Globalizing and Localizing a WPF application 29 April 2010 Diederik-Krols WPF 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]
WCF Data Services 4.0 in less than 5 minutes 08 April 2010 Diederik-Krols .NET 4.0, WPF, Entity Framework 4.0 WCF Data Services 4.0 (formerly known as ADO.NET Data Services, formerly known as Astoria) is one of the ways to expose an Entity Data Model from Entity Framework 4.0 in a RESTful / OData way. This article explains how to create such a data service and how to consume it with a browser and with a WPF... [More]
PRISM in 600 seconds 31 March 2010 Diederik-Krols WPF 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 28 March 2010 Diederik-Krols .NET 4.0 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]
WPF Browser Control Battle: Chromium versus Internet Explorer 28 February 2010 Diederik-Krols WPF Did you ever want to embed a browser in a WPF application, to host a help file or to access an intranet site? Did you ever want to impress your girl friend by building a fancy browser yourself, like YouCube? If so, your obvious choice would be to drag and drop a native WebBrowser Control into your a... [More]
Yet another Circular ProgressBar control for WPF 27 February 2010 Diederik-Krols 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 20 February 2010 Diederik-Krols WPF 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 03 January 2010 Diederik-Krols SQL Server, 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 01 January 2010 Diederik-Krols 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 31 December 2009 Diederik-Krols SQL 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]