DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by BrianGenisio

Adventures in MVVM -- Ball of Mud vs MVVM

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 02:39:39 GMT

A demo that I added to my MVVM talk is one that compares a "Ball of Mud" application with a componentized MVVM application with the exact same set of features. I do this to contrast a messy, un-testable work of code to a cleanly separated, testable work. The application I chose to write is a Twitter search application in WPF. When you download the code, you will see two folders: "BallOfMud" and "MVVM".

Adventures in MVVM - Slides and Demo App

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 01:38:09 GMT

This post links a fully functional MVVM demo that is a front-end for a recipe database web service. It shows how MVVM can be used to eliminate the majority of your code-behind and lets you write unit tests against the UI behavior.

Adventures in MVVM - Commanding with List Boxes

Sat, 30 May 2009 03:39:22 GMT

Continuing in my series of "Adventures in MVVM", I want to talk about a few different approaches to working with List Boxes with the MVVM pattern...

Adventures in MVVM -- A Testing Story

Thu, 28 May 2009 01:58:34 GMT

This is the story of how I got interested in the MVVM pattern. Not surprisingly, it is all about testing.

Adventures in MVVM - Commands in Silverlight

Sat, 23 May 2009 09:00:59 GMT

One of the most important aspects of implementing the MVVM pattern in WPF and SIlverlight is the ability for the UI layer to bind directly to commands in the ViewModel. The only problem with this: commands were never implemented in Silverlight. This article will walk you through implementing commands in Silverlight. This technique can be used in WPF as well.

What to do About Those Pesky Singletons?

Sat, 02 May 2009 23:16:14 GMT

No matter what your opinion is about singletons (I favor against them in most cases), it is important to understand what you can do when you encounter code that is dependent upon them. Especially when it comes to testing.

Introducing Html Utilities for Silverlight

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 09:24:12 GMT

I have just released an early version of Html Utilties for Silverlight on CodePlex. This article will explain the whats and hows of this library.

My Silverlight Testing Rig

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 11:33:58 GMT

was recently asked by someone on Twitter to describe my setup for writing tests against my Silverlight application. I thought I would write them down here in case others might find this information useful.

Binding to Resources in Silverlight/WPF

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 09:22:15 GMT

Resources in .NET are generated as internal classes which makes them inaccessible to binding. This article shows how to get around that and bind to the resources.

My Silverlight 3 Wish List

Sat, 07 Mar 2009 09:36:28 GMT

Some things I am hoping to see in the next release of Silverlight.

Caliburn Beta is Live

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 04:51:04 GMT

From the post: "Today is a long awaited day for me. Caliburn is now in official Beta. There have been many bug fixes and a ton of new features since the Alpha release last October. We've also been dogfooding it on several projects, one of which is NHProf. I wanted to use this post as an opportunity to summarize Caliburn's current feature set and introduce you to the Line-Of-Business sample provided with the framework, built with Caliburn and Silverlight."

Right-Click in Silverlight 2 -- A Refinement

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 10:06:49 GMT

This is a new take on what many others have already figure out. I have just refined the concept.

Re-Thinking C# Events

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 09:41:55 GMT

When I was learning C#, I was taught a pattern to use when declaring events. That pattern is rather cumbersome. Through the magic of generics and extension methods, this pattern can be generalized to a single line of code. This article explores the new pattern.

Drag and Drop in Silverlight

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 09:58:13 GMT

As of Silverlight 2.0, there is no built-in support for "Drag and Drop". This article provides an encapsulated, generic solution to the problem of "Drag and Drop" in Silverlight.

A fluent C# library for Twitter

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 18:16:10 GMT

This C# library allows you to compose queries to Twitter easily, as well as serialize responses into data classes, make asynchronous calls, and perform caching and URL shortening automatically. It covers 100% of the Twitter API.

Improving the SEO of your blog

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 09:16:02 GMT

Did you know that yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com are actually different sites? Are they both serving the same content? If so, it may be negatively impacting your search engine rankings. Using HTTP 301 redirects, you can combine these synonymous URLs to increase your page ranking.

Testing WCF Apps (Part 2 of 4) -- Mocking out the service

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 09:17:58 GMT

Once you have written tests against your WCF service, you need a strategy for testing the code that uses the service. This article covers a technique for mocking out the WCF service.

Testing WCF Service Apps (1 of 4)

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 09:43:11 GMT

One of the most beautiful things about the WCF framework is the way it was designed to be more testable than ASPX services. When you design your WCF interface, you are mostly just designing an interface with the WCF ServiceContract attributes. The WCF framework uses your interface to determine the actual contract and transport mechanism so you don't have to.

Writing Tests to Catch Memory Leaks in .NET

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:16:02 GMT

Although Microsoft will claim that it is "not possible to have a memory leak in managed code", most seasoned .NET developers will laugh at that statement. It turns out that it is very easy to leak memory -- just keep a referencing object around longer than the referenced object, and you can leak. Here is a way to write tests to catch leaks.

C# Structs

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 00:16:02 GMT

What are the benefit of structs in C#? When can they improve performance and memory use? See examples and benchmarks as well as screens from CLRProfiler and the Visual Studio debugger. Is this is the best struct article in the world? Maybe!

Focusing on Functional

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 13:18:53 GMT

While at Open Spaces at PDC, I got a chance to hear Scott Gu field some questions. One question about parallel programming really made me understand the importance of functional programming. With that, I am promising myself to become more fluent in the functional paradigm.

The Excitement that is C# 4.0

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 19:01:02 GMT

I just got back from the "Future of C#" talk at PDC by Anders Hejlsberg. This was a truly inspiring talk for a geek like me. C# is evolving into a much more dynamic language. I have always been a believer of strong typing. except when I'm not. and I have been wishing for something more dynamic (such as Duck Typing). In C# 4.0, we will be seeing some significant dynamic features.

My Year With TDD

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 16:46:02 GMT

It's been over a year now since I have been developing using TDD (Test Driven Development) as my primary development practice. I wanted to reflect on what it has done for me professionally. In reality, the past year has been great for my professional career in many ways.

Build Your Own Spy Utility

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 09:41:24 GMT

There are a lot of spy utilities out there: Spy++, ManagedSpy, UISpy, etc. They all work OK, but I have found on many occasions that I wanted my spy utility to do X, Y or Z. So, I built my own spy utility. Start with this form, and add any spy functionality that you need to it.

An easy way to test your GUI using NUnit

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 20:35:21 GMT

With this simple technique, functional (or unit) testing from the GUI is very easy. Take control of the problem yourself with this code example, and customize the tests to your application. I have been using this technique for over a year now with great results.