CRM Bulk State Change

I just worked through an unsupported but not unusual requirement to perform a bulk update of status reason from a grid.  The solution is somewhat complex and posed an interesting challenge with several stumbling points.  For this reason, I would like to share it. The client wants to quickly approve a set of records without […]

Dictionarys in XAML

Short and simple post about how to declare and bind to a custom dictionary in Silverlight 4.  I had trouble finding a solid example of this since it has been properly introduced in the full release of Silverlight this past week. Essentially I derived from Dictionary<String,String> and called it CustomDictionary within the application project.  Add […]

Unit testing in Silverlight with Rhino

I try to follow the test driven design approach but I find it very difficult to do when ramping up on new technology.  Having wrapped up the initial release of Reflect (my MVVM core library),  I decided to try my hand at writing unit tests for Silverlight. The first step was to get the Unit […]

MVVM library source code released.

I have released the source code with unit tests (half done) and a demo application on CodePlex. You can find it here: http://refract.codeplex.com/

Composite Silverlight

I’ve been on hiatus for a while working on a windows forms application using Composite Application Block (CAB) and the Model-View-Presenter pattern. This has inspired me in my Silverlight efforts as the modularity of the CAB architecture is enticing. My first attempt involved trying to use Silverlight 3’s navigation application to navigate to pages defined […]

Test Driven Development Introduction Video Released

I have just published a two part video of a presentation I gave to my colleagues, describing Test Driven Development using Visual Studio Team System and Rhino Mocks. http://silverlight.services.live.com/71140/Test%20Driven%20Development%20Part1/video.wmv http://silverlight.services.live.com/71140/Test%20Driven%20Development%20Part2/video.wmv I hope this will inspire more people to adopt this beneficial pattern.

User Group Presentation

So I just presented at the Toronto Silverlight User Group (http://www.torontosilverlight.com/) and Toronto .NET User Group (http://www.torontoug.net/) and thought it would be a good idea to share the material with everyone.  I’d like to thank the user group hosts and all that attended for allowing me to rush through what is clearly much more content […]

Silverlight LOB Architecture Design

<- User Experience for Line of Business     A Silverlight application by its nature is a distributed app with a front-end on the client and a web service to provide connectivity to the data store. Application Diagram In order to decouple dependencies between components, I use dependency injection.  All components consumed by other components […]

User Experience for Line of Business

Background I have long considered HTML to be a hindrance to user experience in business applications. This old “language” was designed for simple hypertext informational pages but patched and bandaged to support the ever-growing expectations of corporate clients. I was very excited to hear of Microsoft’s new Presentation Foundation and have been working toward promoting […]