I got some positive feedback on my recent post about binding a TextBlock’s tooltip to its own text property, so I decided to post this related follow-up…

Allowing your users to navigate your forms with the keyboard is a very important usability feature that is often overlooked.  In Silverlight, this is accomplished by setting IsTabStop to True on any controls you want to participate in keyboard navigation.  When the user hits the tab key, focus will cycle through all the controls where IsTabStop is True, one at a time.  Any controls where IsTabStop is false will be skipped....

I know, you are probably thinking “Batch files? What is this, the Dark Age of DOS?” Bear with me; while you might see batch files as antiquated relics, I have come to see them as simple and elegant tools (with admittedly primitive syntax) that speed my daily development. They seem to have become a bit of a lost art in this day and age of point-and-click UIs. Let me share a few scenarios with you.

Delete log files before running an app

This one is simple. I am on a team developing a large WCF multi-tier application with plenty of ...

Recently I was given a task of creating a quick example of someone making a data change to a database table then someone else being able to see the new data. Seemed simple enough. I created a WCF RIA Services application with a simple grid and submit/refresh buttons  on it. I brought up two instances of the application and had one instance change the data and the other refresh it. To my amazement the second instance didn’t see the new data.

I brought up SQL Server Profiler to see what was going on. When hitting the refresh button I ...

Those that have been programming in WPF for a while probably already know about defining styles based on other styles.  With the release of version 3, this feature made the jump over to Silverlight as well.  Even though this is old news, as Silverlight is now on version 4, I’ve found that this feature is still little-know, and it’s so useful, I thought it deserved a post.  In the post, I’ll go over the basics of how to use this feature for anyone to whom the feature is new.

Why Use BasedOn

Using BasedOn to define a style allows ...

In every Silverlight project I have worked on I have needed to set some default styles for use throughout the Silverlight controls. So I create a new Silverlight Resource Dictonary and typically add items such as SolidColorBrush:

It is great to have one place to define styles and for the case above colors of my Silverlight components but then I wanted to set a particular font family and font size. This wasn’t immediately clear to me how to do that because ...

  I have written quite a few WCF RIA Services applications now and almost every time I need to pre-fetch some data before showing a Silverlight page or dialog. For instance you might need to get all the years and employees available to so you can put them in ComboBoxes for a dialog. You wouldn’t necessarily want to do this in the Loaded event of the dialog because the dialog will come up with empty information then fill in when the query has returned.

Another problem is that the code turns ugly and hard to manage if you have multiple ...

There have been a few instances when I would like to have an identical copy of an object but want them to be different instances. There are a few brute force ways to do this by either copying the values one by one or by using reflection to iterate over variables, properties, etc. The problem is that these methods are not very generic and need to be tweaked for each situation.

I have discovered that there are a few ways to clone an object by serializing then de-serializing an object into a new deep-copy instance of that object.

Method 1 ...

I've been working on a multilanguage web site using ASP.NET localization. I wanted to return unique meta tags for each page in the user's language. There are a handful of ways to accomplish this (MasterPage codebehind, base page codebehind, etc); here's the approach I took:

1. My web site was already taking advantage of Web.Sitemap, so I decided it would be best to store the meta tags there as a custom attribute. Web.Sitemap's resources can be globalized, so I actually don't need to do anything special to the sitemap besides set enableLocalization="true" and assign a unique resourceKey attribute if one does ...

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