Andreas Zenker

The ability to create a living, breathing, document right inside a WPF UI is pretty incredible to me. Even after working with it for the last year or so, I am still impressed by the power of this largely forgotten feature of WPF.

So, if you like vi as an editor and you use Visual Studio, pony up the money and get ViEmu. Best money invested in my productivity and ergonomic efforts of this past year, hands down. If you love to hate your mouse you owe it to yourself to investigate ViEmu. There is also another free emulator that is available as an extension from the extensions online gallery called VsVim. However the rest of this blog has to do with configuring ViEmu to work with your particular choice of Visual Studio color scheme.

Got my iOs5 update yesterday, mostly cool. However I was unable to send from my Verizon account, kept getting errors like “server does not allow relaying” when I tried to send or reply to mail. I was able to download new mail no problem.

There are many things that Visual Studio does so well out-of-the-box, and then there is merging conflicts. The built-in merge tool is about as helpful as high beams on your car on a foggy night. The screen is full of information you just can't tell what it means.

I have been just as attentive to blog reading as I have to blog writing and was enjoying some extra-long fix/compile/test cycles today and was able to catch up on Eric Lippert’s blog. All I have to say is: “my head hurts … and it feels great!”.

So, I had a need to implement a TextBox in WPF with auto filtering functionality. For example the initial requests were to limit a TextBox to numeric characters only. This was simple enough. Handle the PreviewTextInput Event and only allow numeric characters to be entered. So my first, simplistic, hack version was simply this:

Sometimes you wish you could do better than the method you need to use. Case in point: Contains(). It is a fine method and is meant for more than strings. If you need custom logic to decide if two objects are equal or “the same” for the sake of sorting or searching you write your own comparer and pass that in. So, I don’t have anything against the Contains() method for any reason, I only find it a bit too generic when all I have is a list of strings and want to see if I have a match that doesn’t care about case.

Our current project team decided to post development documents, guidelines, specs etc in a SharePoint site dedicated to project. We also decided we would try a Wiki to post coding standards and best practices, samples, tips on using certain WPF controls etc.