To aid development of rich interactive applications, and reduce the amount of time spent on handling OS specific interactions. .Net applications hide a lot of the underlying message passing that occurs between an application and the OS. This obfuscation is done either at a control or CLR level and usually is perfectly reasonable. However...
Read more →I have posted quite a few times previously covering WPF, its quirks and workarounds as well as ways to improve its overall perceived performance to end users. In this article I will summarise them all, add in lots more tips and tricks and tell you some big gotchas. Versioning WPF and Windows have come...
Read more →Trade-offs have to be made when moving to Cloud platforms, that’s a fact, the question is how much of a comprise do you have to make. Performance and flexibility are two such entities that are intertwined. In this article I want to talk about how you can build a plugin based architecture in Azure...
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Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is a Latin phrase literally translated as “Who will guard the guards themselves?” but commonly rendered as “Who watches the watchmen?” made famous paraphased from its original latin in Orwell’s 1984. With the recent events such as the London Riots and the bombing in Boston, its slowly becoming clear that the...
Read more →A while ago I did a post about Lambda calculus in C#, mainly focusing on how you can implement the concept of Y combinators. Y combinators are one of the simplest fixed point combinators in Lambda calculus, and was discovered by a Mr Curry. One of the other interesting concepts of Lambda calculus is...
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The Cloud seems to be the buzz word of the modern generation, such as HTML5, Ruby on Rails and AJAX were before it. Everyone is scrambling to use it, some bash out an idea or two after a few days tinkering but its only a few that actually understand the technologies. So what does...
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For a long time Microsoft has offered an OCX or COM componentised version of the Windows Media player for inclusion into C# applications. With the introduction of WPF a few years back Microsoft required enhanced video support in end user applications. What we ended up with was the MediaElement control, which I think most...
Read more →Recently I have been trying out a simple but really interesting interview question – how do you reverse a string in C? Hopefully most people should be aware that string functions in C are limited, there are ones like strlen, strcopy etc. but there isn’t a string.reverse such as those present in high level...
Read more →Ran into another annoying gotcha earlier today, it has to do with the encoding format that XML uses when writing out using various methods. If you look at the following code segment for an XmlWriterSetting class, you will straight away notice the encoding property being assigned, and thus be thinking ‘well it must output...
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One of the limiting factors of WPF used to be the availability of hardware accelerated effects for graphics and video. This has all changed with the inclusion of Pixel Shaders in WPF 3.5 onwards. A Pixel Shader is a routine that gets applied as you may guess, to the individual pixels, however it is...
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