Joe Wrobel

I develop a lot of different applications. They range from large inventory tracking websites, to Windows services, to user interfaces encapsulating scripts written by someone else. I get asked to make many different things. It can sometimes be difficult to keep from reinventing the wheel in different projects. So it's very useful to maintain a common library to reference from the different projects. Regardless of what you keep in the library, utilities, base classes, or the dreaded "helper methods", it does become challenging to work with.

Building a ClickOnce deployment outside of Visual Studio can be a difficult task. One point I want to make clear is that there is no magic going on to make your application deployable using ClickOnce. Well, unless you are using the tooling inside of Visual Studio, in which case there is a lot of magic happening. Much to its credit, Visual Studio does make it very easy to setup and publish a ClickOnce deployment for your application. That said, my suggestion would be to just use Visual Studio if it fits your workflow. However, if you need a fully automated solution to create a ClickOnce deployment outside of Visual Studio, then continue reading. In my environment, my builds are automated using NAnt, which are then built on a build server using CruseControl.Net.

I’ve been an asp.net developer for some time now and I was excited to jump on to Silverlight when it 2.0
was released a few months ago.  One thing I really struggled with was applying conditional formatting to
the individual cells in the DataGrid control.  Coming from an asp.net background, I carried a lot of
assumptions with me (big mistake).  I thought I could get a hold of the rows or cells collection and have
my way with it, but no such luck.  I stumbled down several paths which all ultimately lead to dead ends. 
After killing hours (maybe days) on trying to figure this out, I had to let it go and move on.  Now a month
later I decided to give it another shot and I finally got it.  The answer was right in front of me all along. 
I knew about the IValueConverter interface, but I didn’t fully understand its capabilities.  I thought it was
only used for converting an object into a text representation or vice versa.  Actually, you can return
anything you want from it.  So you can return a Button, Grid, or whatever.

I released a new build of Web Profile Builder.
Not much has changed for the 1.3 release.  The focus of this release was to revert an undesirable change I made for version 1.2.  I did however add one new feature so I changed the version to 1.3.  What was the new feature added?  I changed the generated profile class to be a partial class.  Now you can easily add any custom code to the profile class (in a separate code file) without losing your changes when the profile class gets regenerated.

Files can be downloaded from the Web Profile Builder project page.
If you are unfamiliar with Web Profile Builder, you can read my initial blog post about it here.
Details of this release can be found on the Code Gallery web site.
I had a little time to put together some basic documentation.  It is available from the release download section.

Files can be downloaded from the Web Profile Builder project page.

Well, at least for me it is.  I say that because this solution might
not appeal to the masses, but it works great for me.

Files can be downloaded from the Web Profile Builder project page.