Dispatches from the front lines of the war on gnarly problems.

The Scroll Button Dilemma

To quote StrongBad, "Scroll buttons never looked so good! Scrollin' up and down like you knew they would..." Or, perhaps not.  We recently encountered a problem when trying to implement scroll buttons in Silverlight 2 Beta 2 that would:  1) ... Read post
Bob Cowherd 04 September 2008, 2:12 PM

Don't Fence Me In (I’m just a TextBox)

In Silverlight 2 Beta 2, setting BorderThickness="0" or BorderBrush="Transparent" on a TextBox fails to hide the border around the TextBox.  I couldn't get a TextBox I was building to lose its border: This seemed like a bug to me, ... Read post
Bob Cowherd 04 September 2008, 8:47 AM

Silverlight/WPF: Returning Image Data from a Converter

Recently, when working with a class that implemented IValueConverter, I encountered some behavior I found unintuitive when returning an image URI value from the Convert() method.  My Convert() method was returning a URI string as the Source value for an ... Read post
Bob Cowherd 03 September 2008, 10:55 AM

“Shield” Yourself from Animation Problems in Silverlight Visual State Manager

While working on Vertigo's high definition video player for the Democratic National Convention, our team encountered some challenges with Silverlight 2 Beta 2's Visual State Manager. In this post, I'll discuss how we overcame these challenges, and our ... Read post
Bob Cowherd 02 September 2008, 4:12 PM

Democratic National Convention: A Resounding Success for Vertigo!

Vertigo's DNC team is sitting in the Denver airport right now after an exciting and exhausting week at the Democratic National Convention.  We built the High Definition video website for the convention, and it was a huge success! We had a massive number ... Read post
Bob Cowherd 29 August 2008, 1:59 PM

Direct Disk and Partition Access in Managed Code

A couple times a year, Vertigo supports a computer recycling drive. I happen to have a lot of old hard drives that I really wanted to give away, but not without wiping first. Not knowing how to do direct disk access in Win32, I was about to install an ... Read post
David Bautista 29 August 2008, 11:11 AM

Debugging with .NET Source code support

There are lot of blog posts around how to setup the support in Visual Studio for debugging using the .NET Framework source code (here and here) . There is slight change introduced in Visual studio SP1 that you might overlook when following the setup ... Read post
Petar Vucetin 29 August 2008, 10:43 AM

Entity Framework RTM Installation Experience

If you haven't been paying much attention to the release schedule of the Microsoft ADO.NET Entity Framework, you might not even know that it was finally released with SP1 of Visual Studio 2008. Having stirred up so much controversy among ORM enthusiasts, ... Read post
Tim Lee 28 August 2008, 6:31 PM

ECMAScript Harmony

On August 20 I got a really nice birthday present: ECMAScript Harmony. ECMAScript is the standard definition of JavaScript as defined by the ECMA standards body. For quite some time Adobe, Mozilla, Opera, and Google have been working on ECMAScript 4. This ... Read post
Robert Biggs 26 August 2008, 8:38 AM

Fun Animating Type with Easing

I had some fun the other day animating type with Vx-Anim. Applying different easing functions on different values of simple animations allowed me to create some interesting effects, some resembling the movement of air or liquids. You can play with them ... Read post
Robert Biggs 25 August 2008, 9:48 AM

Vertigo Arrives at the Democratic National Convention!

Over the last couple of months, Vertigo has been building the High Definition, Silverlight-driven video website for the Democratic National Convention.  6 members of our team arrived in Denver yesterday, and we'll be supporting the site throughout the ... Read post
Bob Cowherd 24 August 2008, 1:28 PM

Avoiding Inheritance - Response

Recently, there was an article on avoiding inheritance on the Visual Studio start page news channel. In general, I like the content of the article. I don't think there is any misinformation, but I do think there is some misrepresentation. I believe this ... Read post
Chris Idzerda 21 August 2008, 5:47 PM

What Version of That Version are You Using?

I ran into a real stumper this week. I'd written a WPF application that was running fine on my development machine but would silently crash on my target server. With some help from Petar, I managed to track down the problem and what I found out really ... Read post
Elisabeth Boonin 21 August 2008, 4:02 PM

Finding a control’s position in Silverlight 2.0

Ever found yourself with a need to know a controls position in silverlight 2.0, but weren’t using a canvas layout? You could be implementing a combo box, or a review popup, or a semi-transparent detail panel on a glass pane, and suddenly found that the ... Read post
Jeff Veatch 11 August 2008, 10:26 AM

Live mouse traps

We have some mice running around the house and I bought some live mouse traps to catch the mice and release them where they can live out their happy mouse life. I thought one of the live mouse trap's instructions was kind of odd: "Bla, bla about ... Read post
Ralph Arvesen 11 August 2008, 7:01 AM

JavaScript-based Animation

Enlivening a Page With JavaScript As we discussed in our last blog post, we're going to look at how to implement animation using JavaScript. Back during the dark times of the browser wars, implementing animation was a challenge due to the differences ... Read post
Robert Biggs 06 August 2008, 10:02 AM

GridView-DetailsView Parent-Child

I've seen several master-detail examples using a GridView that controls a DetailsView but no parent-child examples that reverse their roles (i.e., an example using a DetailsView that contains and controls a GridView). I alluded to such a scenario in a ... Read post
Chris Idzerda 01 August 2008, 5:50 PM

Recover files from bad drive with FindNTFS

I have two external Western Digital MyBook drives that are working great… I had two external Western Digital MyBook drives die recently, one around a week ago, and another around 2 months ago. Both drives were not used very much (powered off most of the ... Read post
Ralph Arvesen 01 August 2008, 8:25 AM