Globalizing and Localizing a WPF application

This article describes how to localize a WPF application using the WPF Localization Extension project from Codeplex. On one hand, this is a fine tool. On the other hand, it's a crying shame that WPF developers need to rely on external sources for something as basic as localization. As you know, loca... [More]

PRISM in 600 seconds

Welcome to the lean, mean, no Vicodin, U2U Consult PRISM machine. (595 seconds left.) CompositeWPF, or Composite Application Guidance (CAG) including Composite Application Library (CAL) is still commonly referred to as PRISM. The software component -CAL- extends Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)... [More]

MEF in 300 seconds

The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is the .NET framework for building applications that are extensible with external plugins after being deployed. I already hear you thinking: "D'oh! Not yet another Reflection slash Inversion of Control slash Composition framework ?" And yes, that's what it i... [More]

Yet another Circular ProgressBar control for WPF

Here is (yet another) WPF circular busy indicator control based on Sacha Barber's Circular Progress Bar. This type of control is useful to indicate that a part of your user interface is waiting for the result of an asynchronous call. The user control is hosts a Canvas in whi... [More]

How to play the Accordion - WPF Toolkit

The accordion is a musical instrument invented in Europe in the beginning of the 19th century. It produces music (or rather noise) by expanding and collapsing it while pressing buttons. This metaphor is applied to software: you may know the Accordion user interface control from Microsoft Outlook's n... [More]

The Missing Linq to SQL Spatial

This article provides hints and hacks on how to use the SQL Server spatial data types -Geography and Geometry- in Linq to SQL. The data provider has a problem with serializing and deserializing the SQL UDT's. If you ever tried to use these data types in a Linq to SQL (or Entity Framew... [More]

Converting Spatial Coordinates with Proj.NET

In my previous article I expressed some disappointment in the usefulness of the Map Projections in SQL Spatial Tools on CodePlex. There's not much you can do with these in a real-life application. Fortunately there's also Proj.NET on CodePlex, a flexible advanced point-to-point coordinate conversion... [More]

Tuning SQL Server Lookups to a Linked Server

In SQL Server, if you join a local table with a table on a linked server (e.g. a remote Oracle instance) you should be prepared for horrible performance. In a lot of scenarios it makes a lot more sense to tell the remote server exactly what you need, store that data in a temporary table, and join lo... [More]