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Slides & Samples from my Visual Studio Live Vegas 2012 talks.
I spoke at Visual Studio Live 2012 last week and, as promised, here are the slides and code samples from my talks. Talk #1: Top 7 Lessons Learned On My First Big Silverlight Project Silverlight is tricky. You’d think it’d be just like writing any other .NET app but there are some things that can…
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Silverlight Coded UI Tests with UserControls & AutomationProperties
Summary: Silverlight Coded UI tests don’t work properly against UserControls unless you specify either AutomationProperties.Name or AutomationProperties.Id on the UserControl. (Thanks to Howie Hilliker @ Microsoft for his help figuring out this problem!) With the release of Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2, we now have the ability to create Coded UI Tests against our…
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VSLive Vegas: Top 7 Lessons From My First Big Silverlight Project
I’m catching up on my blogging today and I’m posting stuff that should have gone up a while ago. A few months back, I did a Silverlight best practices session at VSLive Las Vegas. Top 7 Lessons Learned On My First Big Silverlight Project Silverlight is tricky. You’d think it’d be just like writing any…
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Quick tip: Super slow Silverlight debugging? Check your Internet Explorer (IE) add-ons.
I’ve been having problems debugging my Silverlight applications lately. Everything ran fine as long as I didn’t hit a breakpoint but — WHOA NELLIE! — as soon as I did, I’d have to wait 10+ seconds before I could do anything. And by “anything” I mean, *ANYTHING* on the computer. I couldn’t change windows. I…
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6 Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) Tips for Unit Testing Silverlight, WP7, and WPF
My article for Visual Studio Magazine just went live. “6 Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) Tips: Leverage ViewModel and Unit Test Silverlight and WP7 Apps” Here are the tips: 1. Separate the Model from the ViewModel, no matter what 2. The classes from “Add Service Reference” are not your Models or your ViewModels 3. Separate your ViewModel and…
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Silverlight 4 Coded UI Tests + IE9: “No Silverlight controls were detected.”
I was playing around with the new (well, new-ish) Silverlight 4 Coded UI Tests that came with Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2 this weekend. I trying to create a Coded UI test using the recorder and kept getting the following error: No Silverlight controls were detected. Verify that the application under test is built…
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How do I think about unit testing Silverlight? What’s my process? (Part 1)
My job as a software consultant can be a little vague. Sometimes I’m coaching a team. Sometimes I’m training a company on how to use Team Foundation Server (TFS). Sometimes I’m an architect or developer. The thread that seems to go through all of these different types of work is that I’m almost always evangelizing…
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Silverlight Asynchronous WCF Calls Without Ruining Your Architecture
A while back I wrote a blog post about how Silverlight 4’s asynchronous network calls make a layered client-side architecture difficult. In that post I talk about wanting to have a loosely coupled, testable, n-tier architecture on my Silverlight client application. Basically, I wanted to have a client-side architecture that was nicely layered like Figure…
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My First Windows Phone 7 App Is Live: NPR Listener
The title pretty much says it all. My first Windows Phone 7 (WP7) application was approved and is live on the Zune Marketplace. It’s called NPR Listener and (surprise) it accesses National Public Radio’s (NPR) web service APIs so that you can stream the audio for the stories that they’ve published. It’s free so go…
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An easier way to unit test INotifyPropertyChanged in Silverlight/WPF
If you’re coding your Silverlight or WPF app and you’re using the ViewModel Pattern, you’ve probably heard of the INotifyPropertyChanged interface. INotifyPropertyChange is the glue that allows changes to values in your ViewModel classes to bubble up to your data-bound xaml user interfaces. When a change happens in a ViewModel property, the property raises INotifyPropertyChanged’s…