Silverlight Localization
The official Silverlight documentation about localization gives lots of information about working with resource files, but it is kind of scant on how to actually get localized strings to show up in the UI in a reasonable way. For example, an unreasonable way would be to set the text/content …
Unit Testing Silverlight View Models
Being relatively new to Silverlight development, I've not had the good sense to accept conventional wisdom that the Visual Studio unit test framework can't be used to test Silverlight code. For testing view models at least, I've been successfully using Mstest and Rhino Mocks for a few months now.
One …
Cell Phone Service for the Non-Garrulous
I'm a man of few words. Well, vocally anyway. My wife has teased that I must have a fixed daily allotment of spoken words, and on evenings when I'm particularly quiet, I must have used them up already. I'm not sure if she buys the "still waters run deep" explanation …
The Best of PDC 2008
For those of us poor folk who didn't make it to PDC this past fall, Microsoft has been taking the show to us in the form of its MSDN Unleashed series. Rob Bagby, developer evangelist, came to Salt Lake City to present and give updates about new and upcoming technologies …
A Billion Mice
On December 3, 2008, Logitech (my employer) announced that it had shipped its billionth mouse. While I didn't contribute much to that as an employee (I work in a non-mouse division), I have helped as a consumer: I think I personally own four Logitech mice.
As part of the company …
QCon SF 2008 Day 3
Friday was the third and final day of the QCon conference.
On Friday, I spent most of the day in the Domain Driven Design track, hosted by Eric Evans. The first speaker was Tim McCarthy, who has recently written a book on using DDD with …
QCon SF 2008 Day 2
It's another day of industry stand-outs at QCon.
The day started with a keynote from Tim Bray, of XML fame. Tim spoke about the application stack from this perspective:
He mainly focused on the …
QCon SF 2008 Day 1
QCon is a software development conference sponsored by the InfoQ site and software consultancy Trifork. I am in San Francisco attending it, and here is a summary and some thoughts on the first day's sessions I was able to attend.
As much of …
Goodbye Money
The current stock market makes the title generally appropriate, but I'm specifically talking about Microsoft Money here. I used to use Quicken pretty heavily, but I got tired of forced upgrades so I've been using Microsoft Money for a little while. Now I'm happy to be done with both of …
User Stories Are Not Narratives
The "story" in agile development's "user story" is not a narrative in the traditional sense of the word. Many are short on verbs, which is a big hint that something non-narrative is going on. "User story" is shorthand for a set of concepts and principles. The danger with taking a …