ILoggable

OMFG AppleTV, seriously? Wipe yourself clean, why don't you?

Labels: apple, appleTV, braindead

posted by ether @ 7:08 PM 0 comments

The riddle of the disappearing WPF databinding

Yeah, not really magic at all. A quick look at the Xaml showed that I had left this particular binding as default (i.e. OneWay). And if you have a OneWay binding and manually set the dependency property, the binding gets overwritten and goes away. Switching the binding to Mode=TwoWay restored my sync.

Labels: c#, wpf

posted by ether @ 1:56 PM 0 comments

WPF Custom Panel layout and Dependency Properties

So if you have a Dependency Property on your panel that affects the measure or arrange of its children, make sure it has FrameworkPropertyMetadataOptions.AffectsMeasure and/or FrameworkPropertyMetadataOptions.AffectsArrange set.

Similarily, if your panel has an attached property for its children, whose modification affects how that child is laid out, set FrameworkPropertyMetadataOptions.AffectsParentMeasure and/or FrameworkPropertyMetadataOptions.AffectsParentArrange.

Now layout and arrange are properly invalidated and called for you.

Labels: c#, wpf

posted by ether @ 10:28 PM 0 comments

XP 64, IIS 6 and ASP.NET

Well, it turns out that ASP.NET (even though it shows up in the Properties tabs) is not installed by default and if you go to Web Service Extensions you won't see it there. So next, track down aspnet_regiis which is in the Framework directory and run

aspnet_regiis -i

Labels: asp.net, iis6, xp64

posted by ether @ 9:13 AM 0 comments

Sharing code between Silverlight and .NET

Luckily, with a bit of trickery, this can be accomplished, although it would be nice if Visual Studio could just do this for you. I've done this on two different projects, once creating DTOs that were then serialized using the JSON DataContract serializer and other other time using the normal XmlSerializer.

The basic trick is this: Two separate projects can point at the same source code files (and even the integrated source control providers will play along with this game). However, playing by Visual studio rules you can't just create two projects in the same directory because the wizards treats ProjectName == DirectoryName. Here's how you get around this:

1. Create a new server side Class Library, say Server.Dto.
2. Create a new Silverlight Class Library, say Silverlight.Dto.
3. Clean out that default Class.cs and update both to have the same default namespace Foo.Dto. Your solution should look something like this:
   
4. Now, right-click on Silverlight.Dto and choose Remove
5. Close Visual Studio
6. Rename the Silverlight.Dto/Properties directory to Silverlight.Dto/Silverlight.Properties
7. Copy Silverlight.Properties and Silverlight.Dto.csproj to the Server.Dto directory
8. Now, and this is the tricky bit, open Silverlight.Dto.csproj in some text-editor (notepad works, but don't try to use Visual studio for this) and change the line

   <Compile Include="Properties\AssemblyInfo.cs" />

   to

   <Compile Include="Silverlight.Properties\AssemblyInfo.cs" />

9. Re-open your solution, right-click on the Solution in the Solution Explorer and choose Add -> Existing Project..., browse to Server.Dto and select Silverlight.Dto.csproj
10. Add your first shared class FooDto.cs to Server.Dto (if you add it on the Silverlight side, you need to clean up a bunch of using statements).
11. Select Silverlight.Dto and click the Show All Files button at the top of the panel. You should see FooDto.cs in Silverlight.Dto now
12. Right-click FooDto.cs and choose Include in Project, like this:
    
13. Voila, you now have two assemblies referencing the same code so that you can use the same code on both client and server sides. Just repeat the last couple of steps for every new class you want to share.

I know you could use a Web Service from within Silverlight and would automatically generate you the proxy on the client side. And I'd recommend that if your payload is dynamic. However, if your payload is generated occasionally by a server side program or periodic service, this methods lets you create Dto's, serialized in your favorite manner that can be consumed as static files with WebClient.

Labels: .net, c#, silverlight

posted by ether @ 11:12 PM 0 comments

Epoch DateTime conversion Extension Methods

DateTime utcDateTime = DateTime.FromEpochSeconds(seconds)

DateTime utcDateTime = DateTimeEx.FromEpochSeconds(seconds)

DateTime utcDateTime = 1205003848.DateTimeFromEpochSeconds();

The one thing to be aware of with all these helpers is that it always deals with UTC time, i.e. the DateTime that you convert to epoch time needs to have a DateTimeKind that is not Unspecified. Conversely, the DateTime you get back is UTC and if you want to deal with it with localtime, you need to call ToLocalTime() on it first.

Anyway, here's the class:

using System;

namespace Droog.DateTime
{
  public static class DateTimeEx
  {
    public static DateTime FromEpochMilliseconds(long milliseconds)
    {
      return new DateTime(1970, 1, 1,0,0,0,DateTimeKind.Utc).AddMilliseconds(milliseconds);
    }

    public static DateTime FromEpochSeconds(int seconds)
    {
      return FromEpochMilliseconds((long)seconds * 1000);
    }

    public static DateTime DateTimeFromEpochMilliSeconds(this long milliseconds)
    {
      return FromEpochMilliseconds(milliseconds);
    }

    public static DateTime DateTimeFromEpochSeconds(this int seconds)
    {
      return FromEpochSeconds(seconds);
    }

    public static int ToEpochSeconds(this DateTime dt)
    {
      return (int)(ToEpochMilliseconds(dt)/1000);
    }

    public static long ToEpochMilliseconds(this DateTime dt)
    {
      return (long)(dt.ToUniversalTime() - new DateTime(1970, 1, 1)).TotalMilliseconds;
    }
  }
}

Labels: c#, epoch, Extension method, unix time

posted by ether @ 11:42 AM 0 comments

Synergy

Update: Don't know if this is something i'll find a way around, but apparently logging on to the VPN killed the connectivity between my desktop and mac :(

Update 2: Ok, as simple as going into the Advanced config and telling it what local IP to listen for connections on. All good again

Labels: synergy

posted by ether @ 10:05 PM 0 comments