Ahhh... the olden days... DialogBox, MessagePumps and the joy of HWNDs

How soon we forget. A few years ago, I weaned myself off of Visual C++ and MFC and toyed (briefly) with ASP.NET

Now, I'm finally getting to grips with C#, .NET and CLR 4.0 and Silverlight.

And, all of a sudden, I'm thrust back to 1996. Why? Because we need to write a GINA (Graphical Identification aNd Authentication) component as part of a password reset application.

So, here we are, with definitely no CLR (which rules out C# and CLR) and recommended against the MFC. So, we're literally back in the days of defining dialog boxes as a set of resource definitions, and copious calls to CreateWindow. And that's before we get to the single threaded message pump that is WndProc.

Couple all of that [...]

Silverlight 3 Navigation – navigating from a UserControl

I’ve been toying with Silverlight over the last couple of weeks and, I have to say, it’s much more complete than ASP.Net ever was (**). Lots of new paradigms to get my head around, of course, but overall it’s a very complete solution for an RIA.

Anyway, to the point of this posting; the new (in Silverlight 3.0) Navigation Framework is great; it allows you to present a common interface and have new pages display in a know part of the browser window, supports browser back/forward, and URL rewrites. See here for more information.

If you are inside a page that is controlled by the framework, then you are able to call on the NavigationService.Navigate method to divert control to a new XAML [...]

“The breakpoint will not currently be hit. No symbols have been loaded for this document.” – VS2008

I’d been hacking around with Sharp Architecture (#Arch)a few months back but haven’t touched it recently. However, the release of 1.0 to coincide with the formal release of ASP.NET MVC 1.0 got me interested again, so I downloaded the latest and greatest to see what’s adoing…

There’s a great community around #Arch and it’s pretty easy to get your head around (assuming you’ve a basic grounding in MVC and NHibernate) and it even comes with a sample/tutorial app based on the ubiquitous NorthWind database. Now, being a cautious sort I figured I’d start by getting the NorthWind sample up and running, as this would prove I had all the dependencies installed and wired up.

All you (should) need to do is restore the [...]