Niche Software

Recently, someone asked me why it was a good idea to attend a local user group meeting. Here's a longer version of the answer I gave at the time.

There are several reasons why it's a good idea to attend a local user group that's relevant to the technology you use for your day to day job - in no particular order, here are some that motivate me.

When working with the DevExpress WPF GridControl, you can get an InfiniteGridSizeException thrown if the grid is in a container with potentially infinite height.

A consultation with Professor Google will show there are two suggested solutions - set MaxHeight on the GridControl to limit its height, or set the AllowInfiniteGridSize property to true. These two suggestions are repeated endlessly on the Developer Express support site.

After a recent update to the Windows 8 Mail app, I found that I could no longer "share to" it from other apps.

For example, if I found an interesting web page and wanted to share it with my son, using the share charm and trying to create an email would fail with the message "Something went wrong and this app can't share right now. Try again later".

I've updated my Markdown.Xaml project with some new capabilities.

The most significant change is the ability to use WPF styles to control the presentation of the generated flow document. Unlike HTML, where you link the stylesheet to the HTML after rendering, the WPF approach requires you to hook the styles up to the Markdown.Xaml rendering engine, which in turn hooks the styles up to the generated document as it works.