outcoldman' Blog

Silverlight 4 in Action (Manning, Pete Brown) – this is second book, which I read about Silverlight. First was Pro Silverlight 3 in C# (Apress, Matthew MacDonald), which helped me when I was need to very quickly know more about Silverlight after WPF. After reading Silverlight 4 in Action I think that this is best book about Silverlight. But maybe I should compare this book with Pro Business Applications with Silverlight.

First time when I familiarized with unit testing was 5 or 6 years ago. It was start of my developing career. I remember that somebody told me about code coverage. At that time I didn’t write any Unit tests. Guy, who was my team lead, told me “Do you see operator if with three conditions? You should check all of these conditions”. So, after that I had written some code, I should go to interface and try to invoke all code which I wrote from user interface. Nice? At current time I know little more about tests and unit testing. I have not participated in projects, designed by Test Driven Development (TDD). Basics of my knowledge are a spying code of my colleagues, some articles and screencasts. I had decide that I should know much more, and became a real professional of unit testing, this is why I had start to read book The art of Unit Testing with Examples in .NET. More than, in my current job place looks like I’m just one who writing unit tests for my code. I should show good examples of my tests. Read more...

At previous my blog post I wrote about how to implement validation with DataAnnotations. I this part of my article I will describe interfaces IDataErrorInfoand INotifyDataErrorInfo. I recommend you to read first part before read this part. Because I use example from previous part.

Silverlight 4 has some new ways for validate input values (some new approaches to implement validation in your application). First approach is DataAnnotation. In this case you should describe validation rules with attributes. Two other ways (both of them is came with Silverlight 4) – you should implement one of interfaces for your ViewModel: IDataErrorInfo or INotifyDataErrorInfo. I want to talk about all of these approaches, about pros and cons of using each of them. Goal of this article to get a best way to implement validation of input values in my and your applications. This part of article about DataAnnotations.

I got two new books from O’Reilly about Html 5 and JavaScript (ECMAScript 5):

I had read about Code Contracts long time ago, but I didn’t see a reason to use contract instead of simple tests and argument's check with Exception's throws. Only now I’m trying to use them at real project. I didn’t see why I need to write:

Couple days ago I got a question about how to register hotkey in Windows for WPF application. I remembered that one year ago I was solving the same problem in WinForms application, I was registering hot keys for my application, it was Vista Keys Extender project. I knew that my project worked, so I suggested author of question to use code of my project to solve his problem. But as we learned later in WPF message handle mechanism different from WinForms. So I started to find solution for WPF application. I copied my old code from my old project and started to rewrite it step-by-step. Read more...

Couple of weeks ago I wrote about my small utility Config Transformation Tool, which I wrote with base of web.config transformation task. In those moments I was thinking about opportunity to pass parameters to transform file, to tool can replaces parameters in transformation file with special values. Yesterday I resolved this issue. From now I use class Microsoft.Web.Publishing.Tasks.XmlTransformation which works with strings and XmlDocuments instead of files. I had two tasks: (a) I need method which will replace parameters on values, (b) I need method which will be parse command line and create dictionary of parameters. Read more...