Paneque's Technology Blog

App is the new black, everyone talks about downloading, buying or selling apps, advertising about them is everywhere. The phone manufacturers have marketplaces and stores where phone users can get get those "apps". We all know the term app is short from application. If this term was coined because was easier or because of a marketing strategy I don't know. But it is catchy, and so we will use it. But to be exact on term, int this case it means "mobile application". Otherwise any program would be an app right? But exactly what is an "app",  really ?  Third-party programs running on mobile is not something new at all, for  more than 10 years we had Java Midlets for almost any kind of cell phone, and I myself programmed for years for the Pocket PC and Windows Mobile, using either eVC, eVB, and later any .NET language like C# or VB.NET by using the .NET Compact Framework (.NET CF). And all those were actually apps . So, if is not new, why the boom...

As a general rule, I always use some kind of source control on all my projects. For the matter of fact I use GIT even when some people might find that weird, being myself a .NET developer .... But hey... GIT is in my opinion the best things out there when it comes to really good team development tools. Then the second part is to use it with people online, for that github.com is pretty good, and the final part is a good add-in for Visual Studio or a shell extension. I use Git-Extensions for all that and so far, except for the little problem I am going to explain here, I have no complains at all. The problem: Git branches are case-sensitive, so you can have "test" and "TEST" as different branches, and it will work fine if you use linux as a client. But when using git-extensions from Windows, and ran into a huge problem, where one of my friends was pushing code and I was not able to see it. She was uploading code to same branch but just with different casing. Is ...

One of the best things about Silverlight is that represents a set of portable functionality that you can expect to run almost anywhere. Its similarity – although reduced – with WPF results in an amazing way to develop rich UIs and logic in Browser-side apps. And then results normal to want to reuse Silverlight code from our own .NET applications. Reusing code from Silverlight assemblies is possible; the referencing process works well because Silverlight is a subset of .NET Framework, so that “by logic” should just work. Of course this is not all happiness, there are lot of limitations, but it will work as long as you keep yourself into the borders of certain assemblies like Mscorlib , System ,System.Core ,System.ComponentModel.Composition and Microsoft.VisualBasic , playing with others might give you mixed results. Now the trick. You SHOULD NOT add the reference to the Silverlight PROJECT. You MUST add the reference to the Silverlight ASSEMBLY. So let’s assume you have a scenario with...

With Windows Communication Foundation it is easy to create any kind of services, of course my opinion could be biased because I am a .net (mainly c#) developer, but I really find hard to believe that someone could disagree with such statement. Of course there is a lot of know-how and trouble for beginners, specially trying to understand that WCF integrates all communication models we know (web, tcp, pipes, message queues) under one uniform paradigm. But there are some moments where you hit a rock in the path; years ago I stumbled upon the following scenario: I had a library “common.dll” that I used from both the client and the service. You might think this is not something you would do too often, and many people would say “that a client must not know anything about the service internals”. Well… that’s true, but this is not that case. It is just a situation where a client shares some business logic with the service. And the problem? Well, there is no problem with that config...

As an asp.net developer, you might find pretty common to have more than one form on a web page, sometimes you decided so, sometimes you just inherited a design and have to make it work. Let's just put the case where we have a form on the master page area, like a “search” or a “subscribe” button, and our inner page is a simple form with some fields to collect user information and submit it back to our site, like the image below. Both forms will cause well-formed postbacks to the server if you click either on the search or the submit button, however if you are typing on a textbox and you hit ENTER, anything could happen. You might have inadvertently submitted form 1 instead of form 2 or vice versa. Changing the default button of the page is simple and will help you if you know which button will be the one to respond to the ENTER key all the time. If you are using ASP.NET Just one line of code and you are done. However, this might not work smoothly across different browsers...

The first thing that we need before blogging in a tech blog, is a way to display well-formatted code, and that means with all the syntax highlighting that our more beloved editors do. You can’t deny, after all, that reading code without colors, is not the same. So I checked a bit online and I managed to show code like this: var total = (from u in ctx.Blogs where u.Name.Contains("Blogger") select u).Count(); if (total > 1) return "I though blogger was the only one"; The best thing about this tool is that supports “brushes” to render a lot of languages, so we can have pieces of code in html, c#, c++, python or whatever we want, the setup is quite easy. I found many entries on internet but finally when to they integration page to really see it working. So it seems we are ready to start blogging with source code!