Share Chrome web apps with DropBox, use them in Launchy

2010-07-26T12:50:00.001+02:00

Lets see if we can kick this blog back to life a little bit. I have a nasty habit of leaving tabs open for a very long time in my main browser window. I have 12GB of RAM in my main machine, and usually only boot once a month or so (whenever I finally give in and install the critical Windows updates etc), so this isn’t a problem as such. However, I thougth there must be a better way to handle

Scaling images while keeping aspect ratio and max size

2009-03-07T18:11:00.001+01:00

In an application I am writing, I recently came across the need to accept uploaded pictures and scale them to a set size for inclusion in a table. Simple stuff, just a “let’s make all pictures the same size for easier layout” kind of deal. Say the “target” size was 800x600, and given a size originalSize, the function needs to figure out a new size for the image that meets the following demands:

Silverlight vs. FireFox

2009-02-25T11:34:00.001+01:00

After struggling with getting some Silverlight (2.0) apps working in FireFox (v3), I thought I’d post the solutions here so that I can find them easily in the future. The first problem was getting the application to load in the first place. In one of the parameters to the that will represent your application, you pass in a ‘data’ parameter, like this: data="data:application/

Making a dropdownlist in ASP.Net MVC from an enum

2009-01-11T12:58:00.001+01:00

Some times your business objects use a simple enum to indicate something, for instance a status. For one of my projects I have a TaskStatus defined like this: public enum TaskStatus { NotStarted, InProgress, Waiting, Finished, Cancelled } Nothing exciting here. Now I want to turn this into a SelectList that can be used with the Html.DropDownList

You can’t do that in WPF?

2008-12-01T12:56:00.001+01:00

One of the things that virtually everyone talks about whenever they start learning WPF is how amazing the experience is – there are virtually no limits to the amazing stuff you can do. Or put in a different way; The hard becomes easy, the impossible becomes possible. However, one thing I have not found a way to do (and which is apparently not currently possible, according to the answer I got on

WPF ComboBox binding to LINQ to SQL

2008-11-06T12:09:00.002+01:00

This is mostly for my own use – I am senile enough to run into this problem again in the future. Like all controls in WPF, the ComboBox is full of configurability and extensibility. This can get quite hairy quite quickly – and if you set the wrong parameters when you databind to a LINQ to SQL data source, really funky stuff can happen. So here is something that worked for me:

Book impression – Programming WPF

2008-10-19T13:06:00.001+02:00

So, I was a complete newbie when it came to WPF, but because of Sloth and other applications, I was curious about what this was, as I must admit that UI programming in Windows has been a serious annoyance. Perhaps that’s the way it has to be when you come from a background of Amiga programming, with som web stuff thrown in for good measure. I think I can safely say that I now have a pretty good

Collection sorting – when the built-in stuff doesn’t work

2008-08-31T13:09:00.002+02:00

C# and the the .Net framework has a lot of excellent support for collections – no more mucking about creating your own linked list structures, hash tables etc. This means you get easy to use lists of your stuff almost for free, saving you a lot of testing/debugging whenever you make a brain fart during tedious boilerplate coding. The network also has a lot in place for sorting these

Book impression – C# in Depth

2008-08-30T12:19:00.002+02:00

I’m calling this an impression, since I have no idea what kind of stuff I have to put in here to justify calling it a review. The other day I finished reading C# in Depth by Jon Skeet, one of those people with such a deep understanding of how stuff works that you just have to admire them. Small disclaimer; Jon replied to a newsgroup post of mine a few years back and turned out to be a very

Automatically implemented properties and WPF

2008-08-27T11:22:00.001+02:00

This blog hasn’t lived much recently – I’ll try to post a little more, but no promises (since noone reads it anyway). I’ve been looking into Windows Presentation Foundation lately, and it is very fascinating; It opens up a lot of doors for new UI possibilities, but also quite a few new challenges. If you want to display your object model in the “WPF way”, one of the things you have to do is

Sloth v0.1.1 beta released

2008-03-01T14:55:00.001+01:00

Hey "all". So it is time for another beta, this time we're talking about Sloth v0.1.1 - an exciting new version which again has improved a lot of the internal design in Sloth. This means more unit tests for verifying that code changes does not break existing stuff, optimized code, and a cleaner, more maintainable design. This is of course a great benefit as it makes adding new exciting features

Fun with optimalization

2007-09-24T14:49:00.001+02:00

Sloth, being written in/towards the .Net Framework (currently 2.0), is an object oriented application. I try to follow a few general principles on how to do stuff. One of the things I try to avoid is premature optimalization - the idea being that you first get it to work, with unit tests as a backing confidence booster, and THEN you optimize. Just for fun, I thought I would optimize something

Sloth v0.1 works in Windows Vista after all

2007-08-05T18:46:00.001+02:00

Hey. So I was fiddling around a little on my Virtual PC with Vista installed - a strange thing that happened was that when you installed Sloth, it would work. However, if you restarted your machine or otherwise stopped Sloth and restarted it, it would no longer work. No specific error message, just a generic "Well, it just stopped working, see..." thingy. After reading up a bit online (I don't

Sloth v0.1 beta released

2007-06-20T22:45:00.001+02:00

This is the first beta that is announced on this blog - and it is also the first beta that uses the .Net Framework v2.0. All beta testers up to and including v0.0.25 got away with just using .Net 1.1, but now you will all need to upgrade. You can download the .Net 2.0 framework installation here if you don't have it (the Sloth installation will tell you if you need it). Apart from the move to .

Fault finding

2007-06-13T07:30:00.001+02:00

Suddenly, out of the blue, I had a problem. With Windows XP. With Visual Studio 2005. Whatever, really. My system behaved badly. And it did so in a really strange fashion. Here's what happened. I was putting the finishing touches on the Sloth v0.1 beta, and I was going to do a test run. No, not run the unit tests, just run Sloth and check on a tiny bug reported by an alpha tester. I verify that

Simplicity is overrated

2007-06-11T00:13:00.001+02:00

So I have this new thingy in Sloth v0.1 that downloads some images off the net. It's not very advanced at all, it pretty much just fires off a Google Images search and gets the results (i.e. the first 20 or so pictures), puts them in an owner drawn ListBox, and whenever one is clicked (or when the first one is added), the real size image will be put in a PictureBox. Nothing to it, right? Well, I

How to unit test the unit untestable?

2007-06-02T02:32:00.001+02:00

Hey. Isn't it funny how all the unit test propaganda tries to get to you with their really complex examples? This isn't far from the average source code illustration you're presented with: [Test] public void TestAdd() { Assert.AreEqual(3, Add(1, 2)); } public int Add( int one, int two ) { return one + two; }Yeah, ok. I see, the TestAdd() test tries to call the Add method with the

ReSharper 3.0 beta ready for download

2007-06-01T07:49:00.001+02:00

JetBrains have made a beta of their new ReSharper 3.0 availible here. I've only played with it for about a day, but I really like it so far. There are of course about a million keyboard shortcuts to learn, but that's always a sign of quality in my eyes. It's making work in Visual Studio 2005 a breeze. Some of the features I've played with so far include built-in support for running unit tests,

Retro-fitting design, unit tests and coverage

2007-05-30T22:42:00.000+02:00

Blog is back in business, after a good run of dormancy. Or is it? We'll see.A while back, I got caught up in the hype surrounding test driven development. I read a bit about it, and while the whole Agile religion got to be a little too much for my tastes, I've tried to adopt a few of the practices. Of course, I see the point of writing the test first since it would be easy to get a unit test for

Specto Ergo Sum - Sloth Online