ISerialized

A visual presentation of Caliburns popularity

Paul Eie — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 09:02:35 +0000

With a little tweaking on Google Analytics, I managed to come up with a map overlay of all page view related to Caliburn: The top 10 contries are: United States United Kingdom Germany Australia Sweden Poland Canada India Russia Norway Quite surprised that Germany, Sweden and Poland is that high on the list ! Top ten cities: London Burnley Melbourne Moscow Sydney Auckland Oslo Stockholm New York Bangkok

IPhone summer

Paul Eie — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 05:33:05 +0000

Summer vacation and IPhone is a good combination. Here are ten of my favorite IPhone Apps for a great vacation while travelling in Norway: Ship Tracking. Keep track of ships nearby! Star Walk. For nice summer nights. The most incredible IPhone App I have ever seen! Facebook. Well speaks for it selves. TripIt. Keep track of all your booking reservations for hotels, [...]

Double-clicking Visual Studio solution files in Windows 7

Paul Eie — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 06:57:16 +0000

I guess I am not the only one annoyed by the fact that I could not open Visual Studio by double-clicking a solution file. Finally I looked into this problem and first found a simple, but not satisfying solution: By setting Visual Studio to not run as an administrator. But if you ever tried running Visual Studio on [...]

Using the AutoCompleteBox in the WPF Toolkit

Paul Eie — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 19:36:31 +0000

In this blog post I will look into the AutoCompleteBox in the WPF Toolkit, added in the february release of the WPF Toolkit. The AutoCompleteBox works, just the way I had expected it, but it actually adds a couple of more features than what I would have expected. Only one dll is needed to use the [...]

Unit testing Caliburn applications in NUnit

Paul Eie — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 20:42:01 +0000

This is part three in my series on Caliburn, if you haven't please read Part 1: Getting started with Caliburn and Part 2: Multiple Views on one ViewModel. In this post I will look into the unit testing features of Caliburn and try to give a quick introduction to the essentials of what you need to [...]

Optional parameters in C# 4.0

Paul Eie — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 21:49:32 +0000

A while back I blogged about the great features of the Dynamic Language Runtime introduced in .Net 4.0. Today I will look into another great feature introduced in C# 4.0, namely the new named and optional parameters. If you are familiar with C++, you have probably used optional parameters earlier, but C# has missed this feature until [...]

Splash screen in WPF

Paul Eie — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 11:09:14 +0000

Remember the time when adding a splash screen to application was a hassel? In WPF this is now extremely simply, follow these few steps, and you splash screen is available in your WPF application! Steps: Add your desired splash image to your WPF project Click the image in the solution explorer Set Build Action to SplashScreen Thats it! The image [...]

Running NUnit in an STA thread

Paul Eie — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 22:42:45 +0000

While unit testing a WPF Caliburn application, I bumped into the following error: The calling thread must be STA and I ended up with a cross-thread exception. When diving into this problem I found that TestDriver.Net actually runs in STA (acronym for Singel Thread Apartment) by default, but NUnit is not! It is however a fairly simple configuration change to get NUnit [...]

Features vs. user stories in Scrum

Paul Eie — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:01:12 +0000

As Scrum has grown in popularity, the concept of user stories has made its way from theory and dust covered UML books, to developers every-day vocabulary. In the "old days" we tended to focus on one layer at a time, instead of one user story at a time, we focused on writing large classes supposed to [...]

Converting from Blogger to Wordpress

Paul Eie — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:31:10 +0000

This week I started the hard shift from my old Blogger blog to my new Wordpress blog on my new domain ISerialized.com. There are a couple of aspects of such a shift that makes this a hard decision to do: Allot of hard work Leaving the old familiar Blogger tool Learning Wordpress Trying to convert my old Feedburner readers [...]

How to unit test private methods in C# using NUnit

Paul Eie — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 03:16:00 +0000

Ever had the need to unit test a private method? Ever change a private method to public just to able to write a test for it? You are definitely not alone! A couple of weeks back I had a very interesting discussions with a very good colleague of mine: "What to do if I want to unit test [...]

The is keyword: Yet another hidden treasure of C#

Paul Eie — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 23:43:00 +0000

A while back i blogged about the yield keyword and called it a hidden treasure of C# as I seldom see it used, and many senior developers never use it! Today, I came across a similar one, namely the is-keyword. And frankly, I had actually forgotten about myself, even though I have used it in the [...]

Daily Stand-Ups in Scrum

Paul Eie — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 15:18:00 +0000

I just came across a great summary of the daily stand-ups in scrum, written by Joakim Karlsson. I guess most Scrum teams start out with good intentions and focus in the begging, but as time goes by, we start falling into the old "around the table" reporting habit to the project manager, the Scrum master [...]

Dynamic Language Runtime in .Net 4.0

Paul Eie — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 15:52:00 +0000

The upcoming .Net 4.0 contains many new and exciting features, in this blog post I will describe some of the new features of the DLR including the dynamic keyword. To quote MSDN: The dynamic language runtime (DLR) is a runtime environment that adds a set of services for dynamic languages to the common language runtime (CLR). The [...]

Why use Custom Control instead of User Control in WPF?

Paul Eie — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:28:00 +0000

When I first started experimenting with WPF I was quite confused with the new custom control introduced in WPF. I did a quick Google search but never got the full understanding of the difference, but I read somewhere that in most cases a custom control was not necessary, so I just focused on the regular [...]

What’s new in WPF 4.0

Paul Eie — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:06:00 +0000

Microsoft has just release a series of short (15 minutes long) how-to videos for WPF 4.0 introducing the various new features of WPF 4.0. The following videos are currently available: New Windows Presentation Foundation Controls WPF 4: The Visual State Manager Touch comes to Windows Presentation Foundation WPF4: Graphics Enhancements Binding in Windows Presentation Foundation 4 WPF 4: XAML Browser Applications Windows Presentation [...]

Getting started with Caliburn Part 2: Multiple Views on one ViewModel

Paul Eie — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 04:48:00 +0000

The documentation and tutorials on Caliburn is still very limited, and is one of the biggest obstacles getting started with Caliburn right now. In this post I hope to fill some of the gaps I have seen in the lack of documentation by showing how you can easily hook up two Views to one ViewModel. Caliburn is rapidly improving [...]

Extension methods in 60 seconds

Paul Eie — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 03:41:00 +0000

Extension methods enables you to hook up extra methods to an already existing (and possibly sealed) class, without the need of subclassing or changing the original class. Lets say I have a class from a third party vendor I use, which contains information on persons public class Person { public string FirstName{ get; set;} [...]

A quick start guide to yield return and yield break

Paul Eie — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 04:27:00 +0000

The yield statement was introduced in .Net 2.0, but I am a bit surprised that I meet many senior developers who has never used yield return (and yield break)! For some strange reason, yield has become some kind of hidden treasure in .Net. Through this post, I hope I can show some simple examples, and [...]

Working with globalization, string parsing and number formats in C#

Paul Eie — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 04:24:00 +0000

On a project I attended a couple of years ago, we struggled a lot with string parsing, date formats and cultures. The product was shipped to among others China, Japan and US, and getting your code to work seamless in all culture formats can be a bit of a hassle if you are not fully familiar with [...]

SqueezeBox Server won’t scrobble to LastFm

Paul Eie — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 22:05:00 +0000

For the second time this week, I saw that my Squeezebox Server won't scrobble my played (and loved) tracks to last.fm! I started investigating, and in the server log of my Squeezebox server, I found the following errors: Slim::Networking::SqueezeNetwork::_error (447) Unable to login to SN: Couldn't resolve IP address for: www.mysqueezebox.com Slim::Networking::SqueezeNetwork::_init_error (180) Unable to login to [...]

Memoization using generics – Part 2

Paul Eie — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 16:54:00 +0000

This is Part 2 of my series on Memoization. In Part 1 I described the basic principles behind memoization, and showed some examples on how to create an effective generic method to do memoization of methods with zero and one parameter. In this post I will show how to do memoization of methods with two parameters Why [...]

Getting started with Caliburn

Paul Eie — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 21:18:00 +0000

The lack of documentation and examples of usage is one of the biggest obstacles getting started with Caliburn. I hope this article can help somewhat! One of my biggest fears when starting a new project is heading in the wrong direction and not realizing that we are headed for disaster until it's too late. Due to [...]

Closing in on 20 000 reader on my article at CodeProject!!!

Paul Eie — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 22:13:00 +0000

Back in 2006 when I started working with .Net, I posted an article at The Code Project, where I wrote about Sending parameters at thread startup. My competence with .Net has grown rapidly since then, but I check back today to check my profile at The Code Project, and realized that my article was read 20 000 times!Checked Google [...]

Adding C# and ASP.Net to Blogger (Part 2)

Paul Eie — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 03:43:00 +0000

In one of my earlier posts I recommended using Windows Live Writer and the "Paste from Visual Studio" plugin to add code to your blog. But two days of struggling with layout I gave up, and stumbled upon the C# code formatter which is very easy to use! To add C#, VB, ASP.Net etc, just following these steps: Copy [...]

Memoization using generics and lambda expressions

Paul Eie — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 03:00:00 +0000

Memoization is a hidden treasure of programming techniques. Most developers has a good understanding of caching and use it to optimize queries, but why even do calculations on cached or live data, when you don’t need to calculate at all? This is Part 1 of my series of memoization, you can find Part 2 here. The defenition To quote [...]

Adding C# and ASP.Net code to Wordpress

Paul Eie — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 14:22:00 +0000

In the case of WordPress, adding C#, ASP.Net and similar code is very simple. Just use the sourcode tag in the following way (discard the underscores): [_sourcecode language="csharp"] string s = “Hello World”; System.Console.WriteLine(s); [_/sourcecode] And it will turn up like this: string s = "Hello World"; System.Console.WriteLine(s); Note: This functionality require the following plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/syntaxhighlighter/

Adding C# and ASP.Net code to Blogger

Paul Eie — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 18:04:00 +0000

Many developers ask, how can I paste C# code in my blog? I have looked into several ways of doing this, my verdict: Use Windows Live Writer! Update: Please see my second blog post about an updated evaluation of Blogger and C# ASP.Net Windows Live Writer comes with Live Messenger, and has a very easy to use interface, [...]

Struggling with impedance mismatch, obstacles and technical debt in Scrum projects

Paul Eie — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 19:30:00 +0000

Lean processes such as Scrum has no requirements regarding specific software design methodology, but on the other hand an agile software process requires an agile code base! When planning one sprint, we don’t really know what the next sprint will bring. The backlog might change radically before the next sprint, and if the code base and [...]

Twingly and AdSense: My “incredibly rich without working” idea

Paul Eie — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 02:28:00 +0000

The idea: As a blogger I can add AdSense to my blog to make money, based on hits and clicks. But the dollar per click ratio is rather low, so to become incredibly rich I need a blog with MANY hits per day. So how can I do this? I can start blogging, like I [...]

Focus on the product backlog and business value of Scrum projects

Paul Eie — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:12:00 +0000

While struggeling on a customer project, I came across a post in Eric Lee's blog The root of all evil in Scrum We are struggeling on a customer project to get scrum working. I joined the team a couple of months back, when they had allready been scrumming for a while, but I found a SCRUM team [...]

Accessing Sharepoint 2007 from Office 2010 Technical Preview

Paul Eie — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 17:38:00 +0000

I have really struggled with my Office 2010 Technical Preview the last few days. Most of the Office 2010 is working really good, but accessing word and excel documents located on a Sharepoint 2007 server, has not been easy! I had to save a local copy, and then open the local copy to be able to [...]

Version 1.0 of Windows 7 code pack

Paul Eie — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 22:04:00 +0000

Today the Windows 7 code pack version 1.0 was released. With the code pack you can start using the new features in Windows 7 from your own .Net 3.5 applications, eg. progress bars, icon overlay, Thumbnails toolbars +++ This page includes all the features, as well as a few quick 2 minutes videos of the [...]

Getting started with Windows 7 (Tips and tricks)

Paul Eie — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 15:21:00 +0000

One of the biggest problem with each new version of a framework or OS is getting known with all the new features and functions. I personally never have the time to sit down and read pages upon pages each time I upgrade, but today I came across a really good page with quick videos of [...]

Setting up Gmail on Windows Mobile 6.1

Paul Eie — Fri, 29 May 2009 05:32:00 +0000

Accoring to this article, it should be rather straight forward to setup Gmail with IMAP on WM 6.1. I manged to this on my HTC TYTN II when I was running WM 6.0, but after upgrading to WM 6.1, I never had the choice during installtion to avoid automatically retrieving setting, so I was forced [...]

Upgrading Windows 7 Beta to Windows 7 RC

Paul Eie — Tue, 19 May 2009 16:31:00 +0000

A couple of months ago I attended a MSDN Live session in Stavanger Norway, where I talked to a Microsoft representative regarding the Windows 7 beta-program. To avoid too much extra work, I considered waiting for the RC before installing the Windows 7, but based on the "guarantee" from Microsoft that upgrading for Windows 7 [...]

Logging in .Net: a short study

Paul Eie — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 22:11:00 +0000

I have been using different third-party logging tools for both .Net (C# and C++) and Java, but in my current project we are using a custom logging tool. Don't ask me why we have written our own framework for this, but I guess it's partly because we have worked on our current code base since [...]

Using icons in windows applications

Paul Eie — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 19:44:00 +0000

Today I came across the same problem that I have had many times earlier: I need a new icons in an application, this time for a refresh button. So what do I do? I Google it ofcourse and get hundreds of hits to all kind of crappy icon libraries, most of the costing me a [...]