Perhaps one of the most ambivalent things about putting code on GitHub is that it’s more or less an open project. It’s great that people (including yourself) can continue to work on it, but it seems to lack closure so that you can move on with your life.

So one of the things that I’ve been missing in my BindableBase class is property coercion, a la dependency properties. It’s a pretty smart idea; you can keep values in a valid state without pushing change notification. Unfortunately, there are some problems that crop up pretty quickly in INotifyPropertyChanged based view models. Read more

It’s sad how much controversy there is in doing something as simple as raising property change notification to our subscribers. It seems to me that we should have settled on something by now and moved on to bigger problems, yet, still, I see developers at every level of experience doing it differently.

I want to inform you all that you’re doing it wrong. Read more

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

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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Continued from Part I.

Part II. On the Phone

Sunday evening, January 18, I decided it might be a good idea to brush up on my .NET framework knowledge to prepare for my interview the next morning. Judging by the latter questions of Lab49’s “preliminary screening test,” these guys really didn’t mess around. I pulled off my bookshelf my trusty copy of CLR via C#, which is, in my opinion, the best book you can read if you really want to take your understanding of C# and .NET from “intermediate” to “expert”. C#  Developers: no excuses, read this book cover to cover. As it turns out, my interviewer, Nick, must be a fan of the same book. When he called me that Monday morning, after introducing himself, Nick threw me a couple softballs before turning up the heat. I was queried at length about generics, delegates, anonymous methods, and the garbage collector (among other things), all of which I was more than happy to explicate in the greatest of detail, having refreshed myself on their inner workings the night before. Nick’s attention then turned to the newer .NET 3.5 features, which I had been using for almost two years, and I was more than happy to talk about those, too. I must admit, he stumped me on a concept called “attached behaviors”. I was familiar with attached properties, but it wasn’t until recently that I’ve become fully aware of attached behaviors. I’ll have another article discussing what I learned in the future.

After Nick finished grilling me for information, I had my turn to ask him questions. I seem to remember having a list of things to talk about, but I was suffering from some strange variant of vertigo, so I went with my usual developer talking points. For the record, Nick is one of the nicest guys ever. As I would find out later, Lab49 is composed solely of superb people. You may be thinking that I’m generalizing or hyperbolizing, but in all seriousness, I have yet to find a single bad apple or even mildly distasteful person at Lab49. Every time I think I’ve found one, they prove me wrong. Even the Java guys are top notch, and that’s saying something. In any case, I finished the interview enjoying a discussion of the usual programmer minutiae, talking about podcasts and developer philosophy. I’m not sure if it’s normal for one to feel a sense of camaraderie with his interviewer, but I know I sure did. Read more