So you’ve built up your nice new fancy custom control, and some Dependency Properties for your users to bind there data to, what else could you want? How about validation? Turns out that the control base class is all ready set up for this exact scenario. There is only one step required: Create the Visual states. …

On Wednesday I gave a talk on xaml usage outside of the UI. This post is basically a recap of that talk. There are three useful attributes in the System.Windows.Markup namespace that give you some control over how classes can be used in Xaml, and xaml tools like Expression Blend and Visual Studio. This has an impact …

If you are getting the “Dialogs must be user-initiated.” error in Visual Studio, you are probably calling an OpenFileDialog or SaveFileDialog from the wrong place. The most common ‘wrong place’ seems to actually be the debugger. If are stepping through your code and try to step over a …

Here is my first post on what I will try and turn into a series of WPF/Silverlight differences and how to get around them. First I will begin by talking about DataTemplateSelector. I suppose before I talk about the DataTemplateSelector class, I should mention a little bit about what a Template is. Unless you are new to …

So I really should have posted something sooner, but I’ve been so busy with other things. Anyway, Change should soon be coming, I have a whole backlog of things i need to post about, and I’ve started using Twitter, which should result in this post being tweeted about due to a new plugin (fingers crossed). …

I had someone ask me the other day where he could go to see silverlight in action, what sites are using silverlight, so I did a bit of searching, and found that it’s not that easy to find really. So here is my attempt to create such a list. Feel free to add anything I miss by posting comments. Bing maps I …

Check out the icons for developers, For Windows Phone 7, lookin pretty sharp.

Now I’m not personally a tweeter, but since this was written in silverlight and posted on The Silverlight Team Blog, I thought it was worth checking out. Personally, I think it looks cool, and is a great use of GPS. I did notice that my location is full of FourSquare tweets from workmates, which is pretty neat. …

I just read a really awesome post about software development using the analogy of Chuck Norris and Steven Seagal. Definately worth a read and brings forward some good points about software development. Check it out. http://www.intergen.co.nz/blog/chris-klug/dates/2010/3/software-development-action-hero-style/

 Over the last week, Wellington has been taken over by shop front Mannequin displays. For those of you who missed it, it consisted …

I recently decided to make the leap from Ubuntu and open source MythTV to the professional product, Microsoft’s Windows Media Center. Why you may ask? Well to be honest I moved and lost my Freeview reception, then came to the conclusion that without that I no longer had any real use for the machine. But also I …

Yesterday at the supermarket, Mussels just happened to be on special, and after the last meal of Mussels I had cooked for me turned out so great, I thought I would give them a go. First things first, I had no recipe so performed some quick google magic and stubbled upon this great, simple recipe for Creamy Garlic & …

I have my machine set up to use MPD (Music Player Daemon to play my music, and use the minion Firefox plug-in MPD client to control it, all well and good, no troubles there. I use Pulseaudio(PA) for sound on my Ubuntu server, and configuring this with MPD is no trouble, just search for MPD and Pulseaudio and the …

I’ve just started to experiment with silverlight, well, silverlight 2 to be exact. Its an interesting combination of C# and xml markup, but i like it none-the-less. So far if made a series of buttons that change elements on the screen, nothing special, but am keen to get stuck into something more substantial. …

Well here is the YouTube movie I promised, 6 weeks work to make, and im really proud of it. This was made using Blender for the animation, and GIMP to prepare the stop motion frames. Be sure to keep posted for the second installment of Fred. :)

Just a little backstory to put this in context. I have a dual-boot Vista/Ubuntu machine. I updated my hardware and vista needed to re-register, but my internet connection was down. Fine, I’ll use Ubuntu till my internets back. All is well until I finally reboot into Vista and re-active my licence online, download …

I am just about ready to start becoming a contributing member of YouTube. For the last six weeks I’ve been taking part in a Summer School Paper at my University to develop and make a short 2-5 minute movie. The paper essentially sums itself up as ‘YouTube for credit’ according to one of the …

This weekend I was lucky enough to participate in Global Game Jam 2009 in the Dunedin, New Zealand Team. For those of you who don’t know what Game Jam is, it’s a 48-hour game building competition run in multiple centers around the world simultaneously. Dunedin entered three teams and successfully made 3 …

So I’m making a movie. Yes thats right, I am making a short animated film for a class project with a fellow class mate, that will eventually end up on youtube for every one to enjoy. I don’t want to give too much away, but will say this: it contains stop-motion play dough. Wait and see!

Ive had my mythbox up and running for about a month now, and its working perfectly. Here are a few wee changes i had to make from the default xfce mythbuntu 8.10 I had to make. Mythwelcome I have my mythbox set up to autologin and run with the remote, without a keyboard and mouse. for this reason i needed it to have …