Blogs @ IRM

So in my struggling to get a lean and effective way to roll out new versions of an application for two of my clients, I have some more to share with you. I want it to be extremely easy for me to create a new ClickOnce installer for my clients and I have identified three things that I need to solve: The installations will be run from different ...

I have two clients who are outsourcing their PCs and servers and one consequence of that is from now on it will take 3 weeks (plus additional costs) to get a MSI delivered to the clients. This way to far from our fast deliveries that we have today, so I recommended them that we should move on to ClickOnce for distributing the application. This ...

When you are developing both the service and the client it can many times be good to not use the “Add Service Reference” in Visual Studio. Instead the service and data contracts can be defined in a shared class library. There can be many reasons for this, on popping up immediately is that such a solution removes the need to always update the ...

Lately I’ve been using Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) in Windows Forms application with great success. I really like using this pattern because it has made me getting even more code out of the View and into the ViewModel instead. One reason for this I believe, is that the ViewModel has no reference to the View and this forces me to have better ...

I haven't managed to bind the Visible property of Windows Forms controls and getting it to work. I belive that it does not work because the property that I bind to returns false initially and therefor are the control never created, and the data binding of the control is not active if the control is not created (because of optimization). This is ...

We, as developers, must begin to use more asynchronous thinking when we develop applications. Processors don't get any faster, they just gets more cores that can do more work simultaneously, but that is no good for us if we don’t use it. Microsoft is for example working on ParallelFX, which probably will be included in .NET 4.0. There is ...

I run into an issue with grids not showing newly added objects in one of my projects a couple of days ago. We use LINQ to SQL classes and the client is built according to the MVP pattern and what we want to do is of course to add child objects to the collections in the presenter class. The problem with this though is that the newly added object ...

Microsoft have updated their artwork in Visual Studio 2008. I blogged about it when they finally started to ship some quality icons that we could use in our applications and now they have added more new good looking icons. If you haven't found the image library it can be found under Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7.

A common problem is the need of different configurations in development, test and production environments. For example it's very common to have different databases, and therefore its necessary to modify the connectionStrings section when moving from development to test. Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Projects contains a solution for this, but ...

During TechEd Microsoft announced Acropolis, which is a new framework for building more modularized client applications. Acropolis should feel familiar for CAB and Smart Client Software Factory users and there should be a migration strategy. I have downloaded and installed the CTP1, but I haven't even tried the simplest thing with it, so instead ...

You can use policies to affect how the strategies performs their tasks in ObjectBuilder. For example, for the SingletonStrategy to consider any object to be a singleton you need to use the SingletonPolicy. Since policies affect how strategies do their work, it's easier to create more general purpose strategies, that are then informed of the ...

In this post I'm back covering the CreateNew attribute that you can use in a class that is instantiated by ObjectBuilder. Marking a property (or parameter to a method or constructor) with the CreateNew attributes will set that property to an instance of the object. The instance itself will of course be built by the ObjectBuilder too. A great ...

I’ve started to dig a little deeper into PAG:s Composite Application Block (CAB) and one place to start is to check out ObjectBuilder (which is also used by EntLib). ObjectBuilder is an implementation of Dependency Injection, which is a specific name for the pattern “Inversion of Control” (IoC). You can read more about it on Martin Fowlers ...

Each windows forms control now has a property UseCompatibleTextRendering, that determines if GDI+ or GDI is used to draw text. Setting the property to false will make the control use GDI for drawing text which should lock better and localize better. The Application.SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault(bool) method is a utility function that sets the ...

When you design a form it will for sure contain a lot of controls and components that you never will write any code against. You don't want to manipulate them and you don't want to catch any events from them. For this occasions there is a new nice little property on each control and component in the windows forms designer that has the name of ...

Yesterday I wrote about some strange behaviors in the Windows Forms designer. Today I managed to get a little bit more precise about a problem with the designer that I've got (and I believe that yesterdays problems is less frequent now). The forms that I'm working on derives from a base form that I've created. This base form, among other things, ...

I've been working with Visual Studio 2005 each day for a week now and unfortunately I feel that the quality is not as high as we got used to with VS 2002 & 2003. I have had some problems with the Windows Forms Designer (which I by the way love when it's working as it should, very productive). Sometimes when I open a form (and even on forms ...

Now we're talking! For me, at least, this afternoon felt like the PDC was really starting to take off. I found the P&P session to be very interesting, even though it started out bad with a power outage in parts of LA. This time was used for Q&A until the power came back. The afternoon was used to cover topics like designing service interfaces, ...

First day of my first PDC event ever. Even though it's just starting I'm impressed by the organization of this event. Everything works really smoothly. Even the immigration went smoothly yesterday. the only problem is a slight jetlag. A cool detail is that we were the first ones of all the people in the breakfast area. Today I'm attending Billy ...

Here I blogged about setting errors in the data set. In this post I will just show you what it could look like in a windows forms application. (Maybe I should have done this earlier.) In this example I have used the ErrorProvider control. The only steps necessary to get this functionality is to drag the control onto your form, set the DataSource ...