Last month (21st of July 2011) I spoke at the Bermuda NET Event “Migrating WinForm applications to WPF/Silverlight”. This has been for me the first NET Event in Bermuda but for sure it will not be the last one. We are planning to have a new event this autumn where we will touch other topics like: ALM, Parallels and more. Thanks to Alessio Bellisomi, the web developer that works in my company, I am able to share with you some nice pictures of the event and three short movie of the event. Unfortunately, for this event, we were not...

Last year in Bermuda we had a new born, a NET community. The community has been created by some locals companies to attract developers, architects and analyst; but also anybody passionate of development. You can check-out the web site here: http://www.dnug.bm/. This month I will have the opportunity to present my two books: Applied WPF in context (APRESS) Build enterprise application with WPF and MVVM (MS PRESS) and to talk about WPF/Silverlight. During this event I will explain what are...

During the last two months I have been away from Bermuda and I didn’t have a lot of time to write or post any news on this blog. In the meantime, I didn’t realize that my new book from APRESS: “Applied WPF 4 in context” has been published so it is time to post some info about it. The cover of the book is following the APRESS new style and it is the following one: The new series “applied in context” of APRESS deliver content by example and practical code, so in this book you...

Note: Starting from the 15th of April 2011 until the 6th of May 2011 I will be off-island. During this period I will not have access to the internet so I will not able to approve you comments or either to read and answer them. You can try to send me an e-mail using the...

After one week that my book about LOB applications has been published I started to receive some additional questions that I am trying to address in this post. First of all I want to thank all the guys and girls that are buying the book and all the people that are providing feedbacks for the book. I really appreciate. I want also to specify that the Microsoft book has not been released as a “Book about MVVM” but more as a “book to discover LOB and layered applications”. I believe that part of the misunderstanding as been caused by...

This post is an update for all the enquires I got about the source code for my MVVM book published few days ago. (Please follow this thread: MVVM book). The book was planned to be published for the first week of April 2011 but it was already published this week due to the high demand we received from the customers. Unfortunately the source code of the demo application is under polishing process in these days and it will be available next week. Please forgive me for this and stay tuned, I will update this post as soon...

(a.k.a. Buy one copy!) Finally I am excited and glad to let you know that my first book: “Building Enterprise Applications with Windows® Presentation Foundation and the Model View ViewModel Pattern” is out and available through the major IT books distributors like: www.amazon.com, kindle, www.oReilly.com and more. Distributors Please forgive me if I am missing some of my distributors but I do not have yet the full list. The book is available through the oReilly website at this address: http://oreilly.com/catalog/0790145309686/ in the following formats: PDF, EBOOK, KINDLE and PAPERBACK (hard copy); of course the hard...

In the previous post we saw how we can implement the state pattern (I know, I didn’t show you the purist way of using the State pattern …) and include in the state execution the flow logic. This technique is fine but … it requires a lot of effort in the implementation and requires a lot of maintenance, plus it has the GAP of forcing us to re-run the CanExecute delegate every time we want to execute a specific action. On the web I have found some solutions that personally didn’t satisfy me at all. I personally believe...

I have been busy for a while writing my two books about MVVM and WPF but I am almost done so be ready to get more posts in the next months. This one is the first of a series that I will write to solve the state pattern issue. Today I want to start to talk about the state pattern, a design pattern used to represent the state of an object and how we can apply this pattern in a normal WPF application. The problem we have is that based on the state of an Order we can...

Hi guys, I am glad to let you know that my Company is hiring two devs. The Company is growing and the IT team has to grow too! Actually I am looking for two Senior Developers that are interested in join our cool team here in Bermuda and may also consider to relocate in the future to the awesome San Francisco, in US. The first period will be in Bermuda than it will be up to you to decide to stay in Bermuda or move to SF. If you believe you are one of them that can...

A lot of things are going here, on my side I am publishing two books about WPF and more in general about MVVM and Prism; on another side someone pretty cool (Karl Shifflett) has just released a new way of delivering tutorials and lessons within the Visual Studio 2010 UI, the tool is called InTheBox. Finally, the team of Patterns and Practices is making progress on Prism and a new drop has been released on Codeplex. In The Box and Feature Builder InTheBox is a new way of delivering mentoring through the UI of Visual Studio 2010. The...

As we saw in the previous post, it’s pretty complicate to create a custom design in WPF to override the default style of the TabControl, but it’s pretty simple to extend the behavior of it. As a senior dev, I usually don’t like to: 1) touch what is already working, 2) reinvent the wheel just to write the same code twice. For that there is the refactoring process, at most! So, let’s start by the requirement we had in the previous post, we need to emulate the VS IDE in our applications, that’s it! We also saw...

The second part of this tutorial is here. Enjoy! One thing that I really hate when I started working on Prism was the fact that the developers didn’t provide a nice tab region adapter. Well, the items adapter provided in Prism fits perfectly with the tab control, but if you use it “as is” it pretty sucks. I am pretty sure that as soon as you will release your first Prism “Visual Studio style” Prism application your manager will ask you for a cook tab like the one below: This is an add-in...

Today we will see the modularity concept of Prism. Probably the best part of it, as it will allow us to build a real plug-and-play application where the main Shell won’t know anything about the modules. Discover and load the module. What does it mean? As we saw in the previous article, we have declared a reference in our Shell for the hello world module. In this way we force the Shell to be compiled including in the shell project a reference to the Hello World module. Fine, but what happen if we want to replace this module...

Update: source code and documentation are now available on CodePlex at this address: http://prismtutorial.codeplex.com/ Today we will build the skeleton of our application using the latest version of Prism, available in this section of MSDN: Prism February 2009. One of the reasons that I didn't write anything concrete until now is the fact that I knew that the new version of Prism was coming this month. The classic Hello World application. As for every tutorial, is always better to start with the classic Hello World in order to understand, step by step, how...

Update: source code and documentation are now available on CodePlex at this address: http://prismtutorial.codeplex.com/ Design of a Rich Interface using WPF. WPF is a very powerful language and allows you to do everything you want. The only problem is that Microsoft didn’t release yet a rich toolkit with all the controls we need and the XAML is not easy to learn. Before starting to build a UI, usually, I follow these 3 fundamental steps. 1. Main layout of my application (MDI, Tab, Ribbon …) 2. Style of my application (Custom,...

Good morning everybody, first of all I want to apologize for my absence in December. I am really sorry but I was ‘trying’ to deliver a component in my office and I was so busy and tired that I didn’t have time for the blog. Let’s start this ‘holiday’ posts with an interesting review of a software architecture book written by two friends of mine: Andrea Salatarello and Dino Esposito. The title is: Microsoft .NET: Architecting Applications for the Enterprise (PRO-Developer) (Paperback) available at Amazon.com for 29.69 USD. Chapters and sections. The book...

Configure your Customer lookup and run it on IIS 7.0 In the previous article we saw how to use WCF (a basic approach) and what we should keep in consideration if we want to use SOA as our repository. Now we need to: Change the WCF service to point to a real database Test the service Build a web site to host our service Host the web site on IIS 7.0 The the final result ...

Update: source code and documentation are now available on CodePlex at this address: http://prismtutorial.codeplex.com/ Starting with WCF. Today we will see how WCF works and what are the best practices we should use in order to keep our application safe and maintainable. WCF startup. I assume that you know already what is WCF and what’s the difference between WCF and the old Web Service technology. If you don’t, this is a nice overview of WCF, and this is a nice overview of the differences from these 2 technologies. The big difference...

Service Oriented Application. Introduction. The first problems I always encounter when I design a scalable, multi-tier application are: Work on a disconnected environment but be able to work with the data previously downloaded. Keep always the data up to date, notify the users when the data changes. Threading and UI performances, do not provide frozen screen when the user requests the data. Synchronization from the database and the disconnected environment. Those are common problems of a complex software and can be solved using...