Vista Battery Saver

As you, probably, notice, I returned to the consulting field. So I started to publish here again. Today, we’ll speak about some quick extension methods which help me to work with Windows Phone. We’ll start from IsolatedStorageFile (frankly, I do not know why they called it “File”). First of all, let’s make a method to [...]

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1. Installation of Windows Phone SDK 8.0 on Windows 7
2. How to build self descriptive web API [part I]

Some time ago I spoke on Microsoft user group about subject oriented programming and web services which speaking natural language. Now, when I have some time, I can explain how to build your web front api to be readable by humans, rather, than by robots. So, let’s start. First of all let’s decide how our [...]

In order to ignite my comeback to the community I decided to start from Windows Phone development. First of all, I downloaded WPSDK 8 and start it installation on my good old Windows 7 x84 machine. What’s the hack? Why it wants me to install Windows 8 with all those tiles on my screen? Digging [...]

Dear readers, After 5 years in Better Place, I left the company for the new challenges. I still cannot disclosure what I’m going to do (but promise, that you’ll hear about it very soon). This also means, that those days I have some time for consulting and community. So, welcome me back and, hopefully, make [...]

Recently I had to go over some code in one of systems. There I’ve found real gems of production code snippets, worth to share with developers community. Note, that most of this code is not “dead code” and perfectly working. READER ADVISORY: Following post contains objectionable code snippets and might not suitable for all individuals. [...]

More than half year ago, I wrote an article about importing RSA private key in PEM format into C# RSACryptoProvider. This code was used by me for a long time until two days ago I got private key which I was unable to import due to “Bad Data” CryptographicException. And here the story begins… First [...]
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1. RSA private key import from PEM format in C#
2. Self installable and runnable service or how to make generic service and console hybrid
3. Video encoder and metadata reading by using Windows Media Foundation

Frankly, I thought that one of basic things in windows development, such as “debagability” and “installability” of services,  were changed for the last 10 years in development environments. However I was disappointed to discover, that nothing actually changed. You still cannot build easy to debug (in command line) service, which is also can be installed [...]
Related posts:

1. RSA private key import from PEM format in C#
2. Video encoder and metadata reading by using Windows Media Foundation

At 1996-1997, together with Internet Explorer 3.0, Microsoft released API to work with media content (for example movies). They used to call it Quartz. This was very convenience set of interfaces and thus was widely used by industry. Now we call it DirectShow. Years passed, but DirectShow remains the same. It worked and worked very [...]


Related posts:

1. RSA private key import from PEM format in C#

First of all, I want to apologies for not writing. From one hand, this is not a good think for me to disappeared from development community horizons, from other hand, I am investing all my time into our better feature, which is good thing. There are too much things were done during last two years. [...]

Yesterday Visual Studio 2010 was released. This is very exiting, however from the moment I played with very first preview versions I had concerns regarding the performance of it code editor. So today I had some time to perform small face-to-face battle between different versions of Visual Studio – 2005, 2008 and 2010 (Sorry, I [...]


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1. TFS licensing model demystification or what should I buy for my company in order not to step on the licensing mine?
2. “Zone of Pain vs. Zone of Uselessness” or code analysis with NDepend
3. Quick IT tip: How to build bootable USB stick

Because of my main job and lack of human resources there, I invest less and less in community. Thus I lost my MVP title. Sorry, guys. Also a ton of management tasks in big company prevents me from actual coding. However I am still able to find some time for doing “real” things such as [...]


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1. Read and use FM radio (or any other USB HID device) from C#
2. Quick Silverlight (and WPF) tip: How to write program without XAML
3. USB FM radio library was published on CodePlex

One of the most common problems in WPF is memory/processor time consumption. Yes, WPF is rather greedy framework. It become even greedier when using unmanaged resources, such as memory files or interop images. To take care on it, you can implement singleton pattern for the application and share only one unmanaged instance among different application [...]


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1. Read and use FM radio (or any other USB HID device) from C#
2. Nifty time savers for WPF development
3. Quick how to: Reduce number of colors programmatically

For the last week most of WPF disciples are discussing how to get rid of hardcoded property name string inside INotifyPropertyChanged implementation and how to keep using automatic properties implementation but keep WPF binding working. The thread was started by Karl Shifflett, who proposed interesting method of using StackFrame for this task. During this thread [...]


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1. Nifty time savers for WPF development
2. Set binding, based on trigger
3. Auto scroll ListBox in WPF

Microsoft loves cumbersome licensing models . This is not because of their evil-heartedness, but because it make them possible to get more from bigger companies and less from smaller. However when you come into the real decision about how many and what kind of licenses you have to purchase, you stuck. Today we’ll try to [...]


Related posts:

1. Making TFS better or what is TITS?
2. Open Source licenses comparison table
3. Programming for Windows 7

As for me, there are only two kinds of projects – hobbyist’s nifty tools and systems (scale may wary). The main difference between those is the easiness of making changes and refactoring. Other words, how many other developers I should persuade to do it just because “In the final analysis, it’s their war” – JFK. [...]


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1. The new version of WPF Performance Profiling Tool is available for download
2. Making TFS better or what is TITS?
3. Issues, you reported were fixed

If you following me on Twitter, you probably know that we’re looking for developers. However those who was in interview here become a little bit shocked. It is not very standard interview for software houses. So how does it works?
Step zero – requirements and open positions
Even before somebody send us his/her resume there are requirements [...]


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1. Brilliant, yet simple technical questions, can be used for work interview
2. Good challenge for good developers
3. Programming for Windows 7

I have not write for a while (if you’re following me on Twitter, you know why). Even so, today it will not be very informative post. This all about my expression about latest builds of Windows 7 and one job proposal. Have a fun.
January 13rd, I expressed rather bad opinion about Windows 7 (beta those [...]


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1. Windows 7 – dry run or why Intel does not like Microsoft
2. Programming for Windows 7
3. Windows 7 beta is available for download

There are some debugger-oriented attributes in .Net, however 70% of developers not even know that they exist and 95% of them has no idea what they doing and how to use it. Today we’ll try to lid light on what those attributes doing and how to achieve the best of using it.
First of all let’s [...]


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1. P/Invoke cheat sheet
2. Visual Studio 2008 new test features
3. Visual Studio snippet designer

First of all, I want to beg your pardon about the frequency of posts last time. I’m completely understaffed and have a ton of things to do for my job. This why, today I’ll just write a quick post about checksum calculation in C#. It might be very useful for any of you, working with [...]


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1. Audio CD operation including CD-Text reading in pure C#
2. To OLE / From OLE color translator in WPF
3. Read and use FM radio (or any other USB HID device) from C#

A couple of weeks ago, Packt publishing asked me to review Gastón C. Hillar book “C# 2008 and 2005 Threaded Programming: Beginner’s Guide”. They sent me a copy of this book and today, I’m ready to write a review for it. But before I’ll start reviewing it, I want to apologize to the publisher and [...]


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1. Petzold’s book with personal dedication has been arrived
2. Parallel programming? Well, it’s all about CPU affinity or how to set processor affinity in WPF
3. Asus R50A UMPC review