a geek trapped in a cool guy's body » Software

Setting properties for WiX in MSBuild

Jason Kemp — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 03:07:40 +0000

I recently had the pleasurable and painful experience of learning WiX to build a windows installer for a Windows Mobile application. The pain came first: there is quite a learning curve to both WiX and the underlying Windows Installer technology; and the documentation is a little thin on WiX 3, the latest version as I [...]

Keep it DRAFT-y

Jason Kemp — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 01:19:44 +0000

The other day I was grabbing screenshots from an app I’m working on. I noticed a huge visual problem with a a list in the product: in a one-column ListView in Details view, each item’s text was truncated, as though the column’s width was just left to the default of 20 pixels (this is in [...]

The Missing .NET #3: An AutoComplete TextBox in WPF, Part 4 – WPF Flourishes

Jason Kemp — Thu, 15 May 2008 11:00:33 +0000

The .NET framework is huge, but not so huge that it does everything for everyone; there are things that they in Redmond miss or don’t do for whatever reason but is still generally applicable to many developers. So, dear reader, I present to you a new series of posts on stuff I find missing in [...]

© 2008 Jason Kemp. All Rights Reserved. A geek trapped in a cool guy's body

The Missing .NET #3: An AutoComplete TextBox in WPF, Part 4 – WPF Flourishes

The Missing .NET #3: An AutoComplete TextBox in WPF, Part 3 – Control Templates

Jason Kemp — Wed, 14 May 2008 11:00:57 +0000

© 2008 Jason Kemp. All Rights Reserved. A geek trapped in a cool guy's body

The Missing .NET #3: An AutoComplete TextBox in WPF, Part 3 – Control Templates

The Missing .NET #3: An AutoComplete TextBox in WPF, Part 2 – Making it reusable

Jason Kemp — Tue, 13 May 2008 11:00:01 +0000

© 2008 Jason Kemp. All Rights Reserved. A geek trapped in a cool guy's body

The Missing .NET #3: An AutoComplete TextBox in WPF, Part 2 – Making it reusable

The Missing .NET #3: An AutoComplete TextBox in WPF, Part 1 – A rough first draft

Jason Kemp — Mon, 12 May 2008 11:00:56 +0000

The more I use WPF, the more I'm impressed and confounded by it. Impressed because it is really well-designed, thoughtful, and quite rich right out of the gate; I'm confounded by the things it's lacking. I realize they had to ship something sooner than later, but some of the things Microsoft left out seem pretty trivial to implement given what I know about WPF. One of these is an auto-completing TextBox (It was even late to the Windows forms party, but still...). The most famous example is the address ComboBox in the browser. Start typing to see that the computer remembers what you typed previously. Auto-complete is everywhere in the OS, and you can see it on the web in spots too, now: Compose a message in Facebook and you'll see your contact list drop down and filter out as you type.

© 2008 Jason Kemp. All Rights Reserved. A geek trapped in a cool guy's body

The Missing .NET #3: An AutoComplete TextBox in WPF, Part 1 – A rough first draft

Subtext to WordPress: Converting blog engines

Jason Kemp — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 19:44:23 +0000

I think my mom is my only constant reader, but if you used to read jasonkemp.ca when I was writing it more frequently than the last year and a half, you’ll notice a few changes in appearance that only scratch the surface of the changes that I’ve made. I moved hosts; I moved OSes; and [...]

© 2008 Jason Kemp. All Rights Reserved. A geek trapped in a cool guy's body

Subtext to WordPress: Converting blog engines

A Fast Equals() – Remember to Always Measure

Jason Kemp — Wed, 09 May 2007 06:12:46 +0000

For years, I thought I had the one, true answer to Equals() from seeing something in some MSDN article a long, long time ago – like 2002 or 2003. Or maybe it was on Brad’s or Krystof’s blog and freaked out because I wasn’t doing it. Whatever the case, I’d make sure to point out [...]

Using the Command Pattern in Windows Forms clients

Jason Kemp — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

I’ve been doing a lot of research with the Command pattern lately at work. Here’s what I found: You’re doing yourself a disservice – and your team – if you don’t play the hell outta this thing! It’s a very powerful design for non-trivial Windows Forms clients. What’s non-trivial? Anything that uses a menu, toolbar [...]

PowerShell profile folder is different than Monad

Jason Kemp — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

This week, Microsoft announced Monad’s product name, PowerShell, as well as releasing an RC1 release (The very good user guide can be found here). There are quite a few changes that you can read about on their new blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell. While I think Monad is just fine for a name, I like PowerShell, too. It’s [...]