I Can't Believe That Worked!

Silverlight 2 XAML Binding and Custom / Core Dependency Properties

2008-11-23T18:14:00Z

The basic scenario is as follows: I have done quite a bit of WPF programming in the past (since back when it was WinFx). I feel pretty damn good about the bindings in WPF, and I feel like I have wrapped my head around binding and dependency properties pretty well. So, I thought when I decided to write Silverlight 2 apps rather than straight to the vein, white horse, WPF apps, it would be a very similar feeling. The feeling was abruptly interrupted by the evilness of the ElementName Binding param. For those of you who have spent time writing WPF apps, you will know the joy of binding element properties to each other and having no problems. It's easy to take such things for granted.

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Silver Lining for Windows Azure -- Silverlight 2 Sample Hosted in Azure

2008-11-08T16:00:00Z

I melded an Azure Web Role project and the Silverlight Toolkit sample to give you guys a quick download, so you can play with them together. I hope you like it, and I hope it helps you explore some of the new technology. I call it SilverLining.

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Unique Identifier Flat File Import with SSIS

2008-11-07T16:44:00Z

This morning I found myself wrestling with SSIS to convert a string from a flat file to a unique identifier via a Data Flow inside of an SSIS package. I figured this would be a rather trivial case (the midget was kicking my ass!). I use guids all over for application development and for database keys. They are very useful, and very dependable. Here is a line from my flat file:

61898d4c-3a1b-4736-9a36-eb90a23322e0|:|10/13/2008 11:59:58 PM|:|74afebfe-9523-4977-b5f6-5154b6c91211

Anyone see anything wrong with this? I didn't see anything wrong, outside of the silly |:| delimiter (I don't want to get started on that <rant/> <--- rant with no content!).

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MetaTable Expression Builder for Fetching Any Object Via Collection of Primary Keys

2008-11-04T14:53:00Z

Basically, I wanted to build a method that gets an object from a data context whatever the primary key may look like, and whatever type that object may be. I wrote this code a little while ago when I was exploring the DynamicData libs. I was checking out some of the code in the libs, and noticed a very slick way one of devs was building expressions to grab back a data item based on a single key ID. I thought the idea of building up the expression completely ROCKED, but I wanted to expand it out to include composite primary keys. Below is my implementation of the composite primary key object fetcher. Hopefully, it will make your life a little easier.

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Windows Azure and _NOT_ SQLExpress

2008-11-02T17:37:00Z

I've been very excited recently by the release of Windows Azure, and rest of the Microsoft suite of cloud based services. I downloaded all of the sdk's, signed up for all the invitation tokens I could, and began writing code. The Visual Studio templates for Windows Azure projects makes getting your first Azure project up and running super simple. I did run into one issues with the project templates setting up my first project.

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