Brendan Enrick's Blog

Silverlight is a great technology, and one thing that really makes it a treat to work with is the ease with which one can access the code inside the XAP file. Yes, this means that someone can look at your code, SO DON’T PUT ANYTHING SECURE IN THERE! I took Jeff Blankenburg’s Click the Button contest . So for a while I though Jeff had tricked me on that puzzle until I opened up the XAP file...

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Last night we had a great HudsonSC meeting. People started showing up around 5:30, and I had the opportunity to meet and talk with a few new attendees during that time. Lightning Talks At around 6:00 we got things started. Kevin Kuebler started us off with an interesting talk on BDD where he showed some interesting code using MSpec. As usual, he was unable to keep his talk under 10 minutes. We will...

Continue reading “HudsonSC January 2010 Recap”

As a late adopter of CodeMash I can say that version 2.0.1.0 was a great event. There were hundreds of developers there ready to learn and try new things. The intelligent, interesting people sparked many worthwhile conversations. If you’re in the area around Sandusky, Ohio, I highly recommend that you attend the next CodeMash. Not Your Everyday Conference I was very pleased with how things were handled...

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I will be attending a great regional event this week. The event is called CodeMash and it is located in Sandusky, Ohio. As the CodeMash site describes it. CodeMash is a unique event that will educate developers on current practices, methodologies, and technology trends in a variety of platforms and development languages such as Java, .Net, Ruby, Python and PHP. I hope everyone attending has a safe...

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Today I received an email that has started this year off very well. Microsoft has honored me by re-awarding me with an MVP award in the area of ASP.NET this year. Thank you Microsoft. Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2010 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others...

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Anyone who has ever run a web site or a blog has probably taken a look at analytics packages to see who is visiting. I’ve recently been working on a very exciting project with Telerik, developing an application to provide this valuable information to bloggers and content creators. To get things started we decided to tackle some of the basics first by asking these few questions: “How many...

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Reference types were created to make dealing with pointers a little bit easier. They hide away the details of the pointers, so that the programmer need not think about them. In many ways I think they’re awesome, because they really achieve that goal. The problem is that by abstracting away the details of the pointers they’re sometimes difficult to work with, because they can be a little bit confusing...

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Earlier, I wrote a post about using inheritance with Silverlight UserControls . The post shows really quickly how one can have their UserControl inherit from another class. One tip I’ll mention is that the base class can be abstract, but not if you plan on using Expression Blend. Generally if you have a class which shouldn’t ever be instantiate, you should make it abstract. The issue is one that I...

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The default layout for a RadChart works for most situations. It has a ChartArea, a ChartLegend, and a ChartTitle. These are easy to work with, and if you want you can break from the norm and create your own custom Silverlight Rad Chart layout . If you’re sticking with the default you almost certainly have some settings and properties to which you will want to make adjustments. In order to do...

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One way in which we object-oriented developers try to achieve code reuse is by using inheritance. This allows us to have shared functionality in one place. Awesome we all know how to do this and it’s easy right? Try it in Silverlight for your UserControls. It is a little bit more challenging. The problem we have is that we’re working with partial classes and these classes are trying to make things...

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