Just a quick tip: in case you are trying to register your windows phone 7 as a developer phone (so that you can deploy your app on it and debug directly on the device from Visual Studio 2010) and get the "Error communicating with the developer portal 0x64" error you might want to check that the regional settings for the Windows Live ID you're using ......

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It's been so long since I posted on the blog that doing it now makes me a bit feel a bit weird. In my defense, i've been quite busy these past months: I left my previous company, got married, moved to a new country, started work for a cool company here... in this order :) More recently I've been working on a small app for Windows Phone 7 and one of ......

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Although the team's intentions might have been good, the new help system in Visual Studio 2010 is a huge step backwards (more like a cannonball-shot-kind-of-leap really) from the one we all know (and love?) in Visual Studio 2008 and 2005 (and heck, even VS6). Its biggest problem, from my point of view, is the total and complete lack of the Help Index ......

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I'm actually somewhat amazed that there are only 16 downloads (or so CodePlex says) for the 1.0 release of AutoFixture. I had heard about it a while ago, but due to lack of time didn't actually get a chance to try it out until today. Please, PLEASE don't make the same mistake in delaying getting and using it for as long as I did, because frankly, it ......

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Profiling some memory problems in the latest project i worked on we found out something rather disturbing: IF a WPF UserControl/Window uses a DispatcherTimer (declared as a private member in the UserControl's code-behind) AND the event handler for the timer's Tick event is also declared in the UserControl's code-behind AND that UserControl/Window is ......

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Even though I heart about transactional file system support since Vista, I never really tried it. So needing to do it today I looked up ways to use it from the managed world. Turns out it's not so straightforward... In the Vista RC, to use the transactional fs support what you'd have to do is just call some win32 api methods that would signal the file ......

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In case you missed it, a really good whitepaper by Rick Strahl and Michele Leroux Bustamante was published a few days ago on dealing with localization in WPF. At 66 pages long, I found the whitepaper really good, as it takes a hands-on, no-bull approach (in the familiar style of the authors ;) ) on the subject. There is also sample code for download ......

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If you ever need to deploy a WCF service to SharePoint 2007, there's plenty of information about how to do it on the web. Including how to make it work with Integrated Authentication or Forms Authentication. And it's all great and works. However, I had to make the service "run" under the context of a particular web (which was actually a subweb). By ......

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This has probably been covered in some tutorial videos or "silverlight 3 what's new"s, but due to the fact that I spent the better half of an hour googling about ways to do it, I guess also posting it here for reference won't hurt. Problem: when calling a WCF service from Silverlight 2, if the service throws an exception, in Silverlight you get a CommunicationException ......

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If you have a Silverlight 3 Beta 1 DataGrid that, for some reason, is not refreshing when its bound ItemsSource changes, like so... <data:DataGrid ItemsSource="{Binding Path=Parameters}" AutoGenerateColumns="false" IsReadOnly="True" > ...you might want to know that it's a bug in the beta. I actually spent about 2 days on and off on this issue, ......

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Small gotcha today after installing the Silverlight 3 beta "suite" - runtime, visual studio 2008 tools and blend 3 preview. (side note: if you install the Silverlight 3 runtime BEFORE the visual studio 2008 tools, then the tools installation fails because it tries to reinstall the runtime... so either uninstall the runtime or don't install it at all ......

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Today I experienced what appears to be a small WSSF gotcha :) If you have a Data Contract which has a Data Member called Value (for example contract is ParameterInfo, so having a member called Value might make sense), the code that gets generated by WSSF looks like so: Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style ......

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It's been there for a while, but I just found out about it yesterday. There's a free ebook from InfoQ called "Domain Driven Design Quickly", which I think is a great introduction to DDD. It talks about the main concepts of DDD and presents them in a very focused yet easy and enjoyable-to-read way, with little or no actual code in one particular technology. ......

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Last year I had the pleasure of receiving a copy of the book Entity Framework Tutorial by Joydip Kanjilal from Packt Publishing and I recently got the time to read it so I thought I'd share my impressions on it. I have to confess to having great expectations from the book: it was from Packt, the publishers of the excellent Programming Windows Workflow ......

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I just installed .net 3.5 sp1, vs 2008 sp1 and thus got access to the latest version of the entity framework. Since I hadn't played with it before, I decided to try. My scenario was more than simple, bordering on lame: save some data in one table in a sql compact database. So I quickly generated the .edmx using the wizard (which is pretty cool btw) ......

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