Scott's code and other ponderings...

Kindle 3 – a game changer

Scott Leckie — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 23:14:32 +0000

Well, here I am, two days into Kindle ownership and I'm sold. There is a little bit of clunkiness but, overall, this is the best evidence yet that paper is dead. Actually, and more worrisome as some of my friends work in book publishing/distribution, I can forecast that we will have no need for traditional publishers and bookshops in 5-10 years…

So, what is it? It's a device that is roughly a third the size of an iPad (which my wife owns) that is designed for nothing more than displaying books and documents. The most striking aspect is the e-ink display that really (and, I mean, really!) looks like paper. The first time I was amazed by this was when I opened [...]

How excited am I about the new Kindle?

Scott Leckie — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 00:44:26 +0000

The answer? "Very"!

Oh Dawg, it seems that the magic cutoff for delivery by this week was 0600 on 6th August and I, of course, ordered it mid-afternoon on August 6th, which puts me in the twilight zone of "after 27th August and before some unspoken date in September".

To make matters worse, Amazon delivered (right on schedule!) my £30 Kindle Kover (my tm). So, I spent the day walking round the office, going "oooohhhh feel that… that is EXACTLY the place that my Kindle would occupy, if I had it"

To be fair to my co-workers; if they squinted enough, and could get as excited as I clearly was, and they remembered that "co-worker" = "employee, who I could get rid of at [...]

_CrtDumpMemoryLeaks() and related fun

Scott Leckie — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 00:40:35 +0000

Welcome to the 1990s….

So, I have a new application that is resolutely non-MFC and non-ATL. Why? Because it's a GINA DLL that can be running on a machine going back to early 2001 (not quite the 1990s of the previous line but close enough!) where we have no idea whether it is running on XP SP0, SP1, SP2 or SP3.

This app has a lot of malloc and a lot of new object() calls in it. Are these all cleaning up after themselves?

Surprisingly(!), the C RunTime Library gives us an easy way to check; you can call _CrtDumpMemoryLeaks()

It ain't as easy as that though (obviously). To be effective, you need to bear in mind the following;

_CrtDumpMemoryLeaks() only understands the context of its own [...]

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

Scott Leckie — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 23:57:22 +0000

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 4 and data-bound combobox – the answer

Scott Leckie — Sun, 16 May 2010 00:38:03 +0000

=========================================================================================

Update: 10th August 2010; Sorry, folks, this continues to be as complex before. What follows works ~95% of the time but will occasionally fail because the lookup data source is not available when the main data source is queried.

This really should not be difficult, but it appears that it really is.

I think that the solution is to move to an MVVM model, where the ViewModel presents the primary data source as well as the lookup data sources. Better; it provides dependency linking so that when the lookup lists change, then dependant views are updated.

You may now be thinking "WHAT!? It can't be that complicated, surely?!?!?!?". Well, I thought the same, and it seems that it really is that complex

It's [...]

Complete Silverlight 4 training videos at channel9

Scott Leckie — Sat, 01 May 2010 21:40:15 +0000

Excellent Silverlight 4 training session [...]

FileTreeView source (1.0.0.0)

Scott Leckie — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 00:01:24 +0000

I had promised to post this to codeproject, but I wanted that article to be sooooooooooooooooooooo perfect… I spent days and weeks and months and years writing the article but never got round to finishing it.

In the meantime, a number of people have asked for the source to FileTreeView and, as promised, here it is!

http://www.scottleckie.com/wp-content/uploads/FileTreeView.zip

I'm an open kinda guy so if you have any suggestions or improvements, please add a comment, or email me, and I'll do my best to incorporate [...]

Code 4004 “Unhandled error in silverlight application”

Scott Leckie — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 23:30:11 +0000

Edit; 26th May 2010; This is my most favorite post! Check out related Silverlight posts here…

Just getting started in Silverlight 4 WCF RIA Services (which is astonishing, by the way – check out Brad Abram's walkthrough here) but I was getting stuck at the validation part.

When I exercise the validation (you know, red bits in the browser because you're failing metadata requirements) and SubmitChanges, it was throwing up a horrible error;

An unhandled exception ('Unhandled Error in Silverlight Application

Code: 4004

Category: ManagedRunTimError

Message: System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Client.DomainException: And error occurred while submitting changes…

The only funny bit about this was the typo; "And error occurred"… The dialog is shown here;

OK – I got an exception, let's debug… So, I click [...]

Silverlight 4 Technical Features Overview

Scott Leckie — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 22:23:56 +0000

John Papa and Adam Kinney have posted a "Silverlight 4 Technical Features Overview" on channel9 (15th April 2010). Goes into good detail about all of the new SL 4 features and gives lots of sample code.

I'm hoping to use this to finally figure out databound combo boxes…

Rush over and read / print the entire 75 pages at Channel9

Covers; Business Application Development, Silverlight Toolkit, MS SL 4 Tools for VS2010, WCF RIA Services, Richer UI design, Expression Blend, O-O-B (Sandboxed and Trusted apps), and [...]

“BindingExpression path error” when binding to a POCO

Scott Leckie — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 21:56:29 +0000

I'm passing a POCO to a Child Window, and the very first thing it needs to do is display a couple of properties from that object. So, I rattled off the basic code;

private MachineCredentials machineCreds { get; set; }

private BackupProviderType backupProvider { get; set; }

public RemoteBrowser(MachineCredentials machineCreds, BackupProviderType backupProvider)

{

this.machineCreds = machineCreds;

this.backupProvider = [...]