One of the fantastic new features in WPF is the way many controls can use other controls (and a lot of other things apart from what would usually be regarded as controls) as content. I wanted to try this out, and I created a little sample program. I started with a small WPF application that has a window with a ListBox control in it. Then I created the following class:

public class WowContent: StackPanel {
  public WowContent(params string[] entries) {
    Orientation = Orientation.Ho ...

This is one funny thing I found while fiddling around with WPF, Cider and the other parts from the newest CTP release: every now and then it’s required to rebuild the complete solution. I suppose it’s not meant to be that  way, but I’ve had all kinds of interesting effects. One time there was a weird exception coming up at runtime, telling me that a Button can’t be cast to a ListBox. The other time it was just some initialization code for a control that was apparently being executed, but didn’t …

Session proposals for Developer Developer Developer day 3 are closed and voting has been opened today. Be sure to put your check marks in the right places if you want to see any of the sessions I submitted! By the looks of it there are loads of interesting things to see on the day, so I recommend everybody should definitely take the time to cast his/her vote and of course to be there! …

I have just published this: Transactions and Units of Work

The next version of XPO (eXpress Persistent Objects) from Developer Express has finally been released. A list of new features is here. I’m currently working on a number of technical articles that will soon start to appear in the list on this page - look out for that if you’re into XPO. And if you’re not (yet), be sure to download a demo of the complete suite including XPO from here. …

My installation of Visual Studio 2003 Enterprise Architect doesn’t run through… I tried it twice and there’s a point where the current action is shown as “Removing registry entries” or something very similar to that, and that’s where suddenly some msiexec process starts gobbling up a lot of CPU and never terminates. Killing that process makes the setup process fail, but I don’t get any detailed information about the real issue, probably because the problem isn’t recognized by the MSI system. …

A single pretty important thing to mention, which held me up half an hour or so — for some reason, the installation program for the SDK doesn’t work correctly when used with the mouse. Specifically, the Next button on the first page and the radio buttons to accept the license do their jobs only when used with the keyboard… I hope this will save somebody some time.

DDD day 3 is on June 3rd, 2006, and last time there I promised I would submit a session proposal myself this time. Here are the two proposals I just put in — I hope they’re not so specific that nobody likes them :-)

Refactoring made easy with Refactor!

Refactoring is the process of changing implementation details of methods, classes or other code entities, to promote readability, efficiency and/or performance, without changing the external interface of the code entity. Refactor! is a pro …