When I first started working with WPF professionally, it wasn’t very long before I realized I needed to change the system theme of WPF to give my users a consistent experience across platforms. Not to mention that Vista’s theme was much improved over XP and even more so over the classic theme. Conceptually, this should be feasible, since WPF has its own rendering engine, as opposed to WinForms relying on GDI. Read more

Last week I interviewed colleague Kalani Thielen, Lab49′s resident expert on programming language theory. We discussed some of the new languages we’ve seen this decade, the recent functional additions to imperative languages, and the role DSLs will play in the future. Read on for the full interview. Read more

I was reading a blog post by my colleague Doug Finke in reference to a “programmer competency matrix” by Sijin Joseph. I took a look at the matrix and it seemed like a set of pretty reasonable benchmarks for a programmer’s growth. My only reservation with the chart was that they claim that you need a certain number of years experience under your belt to be a certain grade of programmer. Here’s Sijin’s criteria:

• Level 0: 1 year
• Level 1: 2-5 years
• Level 2: 6-9 years
• Level 3: 10+ years

To be perfectly honest, I find the entire idea reprehensible. According to this matrix, nobody could be considered an “expert” programmer in C#, since the language has only been around since 2001. I’m not breaking the news to Anders. Ok, maybe that’s a bit of a “gotcha” exception, but I think the entire idea can’t hold water. The problem with the assertion is that it assumes that all years are equal in quality. There’s no comparison between a year in a challenging company on the cutting edge of your technology field working with the leaders in industry and a year making small changes to an enterprise CMS. No offense to the latter group, but it’s just the ugly truth. Read more

The other day I was given the task of converting a particularly poorly designed VisualBrush into a LinearGradientBrush. One of the problems I came across very quickly was the use of semi-transparent colors layered on top of each other, and, of course, I needed a “flattened” color for my GradientStop. Now, I could have used Paint.NET or GIMP or Photoshop to put out a couple layers of colors, set the transparencies and used the color dropper to get the result. Of course, since I’m not a designer, I don’t have any of those things installed on my work computer, so I decided to just find the equation to blend the channels myself. It didn’t take long, and Wikipedia delivered the goods. According to the article, the formula to merge two colors, and , into some output color, , looks like this:

Since a color can be thought of as a three-tuple of its R, G, and B channels, the formula is easily distributed to each of these values.

At this point, I decided I could probably just pull out a calculator and crunch the numbers. But maybe, in about the same time, I could also whip something together, say in PowerShell, to do it for me. Since I’m still learning PowerShell, I figured the learning experience would be worth at least something. Read more

Since .NET 3.0 came out, I’ve been enjoying taking advantage of extension methods and the ability to create my own. The thing I’ve noticed is that a handful of them are useful to almost any application, above and beyond what Microsoft provides in System.Linq. So over the last few days I took the time to gather these methods together, unit test them, and run them through FXCop to make a high-quality package ready to go in any application with a little re-namespacing.

I’ve broken each code sample into independent blocks wherein all necessary dependencies are contained, so you can take any extension method a la carte or you can get everything from the attached zip file. My solution was built in .NET 4.0 in Visual Studio 2010, but everything should work just fine in .NET 3.5 with Visual Studio 2008.

Also included in the zip file are my unit tests, which may help you understand usage of some of the more esoteric extensions, such as ChainGet, and XML comments for your IntelliSense and XML documentation generator.

Edit: The whole solution is now available on github!

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