscribers, with general availability soon. VS10 includes a lot of really nice features over VS2008, and I’m personally very excited to see the Beta 2 release.

I’ve made a pre-alpha CSLA .NET “4.0” available for download as well. This is really just the version 3.8.0 code (somewhere between beta 1 and beta 2) that I’ve updated to build under Visual Studio 2010 with .NET 4.0.

Over the next few months I’ll continue to release updates to version 4.0 that take advantage of the .NET 4.0 features, but I wanted to make sure there was a version online that builds with VS10 as soon as possible, so this is it – enjoy!