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. Read more »

Posted in .NET, Missing .NET, Software | 3 Comments »

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 [...] Read more »

Posted in Software | 13 Comments »

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 [...] Read more »

Posted in .NET, Software | 2 Comments »

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 [...] Read more »

Posted in .NET, Software | 7 Comments »

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 [...] Read more »

Posted in .NET, Software | 2 Comments »