Binding to Nested Properties

Ugh, grids. Seems like no matter what I want to do it ends up being more complicated than I’d like. Same goes for binding to nested properties…
My workmate Vijay is playing with WCF with a small project, and was asking me how to display a “nested” property of his business object in a DataGridView. I'll [...]

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Detecting Design-time in C#

Excellent, now I can detect Visual Studio design time anywhere in my code. (Make sure to read the comments, they provide a valuable correction.)
I came across interesting issue with one of our controls. I needed a different behavior during design-time and run-time. I was sure that .NET Framework has a nice solution for me, but [...]

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.NET 4.0 Beta Breaks WCF Activation

I suppose that’s why it’s a “beta” but I honestly only expected the .NET beta to break itself, not other applications. Here’s a better worded post than I feel like writing that describes the issue…
I’ve had a problem on my most recent Windows 7 install with getting the WCF activation to install. I kept getting [...]

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Multi-Targeting Support with VS2010 & .NET 4.0

This is a great link I can pass on to the people responsible for maintaining the servers who were worried (hey, I was worried too) about installing a beta version of the .NET framework next to production apps using non-beta versions. (For those of you not already familiar with Scott Guthrie, he’s a a Corporate [...]

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Is Software Development Too Complex? (YAP)

Yet Another Podcast, (YAP) this time about the complexity of software development, the different types of complexity of consider, and an all-around interesting conversation.
Panel: Is Software Development Too Complex?
Recorded live at devLink in Nashville, Tennessee. Billy Hollis, Kathleen Dollard, Jim Holmes, and Josh Holmes (no relation) discuss the issue of the complexity of software development. [...]

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ADO.NET Data Services Viewer Tool

Haven’t given this a try yet but I definitely plan to soon.
I build this tool to help me build ADO.NET Data Services URL query ( for example http://e4d.com/Courses.svc/Courses?$orderby=Date/ )
and to see the result. this is first version, please send feedback…
Key Features:
1. URL IntelliSense
2. URL Tooltip
3. Data Grid View
4. XML Atom View
5. Data Service Metadata View
via [...]

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VSTS: DB Best Practices : Right sizing the master.dbschema file for better design time performance

A reference to the master.dbschema (or similar, see below!) is necessary for database projects in Visual Studio that reference system objects. Here’s how to add those objects without slowing everything down.
In the March edition of MSDN we provided an overview of Server Projects and how to reference the master.dbschema file to resolve references to system [...]

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Microsoft Web Platform Installer

Aha! One of my complaints about the Microsoft development platform is that there’s no Windows Update equivalent for keeping track of the myriad of patches, updates, and new versions. Looks like somebody at Microsoft had the same idea and came up with a “Google Pack” of free web-related technologies. Hopefully the installer gracefully handles the [...]

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Kobe: Web 2.0 Service Development Resource Kit

Microsoft’s vision of the Web 2.0 world. Doesn’t seem to be much blog discussion of this yet, I’m hoping the sample code will give my spinning wheels some traction.
Project Kobe is a getting started resource kit for planning, architecting, and implementing Web 2.0 applications and services using the Microsoft Platform. This resource kit is targeted [...]

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Spring.NET – Application Framework

Spring.NET looks to be a great way to implement some best practices such as DI and AOP while letting someone else (Spring.NET) take care of the grunt work. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find very good sample code, and I’ve read comments about it being “overly complicated”. Then again, that makes it sound just like [...]

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