Here is the latest in my link-listing series .  Also check out my VS 2010 and .NET 4 series and ASP.NET MVC 2 series for other on-going blog series I’m working on. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] .NET/WPF/EF 5 Little C#/.NET Wonders that Make Code Better : Nice blog post from James that highlights 5 nice language/framework tips you can take advantage of within your apps.  I’m betting a lot of people didn’t know about the StopWatch class. WPF Ribbon Control Released : The WPF team recently released the final V1 release of the WPF Ribbon control.  This makes it easy to build ribbon-based applications. Also read this WPF team blog post...

Our eye in the sky reports two angry evil (but devishly good looking) cyborg units, XSP 2000 and TRS-80, are fast approaching Black Rock City. They are considered very armed and dangerous. In fact, they are mostly armed and not much else. These cyborgs do not come in peace. I repeat, they are to be considerd hostiles. However, we’ve received a secret communiqué that reveals a weakness built into these cyborg models. Due to a lack of TDD during development, a bug in their FOF system (friend or foe) causes them to view anyone offering a frosty beverage to be a friend, not foe. Any attempts to engage with these hostiles will result in calamity unless you offer them an ice cold beverage. For the sake of your beloved city, I suggest stocking up....

One of the top reported Microsoft Connect issues with VS 2010 has been an issue with the Find and Replace dialog – which grows 16px each time you use it (which is pretty annoying). The Visual Studio team recently released a patch that fixes this issue. You can download and apply it here . Hope this helps, Scott P.S. A few people reported issues installing the patch if they had an older version of the Silverlight 4 tools installed.  If you see an error message that says you need an update to Visual Studio to support Silverlight 4, you can fix it by installing the latest Silverlight 4 tools release . Read More...

One of the common things people want to do when displaying data with grid controls is to have the little up and down arrows next to the header columns to indicated what direction the data is being sorted in. You see this in Windows Explorer and many other programs. This has been traditionally something that is difficult to do with the GridView control in ASP.NET. If you search the internet you will find a variety of hacks to do this: Matt Berseth: Building a VS2008 Styled Grid with the GridView Control 4 Guys From From Rolla.com: Improving the Sort Arrows GridView Control Some of these implementations have various limitations such as they don’t work if you use AutoGenerateColumns = true. In .NET 4 we addressed these problems by adding a couple...

Several people have asked me if I would move my blog to Orchard . There are actually several challenges with this that have nothing to do with Orchard itself, but suffice it to say that right now I’m not really considering it. On the other hand, for a long time I’ve been wanting to create a second, more personal blog about movies, books, video games and opinions to clearly separate the software stuff from the rest. I’ve been posting several times on science , games and even on politics here but it always felt a little wrong and I felt obligated to tone it down seeing that this blog has a clear association with my employer, Microsoft. Anyway, the release of Orchard 0.5 looks like the perfect opportunity to create that new blog. I have big plans...

On Twitter yesterday I made the following comment : We're not here to write software, we're here to ship products and deliver value. Writing code is just a fulfilling means to that end :) All I see now is blonde, brunette, redhead. For the most part, I received a lot of tweets in agreement, but there were a few who disagreed with me: While I agree in principle, the stated sentiment "justifies" the pervasive lack of quality in development Doctors with this mentality don't investigate root causes, because patients don't define that as valuable That's BS. If you live only, or even primarily, for end results you're probably zombie. We're here to write code AND deliver value. I have no problem with people disagreeing...

We did a variety of small feature items across the data controls when we were working on .NET 4 and I’m going to do a couple of blog posts on some of this new functionality. When we were building Dynamic Data we made small enhancements to the data controls but they only worked when you were using Dynamic Data. In .NET 4 we took this functionality and made it work across all of our core data controls. Persisted Selection When using our data controls that support paging like GridView and ListView there is some funky behavior today. If the user selects the first row of data and then moves to the next page the first row of the data is selected. This behavior seems weird, especially when you are in a master detail scenario where you show the details...

****UPDATED 8/27/2010 2:20pm**** We have upgraded to a bigger room and there are currently tickets available for the Web Camp in LA. If you were on the wait list you will be automatically assigned a ticket.  If you’ve not yet signed up – make sure you do quickly ! We released the tickets just under 48 hours ago and Web Camp LA is sold out!  That’s good and bad news, right?! For those of you who haven’t yet signed up, don’t be too distressed.  We are currently looking for a bigger room so that we can release some more tickets .  I’ll post an update once we’ve secured the room – fingers crossed! Remember we are crowdsourcing the agenda – here’s the poll results so far.  Looks like jQuery and ASP.NET MVC 101 is out in front...

We introduced a lot of little data enhancements in .NET 4 that you may not have heard about. One of these is a mechanism for setting the default value of fields in a data control when you want to do an Insert. In our controls today you would probably do something painful: - Handle the ItemCreated event and inside the event you can call FindControl and find the control for each column manually and set the value on the control using whatever property it supports to set its control. - Handle the Inserting event on the data source control (if you are using one) and check to see if fields have values and if not set the default. This is problematic because this happens after the user has pressed Insert so they do not see the default value until AFTER...

From time to time I get questions about missing method names in the sos !clrstack output, like this: 0:019> !clrstack OS Thread Id: 0x5d0 (19) ESP EIP 0f31f340 7c80bef7 [HelperMethodFrame_1OBJ: 0f31f340] 0f31f398 1449167a 0f31f3c4 144915e6 0f31f3f4 10d81b48 0f31f4b4 793e25cf 0f31f4bc 79366b3d 0f31f4d4 793e2734 0f31f4e8 793e26ac 0f31f678 79e7c0e3 [GCFrame: 0f31f678] Jonathan Dickinson from SourceCode, just emailed me and told me that he had written an article about this and how to resolve it.  You can read the whole article here: http://jonathan.dickinsons.co.za/blog/2010/08/windbg-stack-fix/ Thanks Jonathan for writing that article. Solution: As mentioned in the article there are a couple of things you need to get rid of the problem...