September 2011

Windows Phone 7 vs Z88

Submitted by Bevan on Tue, 27/09/2011 - 21:06

I've just acquired a new phone - an LG C900k Windows Phone 7 device. It's awesome and I'm having a lot of fun with it. It's not the only mobile computing device I have, just the newest, so I thought a comparative review was in order between it and the oldest mobile computing device I have, my Cambridge Z88.

Dynamic and meta-programming in .NET 4 with Ivan Towlson

Submitted by Bevan on Thu, 15/09/2011 - 16:54

Ivan's back, and he's brought his top rating TechEd talk with him. This presentation is pure gold, looking at the new stuff in C# 4 from a multitude of angles, and using it to do things with C# that you wouldn't believe possible. In fact, this talk was the inspiration behind my own "Easier property validation with dynamic in C# 4" blog post.

Scheduled Date: 
Wednesday, 5 October 2011 - 6:00pm

Configuration of Log4Net through code

Submitted by Bevan on Wed, 14/09/2011 - 17:02

While writing a windows service, I created a console version for debugging use. I wanted this console to display all the logging, in real time, so I could see things were working. A bit of a search revealed that ColoredConsoleAppender was the desired class, so I added code to set things up.

Warning MSB3247: Found conflicts between different versions of the same dependent assembly

Submitted by Bevan on Tue, 13/09/2011 - 14:10

Here's a Visual Studio tip that falls into the category of "obvious once you know it" ...

When you get this error:

Found conflicts between different versions of the same dependent assembly.

To find out further information about which assembly has been found, and which projects are affected, look in the Output window under "Build". You'll find a dense paragraph of information that tells you everything you need to know.

Fixing a Xaml parse exception

Submitted by Bevan on Thu, 08/09/2011 - 07:31

Working on a side project, I started getting a very odd persistent error. Placing a user control onto a window using the Visual Studio designer gave an error dialog "Provide value on 'System.Windows.Markup.StaticResourceHolder' threw an exception." Hand coding the Xaml for the user control gave the same error:

[img_assist|nid=533|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=center|width=512|height=246]

Lessons learnt at TechEd

Submitted by Bevan on Tue, 06/09/2011 - 19:47

After my recent presentation at the recent Tech Ed conference in Auckland, I've spent a little time reflecting on the feedback received and identifying some lessons learnt. I thought that blogging these might prove useful for others as they work towards their conference debut.

Fighting Spam with Mollom

Submitted by Bevan on Mon, 05/09/2011 - 19:19

I have to figure that the spam arriving on this site comes either from a clever automated process or from people who are too dumb to realise their efforts are useless.

To this point, I've worked with moderated comments, but the volume of spam is getting higher than I want to deal with manually.

Enter Mollom - a network based approach to fighting spam.

It'll be interesting to see how well it works.

Bindable Run for FlowDocuments

Submitted by Bevan on Mon, 05/09/2011 - 12:46

Looking for a way to databind to a paragraph of text in WPF, I first learnt about FlowDocuments, then about Run and how it doesn't support databinding. Further consultation with Professor Google led me to Scott Hanselman's The Weekly Source Code #40 where I found links telling me how to make binding work.