You’ve heard me preach it before.  Custom Controls Everywhere, damn it!  It’s my mantra, my MO, one of my core beliefs for application development. As I started getting used to XAML, I kept thinking about how I’d implement custom controls everywhere and utilize the pattern in the same way I... [Read More]

I’m finding that I’m using LINQ more and more for simple problems that would otherwise have longwinded solutions.  The brevity that LINQ offers is pretty powerful, and I appreciate that LINQ allows me to express what I want clearly and get the desired result. One example today was when working... [Read More]

I was working in a custom control today that exposes a dependency property of type System.Collections.ObjectModel.ObservableCollection<System.DateTime>.  After typing that type name a few times I decided it was time for a using statement at the top of the file to shorten things up.  But even ObservableCollection<DateTime> is pretty long. I... [Read More]

I had always enjoyed Nine Inch Nails’ music.  But it wasn’t until Kelly explained to me that NIN is really just one guy, Trent Reznor, that I really became a fan.  Frankly, when Kelly told me about this, at first I didn’t quite believe it.  But then I went and... [Read More]

We are in the final stretch of moving into our townhouse in Redmond.  We have to be out of the apartment by Tuesday morning in fact.  One of the tasks that's been on my plate since we bought the townhouse was to adjust the water heater to a manageable temperature,... [Read More]