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Coffee, Code, or Me? by Bil Simser

The gauntlet has been thrown down. It's duelling laptops as John Bristowe and I square off at the Kawa Expresso Bar in Calgary this Friday and bring you the Cowtown version of Coffee and Code (with a little Ultimate Fighter Championship thrown in for...

WPF Application Quality Guide, Revision 4 Released by Bil Simser

Microsoft has put together another version (this is rev 4) of their WPF Application Quality Guide, a fairly complete set of tasks and ideas around writing good quality apps using the Windows Presentation Framework. http://windowsclient.net/wpf/white-papers...
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Edmonton Code Camp bound this Saturday by Bil Simser

What do 3 geeks do at 4AM in the parking lot of an IKEA in Calgary on a Saturday morning? Plot to overthrow Future Shop in the hopes of obtaining a rare shipment of WiiFits? Maybe. Test the cold-tolerance level of Dell laptops using Canadian Tire car...
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Transforming Tree Surgeon using the Adaptive Console Framework by Bil Simser

I'm a command line app junkie as I love working with it. I guess it's my DOS/Linux roots but I find things go faster when you're not dealing with a GUI and a mouse. Command line tools like NAnt and MSBuild have all sorts of options and syntax. Some of...

NHibernate: Identity columns that are not the primary key by Bil Simser

Sometimes you need a column in your database to automatically increment (like an identity column) in order to provide back to a user say a confirmation number (when an item is added to that table). In NHibernate there's no way to specify this kind of...
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Building an Error Icon in WPF by Bil Simser

When you launch a XBAP application you can sometimes stumble over the XBAP error page which might look something like this: Here's a WPF user control that you can drop into any application that simulates the error icon you see. It's a simple Canvas control...
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Handling Unhandled Exceptions in XBAP Applications by Bil Simser

In your own applications you'll generally want a "catch-all" handler that will take care of unhandled exceptions. In WinForms apps this is done by creating an unhandled exception delegate and (optionally) creating an AppDomain unhandled exception handler...
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Patterns, Practices, and Prism by Bil Simser

James Kovacs and I had the pleasure of presenting to a well fed crowd of about 150 crazed developers and IT folk at Shaw here in Calgary last night. We did a drive by discussion of Prism. I say drive by because we really just scratched the surface of...
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9 Options, 4 Icons, 1 MessageBox by Bil Simser

You know there are things in life that you never notice or worry about. This is one of them. The MessageBox API in Windows Forms allows you to specify message box icons to display along side your all-important message you're communicating to the user...

Terrarium, Terrarium, Terrarium by Bil Simser

I'm presenting a talk around Terrarium development at the Edmonton .NET User Group on September 25th. The talk is focused on upgrading a legacy app (1.1) to 2.0 (and beyond to 3.5 eventually), building and running your own Terrarium (complete with man...
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