The art of simplicity

The airspace problem was one of the most annoying issues when integration a Win 32 component(like WinForms) with WPF. The problem is that each render technology belongs to only one airspace only. So when you place Win32 components in your WPF application they behave as a black hole for input leading to all kind of issues. I blogged about this issue before and even showed a possible workaround . With WPF 4.5 the issue is finally solved! To do this 2 extra properties are added to the HwndHost class(the base class for WindowsFormsHost ): IsRedirected and CompositionMode . IsRedirected: Set this property to true to solve the airspace problem. (It’s not enabled by default.) CompositionMode: Specified how deep the integration should go. It has multiple possible values: None : this is the default behavior and no integration is done: the airspace problems are still here. OutputOnly : The airspace problem are solved but the user (and the input system) can’t interact with the hosted ...

If you don’t have access to the new Storyboarding features in Powerpoint, don’t worry. Andreas Wulf released a free set of Windows 8 Wireframe Templates for Powerpoint . Using these templates, you can quickly put together a Windows 8 app layout and iterate on it. All elements in the set are based upon regular PowerPoint vector shapes, and are fully editable and customizable. The wireframing set is available as a .pptx file (for PowerPoint 2007 or newer) that you can download using the link below: Download Windows 8 Wireframing Set for PowerPoint (.pptx, 0.5 mb) Thanks Andreas! Some screenshots: Example grid page displaying item previews arranged in groups. Example page displaying details for a single group with previews for each item in the group. Example page displaying one item in detail. Example page displaying a list of items and the details for the selected item. Example of a Metro app in snapped view state. Collection of common...

Last week I discovered the Responsive Web Design Testing Tool by Matt Kersley . This tool has been built to help with testing your responsive websites while you design and build them. You can enter your website's URL into the address bar at the top of this page (not your browser's address bar) to test a specific page. The output will be rendered in different resolutions, giving you a quick overview of the design on different resolutions.

I talked about some of the great features of Web Deploy 3 before. But how do you get the new publishing experience in Visual Studio 2010? It took me some to figure out what software should be installed. You’ll need the following component: Web publish 1.1 forVS 2010 The easiest way to get this software is by using the Web Platform Installer. Download it here or open it if you already installed it before. Go to the Products tab and search for Microsoft Web Publish 1.1 for Visual Studio 2010. Click on Add and start the installation by clicking Install. Once the installation has completed, you’ll see the new and improved Web Publishing wizard when you click Publish in a web application.

With every new releases of the Microsoft OS, I’ll have to go through the same pain to get the DB2 providers working. IBM seems not able to release a driver that works out-of-the-box. So what are the hacks this time to get it working? Start with a normal installation of the DB2 client on your system(don’t forget to run as an administrator). The installation will end successfully but  when you try to connect to a DB2 database, you’ll probably get an error similar to this one: “sql1159 initialization error with db2 .net data provider reason code 7”   Go to Start -> Programs -> Visual Studio -> Developer Command Prompt. Open the prompt as an administrator Add the following assemblies to the GAC using gacutil: gacutil /if "C:\Program Files\IBM\SQLLIB\BIN\netf40\IBM.Data.DB2.dll" gacutil /if "C:\Program Files\IBM\SQLLIB\BIN\netf40\IBM.Data.DB2.entity.dll" gacutil /if "C:\Program Files\IBM\SQLLIB\BI...

I talked about the application pool ‘auto-start’ feature before. In IIS 8 it is renamed to Application Initialization module. Activating it allows you to enable the following capabilities: Starting a worker process without waiting for a request (AlwaysRunning) Load the application without waiting for a request (preloadEnabled) Show a loading page while the application is starting To enable these features Set the startMode on the application pool  to AlwaysRunning . <system.applicationHost> <applicationPools> <add name="DefaultAppPool" autoStart="true" startMode="AlwaysRunning" /> </applicationPools> </system.applicationHost> Set preloadEnabled to true on the web application. <system.applicationHost> <sites> <site name="Default Web Site" id="1"> <application path="/"> <virtualDirectory path="/...

Looking for a good book about testing with Visual Studio 2012? Microsoft released the free Testing for Continuous Delivery with Visual Studio 2012 e-book . “This book is aimed at test engineers, managers, developers, and folks interested in understanding the changing world of test. Over the last several years, software testing has changed a great deal. In the past, test plans were on paper, filed away and out of sight. Today they are—or can be with Visual Studio—living documents, as manual and automated tests are integrating into the test workflow supported by the test infrastructure. Today you no longer have to set up physical boxes; instead you can set up and automate virtual environments composed of virtual machines to meet your testing environment needs. With Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server, the pain of dealing with a heterogeneous test infrastructure is reduced, the cost and effectiveness of testing a product is improved, and regression testing becom...