Boilerplate is any seemingly repetitive code that shows up again and again, like getting and setting instance variables, but seems like it ought to be much simpler. Jon Harrop recently commented on an MSDN article on Functional Programming in C++: (from Figure 8) 60 lines of "functional" C++ in 1 line of F#: type Immutable = {d: float; s: string} http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/… 60 lines is a lot of boilerplate! Here Jon defines a 1line record type to express a simple immutable type. C# [...]

This is a meta post to coincide with posting over 100 articles over 4 years, going back over some the more popular along with some of my own personal favourites. I started blogging regularly back in 2007 on the Applied Games Group blog, here’s a selection from there:  Composing a video game in F# Commercial Users of Functional Programming (CUFP) 2007 F# Custom Exceptions Then in 2008 I started this blog with the motivation of keeping a record of some of the things I’ve learned while improvi[...]

A popup is a window without a standard border that pops up above other controls to display contextual information like a tooltip, context menu or validation error. Silverlight’s browser heritage means it’s built-in popups may appear clipped inside their parent window. When running on the desktop, as an out-of-browser full-trust application, it would be nice to have popups that appear outside of their parent window, as they do in WPF and WinForms, Borderless Silverlight 5’s native window support makes [...]

C# 5 allows you to obtain the method or property of the caller to a method using the CallerMemberName attribute under System.Runtime.CompilerServices in .Net 4.5:using System.ComponentModel; using System.Runtime.CompilerServices; public class ObservableObject : INotifyPropertyChanged { protected void NotifyPropertyChanged([CallerMemberName] string name = null) { var e = PropertyChanged; if (e != null) e(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(name)); } public event PropertyChangedEventHandler[...]

Multiple Window support is new in Silverlight 5: You can display multiple Window instances in trusted, out-of-browser applications. This enables you to create non-modal dialog boxes, tear-off windows, and user-adjustable layouts that can span multiple monitors. Silverlight’s built-in support for Modal Windows is limited to the MessageBox class. MessageBox Silverlight’s MessageBox.Show static method can open a modal dialog box, which is good for error messages, but it looks a bit basic and you can’[...]