Dan Rigby – Software Development Blog

09/15/2009 – Edit: I now have a static page dedicated to these links.

I’m just starting go through my WPF books, so I wanted to capture some useful WPF / Silverlight links that I’ve discovered over the last year.

Windows Client – Winforms and WPF Home. Information, tutorials, links.
http://windowsclient.net/default.aspx

Silverlight Home – Information, tutorials, links.
http://silverlight.net/default.aspx

Web Platform – Microsoft Web Platform Information. Web Platform Installer download.
http://www.microsoft.com/web/default.aspx

Codeplex WPF Home – Portal for accessing the WPF Toolkit and the WPF Futures releases.
http://www.codeplex.com/wpf

WPF Toolkit – Additional Controls, Themes, and Tools for WPF.
http://wpf.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=29117

Silverlight Toolkit – Additional Controls, Themes, and Tools for Silverlight.
http://silverlight.codeplex.com/

Patterns and Practicies: Composite WPF and Silverlight (Prism) – WPF /Silverlight Application Framework and Patterns.
http://compositewpf.codeplex.com/

Caliburn – WPF / Silverlight Application Framework.
http://caliburn.codeplex.com/

Visifire – Free (for GPL’d works) Silverlight and WPF Charting Controls. Has dual licensing model for closed source usage.
http://www.visifire.com/

Kaxaml – Lightweight XAML Editor.
http://www.kaxaml.com/

WebAii – Free Web Application Testing Framework for IE and Firefox. V2 Will support Silverlight.
http://www.artoftest.com/products/webaii.aspx

Ninject – Fast, Lightweight .Net Dependency Injection
http://www.ninject.org/

I’ve been toying with StyleCop more and more as of late and ran into some situations where ReSharper and StyleCop were fighting each other over code formatting issues. Some manual tweaking reduced the problems, but it got me curious. So I did some research and uncovered a wonderful tool, StyleCop for ReSharper.

StyleCop for ReSharper is a ReSharper 4.1 plug-in that allows Microsoft StyleCop to be run as you type, generating real-time syntax highlighting of violations. StyleCop for ReSharper also contains a collection of Quick-Fixes and Code Clean-Up Modules to help you easily fix StyleCop code styling violations.

StyleCop for ReSharper also comes with a ReSharper Code Style Settings File which you can import into ReSharper to make ReSharper’s auto formatting features compliant with StyleCop’s recommendations. If you don’t want to import a whole code style settings file and would rather just tweak some specific formatting settings that are responsible for most of StyleCop’s complaints about ReSharper, I recommend reading these 2 blog posts at Hock Blogs:

• http://www.hockblogs.net/post/2008/10/4-great-Resharper-tips-for-use-with-StyleCop!.aspx
• http://www.hockblogs.net/post/2008/11/Another-set-of-great-Resharper-tips-for-use-with-StyleCop!.aspx

Navigating around the StyleCop for ReSharper project page on CodePlex also turns up a lot of additional useful information:

• List of all the fixes currently in StyleCop for Resharper
• Configuring StyleCop Friendly Code Clean-Up Settings
• Configuring a Company Name for StyleCop File Header
• Configuring Inspection Severity for StyleCop Warnings

All in all, I’m enjoying this ReSharper plug-in. It has taken a lot of the pain out of being compliant with StyleCop’s rules.

I came across two very cool links today that I thought I would save so I could find them later:

• Google AJAX APIs Playground - http://code.google.com/apis/ajax/playground/
  • This page is located on the Google Code website and provides example javascript code and documentation links for what seems to be all of Google’s AJAX web services. It includes an interactive code window that allows you to modify the example code, run it, and see the results in a preview pane. Looks to be exceeding useful as a reference for experimenting with and implementing Google web services.
• Microsoft SDKs - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/dd299405.aspx
  • This page has links to all of Microsoft’s SDK downloads. Azure, Visual Studio, Office, XNA, Mobile, Silverlight, etc. You name, it’s got it.
  • You can find out more information about this new page by reading this blog post from a member of the Windows SDK team.

These links have also been added to the links collection in the right sidebar of this blog for quick access.

While this is not new news, I realized that finding the link to download FxCop 1.36 is still not as straight forward as I’d like it to be (most links are still pointing to the 1.35 on msdn code or the 1.36 Beta 2 release), so I thought I would add the link here so I can find it again, or anyone else for that matter.

• FxCop 1.36 download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9aeaa970-f281-4fb0-aba1-d59d7ed09772&DisplayLang=en
• Whats new in FxCop 1.36 can be found in this post on the MS Visual Studio Code Analysis Team Blog.

For those who haven’t used it before, FxCop is a tool to analyze .NET assemblies based on a set of rules in order to find potential defects or design issues. The tool comes with a lot of very helpful built in analysis rules that are broken out into seperate categories (e.g. Performance, Design, Globalization, etc..). A lot of Continuous Integration tools have the ability to include FxCop analysis as part of a build so that the warnings FxCop generates can be tracked over time (hopefully in the *downward* direction).

And on a somewhat related note, I also wanted to add the download link for StyleCop, which ironically, is easy to find even though I’m pretty sure a lot more people are using FxCop.

• StyleCop 4.3 download: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/sourceanalysis/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx
• Updates and news about StyleCop can be found on the StyleCop Blog.

StyleCop is a tool which analyzes C# source code using a set of rules (much like FxCop) in order to enforce code styling guidelines. It can be used in Continuous Integration projects to verify code style rules are being met. The rule documentation is also available at the link above. I have found reading the rule justifications to be quite educational at times, especially since many of the StyleCop rules run counter to common .NET programming practices that I’ve seen.

Sorry for the long delay between posts, a lot has been going on in my world as of late. Here’s a quick run down of the recent personal events that have kept me busy (and postless):

• I was promoted to “Software Engineer II”.
• I got married (I love you Erika!). The wedding was wonderful. Many thanks to all who were in attendance.
• Spent a week on honeymoon in Seattle, Washington and Vancouver, Canada (4 days and 3 days respectively).

So, enough of the mushy stuff.

This last Saturday was the Jacksonville Code Camp and it was a very nice event despite the last minute change in location due to after effects of Tropical Storm Fay. There were a lot of great sessions and the speakers all did a great job. (I even won a copy of CodeSmith Professional Tools in the raffle… woot!) This was my second year in attendance.

For those in the Jacksonville area, the Jacksonville Developers User Group website can be found at http://www.jaxdug.com/ and contains information on Jacksonville area Developer events. I have agreed to do my first user group talk in October and well be covering what free tools are available to make .Net developers’ lives easier. (I will be posting the slides here on my site afterward.)

VS2008 & .NET 3.5 SP1 Fun!: Service Pack 1 for Microsoft .NET 3.5 and Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2008 have been released! (about a week ago…) Information on the updates included with the service packs can be found here, and for the impatient, you can download the service packs directly from here. If you have trouble with the installation of the service packs, try running the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack Preparation Tool. Microsoft has also released the Framework 3.5 Enhancements Training Kit which has even more information about the new features in the service packs and how to use them (This is in addition to the regular Visual Studio 2008 & .NET 3.5 Training Kit.) Another important release that got lost a little in the hype over .NET 3.5 SP1/VS2008 SP1 is the release of SQL Server 2008. This includes SQL Server 2008 Express Edition which you can grab here for those interested.

Now if that wasn’t enough for one post…. on with the show!

XAMLPad 4.0 has been released and can be downloaded from here. But wait.. what is XAMLPad?:

“XamlPad (xamlpad.exe) is a basic visual editor for Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML). XAMLPad is installed with the SDK and can be found from the start menu at All Programs/Microsoft Windows SDK/Tools/XAMLPad. ”

While you’re downloading XAMLPad, be sure to grab LINQPad if you don’t already have it.

And there’s still more…
NHibernate 2.0 Final has also been released! It can be downloaded here. And while the main NHibernate page doesn’t have the link up yet, the release notes for this release can be found here.

Finally, bringing up the rear on the notable release train is the official release of Microsoft Live Labs Photosynth. If you’re not familiar with Microsoft’s Photosynth technology, Photosynth’s About Page and this CNET Article about the launch should give you a good head start.

My very last news item for today (I promise!) is that Sara Ford has announced the pre-sale of her first book, “Visual Studio Tips: 251 Ways to Improve Your Productivity“. If you’re not familiar with Sara Ford and her blog… then you have a lot of reading to do… Sara has an almost daily piece of information about Visual Studio IDE and its various components. Well worth the read if you can squeeze just one more item into your daily blog diet.

Wooo! Hows that for an “I’m not dead, just busy” post! (-;