My second Windows Phone 7 app was approved today and is now available in the Marketplace. Its called MinistryMate, and its meant to be used by Jehovah’s Witnesses to organize and track their return visits and field service reports. I’m so happy to have version 1.0 out there, but I’m not close to finished with it.There are still many, many features I plan to implement in future versions. If you’ve got a Windows Phone, and you’re a Witness, please give it a shot and let me know what you think!…
Jesse Liberty has a great blog post describing the basics of the MVVM pattern and its value in Silverlight and/or WPF development. I’ve been using MVVM for all my new development in the past few months–and even converting old code to use this pattern–for many of the reasons that Jesse lays out, and I found this to be a great tutorial. [adsense_id=”1″]…
My app contains several screens that have content displayed in FlowDocuments, contained in the FlowDocumentPageViewer control. The problem that arose is that when the user changed the Zoom level on one screen, then navigated to another screen, the content on the new screen would be displayed at the default zoom level. And when navigating back to the original screen, the content would be reverted to the default zoom there too. My approach to solving this problem was to save the zoom level in a “preferences” class and set each viewers zoom to the saved value. However, a problem with this…
I’ve been a huge fan of the Firefox browser for several years, and the folks at Mozilla just keep making it better. The latest enhancement I’m taking advantage of is called Mozilla Weave. I just started using it a few days ago, but so far it’s amazing. The stated goal is to “broker rich experiences while increasing user control over their data and personal information.” I haven’t read much detail on what their vision entails, but the first component released for testing certainly lives up to that goal. The first component is a service called Weave…
One of the projects I’m working on has a requirement to send a document over a secure FTP connection. The .NET framework has a built-in class to handle FTP (FTPWebRequest) so that was a good starting point. The documentation for FTPWebRequest does not provide a great deal of detail on securing the communications between the client and the server. There is simply a boolean property named EnableSSL to turn the encryption on or off. Sounded pretty simple, so here’s what I came up with for my upload method: public bool UploadFile(Uri serverUri, string userName, string password, string…
There are many examples on the web of how to print an XPS document, and for the most part they are relatively simple. But when my application needed to do something crazy (like…I don’t know…tell the document which tray to print to), the myriads of how-to’s proved pretty much worthless. In fact, the only useful information I found on the subject was from a post on MSDN forums. This post proved extremely helpful, even containing a c# code sample that I could use almost as-is. But when I got to the point of implementing that code,…
I just uploaded the newest version of my first add-on for the Firefox browser. The add-on is called “Open in IE”. It adds an item to the context menu for links giving you the option to open the link in Internet Explorer. It comes in handy for those few sites that just don’t want to play nice with the best browser out there. You can download the add-on here. [adsense_id=”1″]…