Rick Strahl's Web Log

Weblog Posts in May 2007

3.0
May 30, 2007 @ 11:49 am

Dude it was 3.0 where were you? That's kind of an inside joke among of few of my friends - when you wanna rub it in that somebody missed big day! And boy last Sunday was one of those epic days on the (Columbia) river that I live for: 40 mph winds, huge rollers. The blowing child advisories were up...

9 comments

Source Control and Sharing Projects
May 29, 2007 @ 3:23 pm

Over the years I've been using source control kind off and on for my personal development. I would really love to use source control all the time but in the past I've had a number of issues in making things work correctly with the way I work on my internal projects. For work I do with...

29 comments

WPF: How hard could it be to get a SelectedItemTemplate?
May 23, 2007 @ 9:59 pm

Here's a fun one to do in WPF. Say you have a ListBox or ListView that is databound and you want to get at the content of the data template used for binding of the items in the list. In my case I want to trigger an animation when the item is selected to indicate the change. It's quite easy to get a...

5 comments

__doPostBack and the Back Button
May 22, 2007 @ 2:06 pm

One of my Web Connection customers (but this also applies to ASP.NET) recently posted a question regarding a page that wasn't working correctly when using the Back button. The behavior would be something like this: Go to the page Click a link that causes a __doPostBack() to occur Click the...

18 comments

Downloading a File with a Save As Dialog in ASP.NET
May 21, 2007 @ 12:05 pm

This seems to be a common question that I hear frequently: How do I download a file from a Web site, but instead of displaying it in the browser see it as a file that can be saved (ie. see the Save As dialog)? Normally when you link a file that file will always display inside of the browser because...

170 comments

Fumblings and Thoughts on WPF DataBinding
May 20, 2007 @ 9:08 pm

So I spent the evening today experimenting with databinding in WPF. Overall I'm very excited about that data binding capabilities in WPF which finally has produced a powerful and reasonably user friendly way to do data binding of just about any type to anything else. WPF makes this easily available...

4 comments

Watch out with precompiled ASP.NET 2.0 Applications if you have Orcas installed
May 17, 2007 @ 4:21 pm

Here's a stumper. Today I made a very minor change to my Web Store application. It's basically and administrative tweak to capture spam IP addresses and store them for later optional blocking. The change made didn't touch anything in the rest of the application. The Web Store is my last app that's...

7 comments

Gravatar Implementation
May 16, 2007 @ 11:14 pm

I took a little bit of time today to make a few minor changes to the blog here and added some enhancements to the comments section here. One of the additions is support for Gravatars which is a very simple REST based mechanism that lets you show an avatar image. Gravatar is implemented by quite a...

10 comments

IE DOM's dragstart Event interferes with 'manual' Mouse Movements
May 15, 2007 @ 3:41 pm

I'm working on some JavaScript code for my library that does drag and drop. It's working pretty well and I'd been testing most of my code against dragging around Div tags with drag handles and content which works great. However, depending on how even bubbling is set up in certain browsers the...

WPF Experiments: Changing a Live Writer Plug-in to use WPF
May 14, 2007 @ 11:14 pm

Ok so I had a little free time on my hands this weekend and was looking for a simple something to use WPF on. A few weeks back I'd been playing with an Justin Brown's Amazon book plug in for Live Writer, which is part of the Windows Live Writer Plugins on CodePlex. Back when I first looked at his...

13 comments

DynamicMethod from C# code?
May 13, 2007 @ 10:40 pm

I'm experimenting with DynamicMethod in .NET 2.0 in light of all the good things that apparently have come of it especially in light of the recent release of the Dynamic Language Runtime on CodePlex. I haven't dug into that code (I suspect it won't be light reading <s>), but thought it sure...

11 comments

Forcing an ASP.NET Application to 'stay alive'
May 10, 2007 @ 12:59 am

This post in the 'stupid pet tricks' category I suppose - it's not one of the things that you need to do every day, but if you need to run an application that requires that your ASP.NET application stays up and running without the discontinuity of AppDomain or worker process shutdowns this can be...

13 comments

Migration
May 09, 2007 @ 4:58 am

No... no... not the techie kind of migration you geek! It's time for me to pick up my suitcase full of belongings and haul 'em on a plane back to Oregon for the summer. I'm in the middle of re-arranging my household here on Maui, locking up the house, storing all the toys away for the...

Silverlight Adventures
May 07, 2007 @ 3:16 am

Well, here we are again - let the hype begin!!! Yup, we have a new toy to get excited about and this time it's Silverlight or Microsoft's entry in the Rich Internet Applications (RIA) space. RIA's are interesting to a lot of developers. I can't tell you how often I've heard the request over the...

10 comments

Silverlight and Threading
May 05, 2007 @ 7:11 am

I've spent the better part of the last couple of days playing around with Silverlight 1.1 and it's been an interesting experience. It's both exciting and frustrating at the same time - exciting because it's incredibly nice to see .NET code running in the browser and being able to debug it....

8 comments

Programmatic Printer Driver Installation re-visited for Vista
May 03, 2007 @ 11:30 pm

A long while back I posted an entry regarding how to install a printer driver programmatically by shelling out and using rundll32.exe to execute the PrintUi.dll which can handle a variety of print tasks including installing a printer driver. This code's been working fine, but it's been giving...

2 comments

Orcas Install Success after all
May 01, 2007 @ 3:12 am

Last week I mentinoned that I couldn't get Orcas installed because of problems with the installer most likely due to a botched uninstall of the previous CTP release. Last night while catching up on my Blog reading I saw that Micrsoft had separately posted the .NET Framework 3.5 beta 1 download and...

6 comments