Author Archives: Ben

The Software Industry is Lost

Posted on February 21, 2011 by Ben

Our industry is more than 50 years old and still trying to understand some fundamental questions. There have been many analogies and practices to describe how software should be built, yet we still do not have definitive answers to questions … Continue reading →

Posted in process, srt | 1 Comment

CodeMash 2011

Posted on February 11, 2011 by Ben

It has been about a month since CodeMash has passed – there was good content and good discussions. Exactly what I hope to get out of CodeMash. I continue to think about some of the ideas and discussions; I have … Continue reading →

Posted in CodeMash, srt | 1 Comment

Parallel LINQ (PLINQ)

Posted on May 24, 2010 by Ben

LINQ is getting an upgrade with .Net 4.0. Features are being added that allow us to easily execute queries in parallel. It gives us another reason to drop those odious for and foreach statements and use LINQ. .Net 4.0 introduces … Continue reading →

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WPF LL: TextBoxes that just keep growing

Posted on May 24, 2010 by Ben

This problem was probably discovered accidentally and shows me once again how important it is to have non-technical and new people testing your programs. The problem encountered was that the TextBoxes on one of our Windows would just keep expanding … Continue reading →

Posted in srt, WPF | 4 Comments

WPF LL: XML Binding and Data Converters

Posted on May 24, 2010 by Ben

In the project I’ve been working on, we’re binding a bunch of controls to an XML document. In our bindings, we are extensively using XPath. One of the things that did not occur to me immediately, and seems very obvious … Continue reading →

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WPF Lessons Learned – Use ContextMenu.Items over ContextMenu.ItemsSource

Posted on May 24, 2010 by Ben

I’ve been working on a WPF project for a client and have learned a lot in the process. I’d like to touch on some of these things. This first post will be about creating a ContextMenu. I’ve had to create … Continue reading →

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Study Group – WPF

Posted on December 9, 2009 by Ben

For the last two weeks Anne Marsan has led study group. Both of her sessions were about WPF and she led them by writing up instructions on how to produce a project that illustrated what she wanted to teach. Her … Continue reading →

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Study Group – F#

Posted on November 19, 2009 by Ben

Chris Marinos led study group this week on F#. F# is Microsoft’s foray into functional programming; it isn’t strictly functional, but it is clearly designed with that purpose in mind. I thought I had gotten some of experience with functional … Continue reading →

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Study Group – JEE

Posted on November 11, 2009 by Ben

Last year we ran a study group in preparation for the .Net certification test. Bill Heitzeg decided to revive the study group with a different focus. Our new purpose is to get a brief overview of a technology each week … Continue reading →

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Convert to Linq!

Posted on July 9, 2009 by Ben

While writing my last post, I was looking at the code to see if it was really something I wanted to post for general scrutiny and saw that I could use Linq to do the same thing. Here’s the old … Continue reading →

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