This week I was assigned a bug with a single line stack trace: Telerik.Windows.Controls.RadDocking.<>c__DisplayClass1b'::'<DropWindow>b__19   The exception type was of type NullReferenceException. The issue could be reproduced by repeatedly docking and undocking a window in the application for about 30 seconds. The result was an unhandled exception that took down the application. The single line indicated that the exception originated somewhere in Telerik’s RadControls for Silverlight, probably a compi[...]

Software is a product of humans, humans exhibit defects as do their software. Microsoft software is no different. You can report issues on the Microsoft Connect site or to Microsoft Support directly. My recommendation is that if possible you should do both. Silverlight One of the Microsoft frameworks I have been exercising heavily over the last few years is Silverlight. In the process, as with any framework, I have encountered bugs. Several have been minor or easily worked around so have not been reporte[...]

Silverlight 5 brings native window and P/Invoke support for Silverlight desktop apps (elevated trust out-of-browser applications). The Silverlight Window class contains a subset of the properties and methods provided by in the equivalent WPF Window class. That subset of functionality may be enough for many users, and anything else can be implemented with a sprinkling of P/Invoke. Remember that .Net is mostly managed spackle over the Win32 API. With Silverlight 5 you can create your own managed spackle usin[...]

Back in January I built a sample Pacman maze script in F# to use at a Pacman Kata evening with the F#unctional Londoners group. Coincidentally there’s another Coding Kata this Thursday 26th July at Skills Matter. Anyway a couple of weeks ago I started playing with the sample again on the train to and from work, filling in some of the gameplay. You can play the latest version with your cursor keys and 9 lives below: (Right click to ins[...]

You decide what happens in the developer community. You can vote with your feet by choosing which conferences and user group meetings you can turn up at. You can also vote with your mouse and decide which talks you’d like to hear all the way through to the new features you’d like to see in developer products. If you’re a .Net developer there are a lot of ways you can get involved with the community by voting with your feet and choosing which user group meetings you attend. These days you can vote for the [...]