Switch On The Code

WPF Snippet Tutorial - Aligning ListView Items

The Reddest — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:36:08 +0000

WPF is powerful. So powerful in fact, that sometimes it's hard to find styles and settings to make it do what you want. Aligning ListView items was one such example for me. This snippet tutorial will show you how to use a style to vertically and horizontally align the contents of ListView cells. More »

WPF Tutorial - Using MultiBindings

The Tallest — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 11:19:37 +0000

If you've touched WPF at all, you've probably realized that bindings are an extremely important piece of the framework. We've talked about WPF bindings a number of times here at Switch On The Code (most recently in a post where we talked about Binding Converters) - and yet we have just barely scratched the surface of the world of bindings. Today, we are going to take a look at MultiBindings. More »

Simple Flex Drag and Drop

The Fattest — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:45:31 +0000

Today I am going to run through a smallish tutorial on creating and using drag and drop in Flex using the DragManager class, which is a utility provided to make drag and drop easy. I should also mention, right off the bat, that some things like lists already have various drag and drop features built in. I however will be showing a example that is useful for any custom drag jobs you might need to do.

WPF Tutorial - How To Use A DataTemplateSelector

The Tallest — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:32:00 +0000

DataTemplates are an extremely powerful part of WPF, and by using them, you can abstract all sorts of display code. However, there are times when they fall short - and initially when I was learning WPF I was disappointed by that. For instance, you only get to set one DataTemplate on an items control, and while that made sense, it felt limiting. What if I wanted to use different templates depending on the content of the item? Do I have to build all that logic into a single data template? More »

WPF Tutorial - Binding Converters

The Reddest — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:04:27 +0000

I'm going to come right out and say it, binding converters are one of the nicest pieces of WPF I've run across so far. Simply put, they provide a translation between your binding source and destination. The most common use I've found is when I'm binding to user interface elements, because on many occasions I don't store something in a data member that can just be stuck on the screen. This tutorial will provide an introduction to what binding converters are and how to use them. More »

Signing up for Slicehost

The Cook — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 18:08:06 +0000

I'm starting work on a new website, and I'm downright tired of my old hosting company. Their tools are cumbersome, their plans are undecipherable, and the level of spam email I get from them is reaching impressive levels. I've watched as a variety of people, including the SOTC guys (Red, Tall, and "Fat") have migrated from shared hosting, to dedicated hosting, to even larger dedicated hosting, and it just looks like a miserable high-effort experience to me. More »

How To Configure And Use Visual Studio Macros

The Reddest — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 19:51:57 +0000

Microsoft Visual Studio has pretty much every operation you'd ever need right at your fingertips through the built in keystrokes. However, there are times when you'd like the text editor to do something that isn't built in. This is where macros come in. Macros can be wired up to keystrokes and can do pretty much unlimited modifications to your text - as long as you're willing to program it. In this tutorial, I'm going to demonstrate how to import an existing macro and configure a keystroke for it. More »

C# Tutorial - Using The Built In OLEDB CSV Parser

The Tallest — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 03:45:30 +0000

So, a while ago, one of the other writers here wrote a small tutorial on parsing simple CSV files in C#. It mostly just showed off the string split method, and only worked on really simple CSV files - no quoted fields, etc. Well, we got a comment asking about that, so today I sat down thinking I would write up a more robust parser. But as I read through the RFC that describes CSV files, I thought to myself, am I suffering from NIH (not invented here) syndrome? Do I really need to write a full CSV parser? More »

Using a PHP Proxy with Flex to talk Cross Domain

The Fattest — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:24:08 +0000

Now one of the worst pieces of working with Flex is cross domain security, oh how I hate it sometimes. Now I understand that there is a reason that the Flash player can't just grab information from any domain it wants all willy nilly, but sometimes this really hampers getting something built. Silverlight also has this issue, and recently I went over using Yahoo Pipes for a proxy for a Silverlight Twitter Client. Today I am going to show how to build a simple PHP script to use as a cross domain proxy. More »

C# Tutorial - Method Attributes And Reflection

The Tallest — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:33:00 +0000

Today we are going to take a look at a deep and yet often underused part of C# - method attributes. First we are going to go through what they are and take a look at the built in attributes, and look at how to poke at them through reflection (which we have taken a quick look at before, in Some Notes On Invoking). By the end of the tutorial, through, we will be making our own custom attributes - and we will be using those attributes to make our code more dynamic and extensible. More »