YA.NB - Yet Another .Net Blog

Anyone interested in giving Visual Studio 11 a temptative go, head over here and get it:  http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/11/en-us/downloads Happy Debugging!

Whoever was happy enough to get the chance to implement a WorkflowFoundation-based solution knows the ultimate power that comes with the Framework. If you haven't tried WF yet and are curious to try, you should do yourself the favour to watch the MSDN screencast series by Maurice de Beijer, located here . This is as good a round-up of the technology as I can imagine and deserves a great deal of attention. I really can't imagine why those videos have so little views...

After mobile Flash has been jilted, there's (more or less official) word out on the street that Silverlight 5 will be the last iteration of Microsoft's web interaction platform. Eventually, HTML5 seems to be the next big thing, and among many other reasons for the first major release of the web standard in ages, the following make most sense for me: No Framework or runtime required  open specification in future, every browser will implement it without a plugin (bringing an end to license hell) Microsoft sure knows how to amaze developers, and with the incarnation of XAML, have given us a toolset that enables us to develop for the web, the mobile and the windows platform in the same comprehensible way. HTML5 is supposed to do the very same thing, and in addition enable us to develop for iOS and other non-.Net-aware platforms as well, all with the help of JavaScript (yuck!). That's what I call zombie technology : I thought JS was dead, but here it comes, stabbing us ...

I've been working on a WPF Toolkit for my pastime project CrystalWars tonight, when I stumbled upon this lovely implementation of a PropertyGrid in WPF . At first sight, and working with basic data types only, it works very smoothly. I'll have to dive into the custom section in the next few days nights. The tutorial looks pretty telling to me.

WPF has a lot of advantages, it's perfectly sane data binding mechanism being one of the most outstanding ones.On the flipside, many people (meaning companies, mostly) have refused to switch from WinForms to WPF because of the "blurry" looks of applications written in WPF. This blurryness goes back to two mechanisms: 1)Text Smoothing Instead of relying on the system's ClearType mechanism, WPF does it's own thing-a-magic, which is blatantly inferior to the aforesaid. In fact, WPF smoothed fonts are a definite way to headaches, if read for some time. Note : The image is from a website that compares various Microsoft.Net Font-Smoothing implementations. They might be useful to integrate text in images, though.For business applications (displaying data grids etc.) this is a K.O. criterion. Nobody wants to have to take their glasses off in order to achieve readability, and nobody wants their software deployed along with a pack of aspirins. 2)SubPix...

The following describes a method that is viable for ClickOnce deployment using "Online Only" mode. One of the aspects I recently pondered about is code identity. In other words : Auditors ask me how I ensure that the software tested and accepted by the departments is exactly and with no alternations the assembly we deploy for productive use and not some tinkered-with version. "That's easy", I say, "I can't!". Because some config-variables are set between approval and release, the ClickOnce hashes differ and thus does the whole thing. The image depicts the requirement rather roughly, but I think more detail is not required: An application should be stateless and not compiled to fit it's environment. The first thing coming to my mind to sail around this kind of trouble is keeping the App.config (or any other file of my personal gusto) a part of the deployment, but removing it from the hash. That would be easy, fast and a little dirty. First and f...

This is an Error Message that I have encountered for the first time today. It is most likely to occur when you copy forms and rename the copy automatically, which will cause the original to be renamed, too. In my first project I split the code of a Form into many partial classes, one partial class for each tab in the form. I created new partial classes the copy & paste way, which worked alright before, but today I got the Message The item [...].resources was specified more than once in the "Resources" parameter. Duplicate items are not supported by the "Resources" parameter Actually you can only have one Resources File per class. What I did was unknowingly copy the form including the resources file (...that the VS project explorer hides under the Form's node), so that the resources were double-linked. Solution: delete the second resource file. BTW: As of now, I will also try to make my posts googleable for developers with a german IDE by adding German se...