I’ve just launched a new website for the Calcium project. It includes a video on how to use the new version of the Calcium SDK, which I’ve also just released. I’m pretty excited about this one. The new version includes an installer that makes working with Calcium much easier, and a bunch of API refinements.

Introduction Today I was reading an excellent post by my fellow Disciple Laurent Bugnion, which led on to a short discussion about performing actions after a user attempts to close a browser window. It got me thinking about the capability to dispatch a web service call in Silverlight just after a user attempts to close the browser window or navigate elsewhere. I have been asked the question before, yet before now, have not attempted to...

Nicolas Dorier and I have posted a new article on verifying type string names in app.config files using MSBuild. The App.Config Type verifier is a custom MSBuild task. It examines your app.config file at compile time and verifies that string type names are resolvable. To demonstrate, let’s take a look at a simple example. The following is an excerpt from an app.config file. <configuration> <configSections> <section name="name1" type="Foo.BahType, Foo"/> </configSections> </configuration> Here we have a...

Introduction Since my initial experimentation with generating project metadata data using T4 (Text Template Transformation Toolkit), there have been several obvious opportunities to expand its scope. One such opportunity has been to use T4 to generate static properties representing XAML keys. This serves to reduce the reliance on string literals when referencing resources. I have subsequently augmented my MetadataGeneration.tt template to do just that. x:Key Property Generation To demonstrate, I have updated the sample application...

This article is an elaboration of my previous experimentation with T4 (Text Template Transformation Toolkit) and describes how to use T4, which is built into Visual Studio 2008, and the Visual Studio automation object model API, to generate member and type information for an entire project. Generated metadata can then be applied to such things as dispensing with string literals in XAML binding expressions and overcoming the INotifyPropertyChanged property name string code smell, or indeed...