Using a server side Prism module catalog in Silverlight 24 April 2011 Diederik-Krols Silverlight Prism 4.0, Managed Extensibility Framework, and Silverlight 4.0 provide an ideal combination to develop robust and flexible enterprise applications. This article explains how you can keep the Prism module catalog in such an application on the server side. In most of the Prism Quickstarts, ... [More]
How to migrate a TFS team project to a new process template 02 April 2011 Diederik-Krols Here's the bad news: there are two very common things that should be easy, but can NOT be done in Team Foundation Server. You can not switch an existing team project to a new set of process templates. You can not rename a team project. These are two show stoppers when you have a team project... [More]
Cloning Entities in Silverlight 26 March 2011 Diederik-Krols Spatial Here's a nice little extension method that returns a deep copy of a relatively simple object - like an Entity or a Data Transfer Object. It is based on the DataContractSerializer, so the object should be serializable through XML or a DataContract. The extension works from Silverlight 2 upwards... [More]
Turning Silverlight Application Themes into Toolkit Themes 16 March 2011 Diederik-Krols Spatial Not every development team is blessed with a professional graphical designer. So I can imagine that a lot of developers appreciate a free, nice, and very complete set of themes, such as the Silverlight 4 Application Themes. Tim Heuer's team has built for us the following themes: JetPack, Accent... [More]
Themebuilding in Silverlight 02 March 2011 Diederik-Krols Silverlight In this short article I'll show you how to transform a resource dictionary with colors, brushes, styles and templates into a real theme - à la Silverlight toolkit themes - and how to apply it to a region in the user interface. I'll build a theme called Glass. Building the theme Ea... [More]
Fuzzy lookup of names with a Dutch Metaphone implementation 10 February 2011 Diederik-Krols SQL Server Phonetic algorithms are heavily used to provide suggestions and corrections in spell checkers and also for searching and matching names. You could use such algorithms to populate autocomplete controls for the lookup of cities and streets, patients in a hospital, or reservations for a hotel stay. All... [More]
Building an Entity Framework 4.0 model on views: practical tips 01 February 2011 Diederik-Krols Entity Framework 4.0, SQL Server Many development teams and database administrators use views to create an abstraction layer on top of a physical data model. In this article I'll show you how to build an Entity Framework 4.0 (EF4) model upon such a set of views. I'll create a couple of views in SQL Server -some of them indexed-, im... [More]
Using the Prism 4.0 Event Aggregator 16 January 2011 Diederik-Krols .NET 4.0, WPF This article illustrates the problems that occur when you use regular events for intercomponent communication in a composite application. It shows how to solve these problems by implementing the Mediator design pattern, using the Event Aggregator from the Prism 4.0 framework as an exa... [More]
Very Spatial Wishes 20 December 2010 Diederik-Krols Spatial, SQL Server Last year I encountered this T-SQL script on a MSDN Forum. Run it in SQL Management Studio (not Visual Studio!), and select 'Spatial Results': -- Original Source: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sqlspatial/thread/d52c686e-30cc-4ae0-bdc7-ae4a2536cd64 -- Prepare the scene CREAT... [More]
A fistful of Entity Framework 4.0 Tips 16 December 2010 Diederik-Krols Entity Framework 4.0, SQL Server This article presents some useful tips for building the data access layer of an enterprise application on top of Entity Framework 4.0 (EF40). For those who can't wait, here they are: 1. Only project the columns you really need, 2. Stay away from the Include syntax, 3. Consider alternatives, 4. But ... [More]