Blue Onion Software

Programming Computers

Adventures in MVVM – Generalized Command Behavior Attachments - There are several examples on the web that describe the “Attached Behavior” pattern in Silverlight and WPF.  This pattern works really well for binding commands in the ViewModel to controls in the View.  The problem with this is that for every behavior, there is a LOT of boilerplate code that goes along with it.  Because the DepencencyProperties need to be static, they cannot be easily abstracted into a common class.

Test Driving a WPF application using MVVM and TDD - Advantages of the MVP-like architectures, such as being able to test my UI without actually running the UI, but without the overhead of wiring all that junk up.

Defining Terms » Blog Archive » C#, The Ternary Operator, and Mono - It’s a bit amusing that an open source project supports the spec better than Microsoft itself, but there are probably also cases where it goes the other way.

Rick Byers : AnyCPU Exes are usually more trouble than they're worth - I think we've converged on a consensus that most of the time they're not what you want and so shouldn't be the default in Visual Studio.  I suspect this topic may interest (and even shock) some folks, so I thought I'd share the rationale with you here.

TestDriven.Net 2.23 Beta – Faster! - TestDriven.NET by Jamie Cansdale - If you’re using TestDriven.Net 2.23 on a 64-bit OS, you should find that running tests is almost twice as fast!

NCover - NCover Blog - Code Coverage for .NET Developers - Great new features to NCover and a ton of improvements and bug fixes that make NCover Explorer simpler to use and easier to configure.

Using your Personal Computer

Get Behind the Shield! Hotspot Shield by AnchorFree – If you surf on free Wi-Fi  at coffee shops and hotels, this tool can protect your activities by creating a VPN to their site and then out to the Internet.

Immunet releases free cloud-powered antivirus for Windows - They're not the first company to push out a cloud-based Windows antivirus product, but Immunet is hoping to make a splash with their newly-released beta ofImmunet Protect.

How to Block Ads in Google Chrome - Proxy – Lifehacker - In short, you use the free Privoxy web proxy software, which blocks web sites serving ads, and configure Google Chrome to use the proxy. Here's how to do it.

Science and the Environment

Newly Discovered Carnivorous Jungle Plant Gobbles Rats Whole | Popular Science - Scientists recently discovered this new species of pitcher plant on the verdant face of Mount Victoria in the Philippines. (Warning, gross picture of Rat being consumed)

IBM Scientists Harness DNA Self-Assembly to Build Faster, Cheaper Chips | Popular Science - The next generation of semiconductor technology could take a page from nature’s book, letting DNA do the heavy lifting. Straight-laced researchers at IBM, afraid of breaking Moore’s Law, have figured out a way to combine lithographic patterning and DNA self-assembly to create semiconductors that built themselves into chips that are smaller, more efficient and less expensive than anything made conventionally.

Water Quality Improves After Lawn Fertilizer Ban, Study Shows - Do the ordinances really help reduce phosphorus pollution?

DNA Evidence Can Be Fabricated, Scientists Show - NYTimes.com - Scientists in Israel have demonstrated that it is possible to fabricate DNA evidence, undermining the credibility of what has been considered the gold standard of proof in criminal cases.

Tiny Flares Responsible for Outsized Heat of Sun’s Atmosphere - The mystery of why temperatures in the solar corona, the sun’s outer atmosphere, soar to several million degrees Kelvin (K) —much hotter than temperatures nearer the sun’s surface—has puzzled scientists for decades.

On the Web

Repower America - Just launched the Repower America Hotline. It's a number you can call anytime to leave a message for your Senators, and we'll make sure it gets to their offices. Just call 1-877-9-REPOWER. Enter your zip code when prompted so we know which Senators should receive your message.

Feel The Need The Need For Speed With Google Earth’s Flight Simulator - Google Earth has a pretty nifty feature called the “Flight Simulator.” The flight simulator basically allows for users to take control of a plane as they navigate around locations, mountains, oceans, and landmarks of their choosing.

Gmail Nudges Past AOL Email In The U.S. To Take No. 3 Spot - In July, Gmail nudged past AOL Email with 37 million unique visitors compared to 36.4 million for AOL.

Stuff I just Dig

John Scalzi's Guide to the Most Epic FAILs in Star Wars Design - Star Wars has a badly-designed universe; so poorly-designed, in fact, that one can say that a significant goal of all those Star Wars novels is to rationalize and mitigate the bad design choices of the movies. Need examples? Here's ten.

Hubble's Deepest Look Into Space, Now Rendered In 3D | Popular Science - Over a period of four months in late 2003, the Hubble telescope assembled an image that represents the deepest look into space every composed. Here's what it looks like in 3D.

Pick of the Week

Input Director – Control more than one computer with a single mouse and keyboard. If you have multiple systems in your cube like I do, this is a real time saver.

Programming Computers

ZipStorer - A Pure C# Class to Store Files in Zip - Small C# class to store and extract uncompressed and deflated files in new or existing Zip files, without any external library. Check out my SimpleZip as an even more lightweight (and less featured) alternative.

Windows 7 Training Kit for Developers – Comes complete with 2 packages of Kool-Aid.

CLR Team Blog : Improvements to Interop Marshaling in V4: IL Stubs Everywhere - Faster interop marshaling: the more complex the signature the greater the speed-up.

Text Effects in Silverlight - It's So Simple - SvLite Effects library providers text effect control to create text animations in Silverlight. The control is easy to use and can be configured in multiple ways to create different text animations.

Expression Trees, Take Two – Introducing System.Linq.Expressions v4.0 - NET 4.0 introduces statement trees as an extension to the existing expression tree API.

Daniel Cazzulino's Blog : Linq to Mocks is finally born - . What the next version of Moq (early beta readily available now) allows you to express in a very declarative way essentially is: “from the universe of mocks, get me those that behave like this.”

Using your Personal Computer

Windows 7: How low can you go? - Do you really need a computer with the minimum specs as outlined by Microsoft?

You must obey: Unwritten laws of technology - PC World – Humor.

Science and the Environment

BBC - Earth News - Giant 'meat-eating' plant found - The plant is among the largest of all carnivorous plant species and produces spectacular traps as large as other species which catch not only insects, but also rodents as large as rats.

Chevy Volt to pull 230 mpg in city | Green Tech - GM is confident that the combined highway and city mileage for the Chevy Volt, due to go on sale in late 2010, will be in the triple digits. Expressed in electrical terms, the performance will be 25 kilowatt-hours for 100 miles.

Scientists Launch The First Standard Graphical Notation For Biology - Visual language should make it easier to exchange complex information, so that biological models are depicted more accurately, consistently, and in a more readily understandable way.

On the Web

Why Apple and Google Rule - A webcomic by Eric Burke that is sad but true. I posted this one outside my cube at work.

Microsoft’s SharePoint Thrives in the Recession - Bits Blog - SharePoint broke the $1 billion revenue mark last year and continued to rise past that total this year, making it the hottest selling server-side product ever for the company.

Coding Horror: COBOL: Everywhere and Nowhere - Most impressive perhaps, is that 200 times as many COBOL transactions take place each day than Google searches - a figure which puts the influence of Web 2.0 into stark perspective.

HootSuite Organizes Your Twitter Activity in Your Browser - Social Networking - You can also have HootSuite schedule a tweet to be sent later and automatically send tweets from your blog feed.

RockMelt 101: A Quick Guide to the Mysterious Browser - PC World - Have you met RockMelt? Neither have most people, it seems -- but the Web is definitely a-buzzin' with word of the mysterious new browser.

Stuff I just Dig

Toolmonger » Blog Archive » Conductive Epoxy - Soldering isn’t your only option for an electrically conductive connection. MG Chemicals sells one alternative — the two-part silver conductive epoxy.

Orbis Scooter Concept Shrinks Your Segway | Popular Science - As much as there is to like about the Segway, it’s not the most practical option out there – it’s bulky and expensive. The Orbis Urban Mobility Vehicle, on the other hand, could do a lot to make scooting a smidge more plausible. The Orbis’ polycarboate-and-aluminum body weighs 25 pounds to the Segway’s 105. The scooter rides around 13mph on its one wheel.

Guitar Legend And Innovator Les Paul Dies : NPR – I remember endless hours of jamming in my friend’s basement with his “Star Burst” finish Les Paul guitar.

16-Megapixel Infrared Satellite Camera Can Monitor An Entire Continent In a Single Shot | Popular Science - Now, while that may sound very 1984 to the tin-foil hat crowd, the sensor is primarily designed for missile detection and guidance.

Pick of the Week

bxAutoZip – If you use Outlook (or in my case you are forced to use Outlook, yuch!), this extension will automatically convert your attachments into a zip file. Very handy.

It’s a little weird, but I just installed Windows 7 and, well, er, um, I’m done.

Not that I didn’t run into an issue, but in retrospect, I’m sort of glad it happened.

The good, I installed Windows 7 in less than 20 minutes. The setup was silly stupid easy and the feedback during the install was “just right”.

The bad, I was “forced” to do a clean install. Apparently, in a weak moment, several years ago, I installed and ran Perfect Disk from Raxco for a bit. Well, Perfect Disk modifies the NTFS partition in such a way that Windows 7 thinks the disk is corrupted. Now you might argue that the Windows 7 installer should account for this, but in this case, I hold Raxco at fault. No F-ing way should a disk defragger modify my computer in such a way that it still has ramifications years later – After it is uninstalled. Bad, bad bad…

In retrospect, I’m not sure why I didn’t just do a clean install from the beginning. It’s not like I don’t have stuff backed up. I’m I bit of a backup freak. Still, I hate having to rely on them, even if it’s only for a few hours.

As for Windows 7, it just works. It’s sounds like  bad parody of an Apple commercial but then again, it applies. I’m writing this on three old hardware (this November), on Windows 7, with Windows Live Writer (just installed).

I’ve read a lot of press about how much faster Windows 7 is compared to Vista. I don’t perceive that’s I  it’s faster, but I can certainly say it’s not slower. And this is on somewhat older hardware.

I’m sure I’ll hit some “issues” as time goes by but for now, Microsoft gets a big, “Pat on the back”, for a job well done.

I’ve resisted the release candidates, the betas and the hype, but as of 1 hour into it, I’m thinking I should have jumped sooner.

Prepping to install Windows 7 while writing this. Multitasking, not just for computers…

Programming Computers

Vault 5.0 Released - SourceGear's Version Control and Source Control Software - Having used and enjoyed Vault up until I started using Subversion, I wanted to mention that SourceGear just released Vault 5.0 and Fortress 2.0 if you are looking for version control and possibly application lifecycle management for your teams. Subversion, Git, and TFS are not for everyone, so it is good to know that other version control and source control solutions exist.

Mastering CSS, Part 1: Styling Design Elements | CSS | Smashing Magazine - CSS is one of the most important building blocks of modern web design. Standards demand the use of CSS for formatting and styling pages, and with good reason. It’s lighter-weight and capable of much more than older methods like tables.

My Technobabble : The spirit of MVVM (ViewModel), it’s not a code counting exercise - Lately there is a lot of momentum and interesting conversation around Model-View-View-Model. There’s several good resources out there that discuss the basics of the pattern, who the actors are that are involved and what role the play. I’ll let those speak for themselves, including John Gossman’s great posthere, Martin Fowler’s post on the more general PresentationModel pattern and more recently Josh Smith’s MSDN article, Rob Eisenberg’s new series, and Ward Bell’s posts which touch on some of the deeper complexities involved.

Google Releases “Simple” Programming Language - Google has released a simple programming language called, appropriately enough, “Simple.”

Silverlight 3 Flip TriggerAction – It’s just so cool. I have to figure out how to integrate this into our app at work.

Using your Personal Computer

Switcher for Windows Vista - Switcher puts you in control of your windows. See all your windows on one screen, quickly search through them, even decorate them with your favorite colors and fonts.

Keep an eye on your system's vitals with Yet Another Process Monitor – Nice, but I’m sticking with SysInternals.

Printee: make any web page printer friendly with this Internet Explorer extension | freewaregenius.com - Printee is a free Internet Explorer extension designed to remove elements of a webpage to create a perfectly printable page without ads or extra information.

Google Chrome Theme Gallery Open for Business, 30 New Themes Await - Google Chrome – Lifehacker - While themes aren't exactly all about productivity, strictly speaking, it never hurts to spice things up a little bit and make your workspace a little friendlier. To that end, Google Chrome's new Theme gallery adds a little spice to your Chrome installation.

Science and the Environment

By the Numbers: Energy-efficiency investments would pay huge dividends, says McKinsey & Company report - As the report details, an initial investment of $520 billion would be needed to reduce annual energy consumption by 23 percent by 2020, which translates into $1.2 trillion in savings and an end-use reduction of 9.1 quadrillion British thermal units.

Test Drive: Nissan’s Leaf, The Electric Car’s First Shot at the Mainstream | Popular Science - Nissan is going to manufacture the Leaf in the thousands (maybe the hundreds of thousands). We took the first publicly drivable model for a spin.

From Graphene To Graphane, Now The Possibilities Are Endless - Ever since graphene was discovered in 2004, this one-atom thick, super strong, carbon-based electrical conductor has been billed as a "wonder material" that some physicists think could one day replace silicon in computer chips.

Scientist at Work - Stephen Kurtin - Making Eyeglasses With a Mechanically Adjustable Focus - NYTimes.com - glass element that is part of the mechanically adjustable eyeglasses he created.

eSolar plugs solar plant into California grid | Green Tech - CNET News - eSolar is doing what so many other solar start-up wish they were already doing: feeding electricity into the grid.

A Cocktail of Diesel and Gasoline Runs 20 Percent More Efficiently Than Either One Alone | Popular Science - A team of gearheads at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed an engine that can handle a blend of gasoline and diesel fuel. It outputs low emissions, and offers up to 20 percent greater fuel efficiency.

New Technology Could Drill Deeper Into the Earth Than Ever Before | Popular Science - An adaptation of oil drills for deep water could bring scientists closer to the goal of drilling all the way through the earth's crust to the wonders beneath.

All-in-One Nanoparticle: A 'Swiss Army Knife' For Nanomedicine - Nanoparticles are being developed to perform a wide range of medical uses -- imaging tumors, carrying drugs, delivering pulses of heat. Rather than settling for just one of these, researchers at the University of Washington have combined two nanoparticles in one tiny package.

On the Web

Sony PRS300/PRS600 available for pre-order - MobileRead Forums - The Sony PRS-300 is priced at $199. Take that Amazon!

Microsoft Releases Windows 7 Upgrade Chart - Windows – Lifehacker -  Windows 7 available to their MSDN and TechNet service subscribers, and to help prepare you for the impending release, the company has also produced an official upgrade chart. How about one version?

Stuff I just Dig

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics: Toyota’s running humanoid robot - The robot takes a step every 340ms and has no contact with the ground for 100ms of that. Notice in the video how the robot remains balanced even after pushed by the human. Note: Not Honda, but Toyota. Check out the video!

The Wink Glasses: As good as caffeine? | Health Tech - CNET News - The USB-charged Wink Glasses are designed to keep you awake by making you refocus.

Teague Unveils a Glowy New Bike Concept: The Pulse | Popular Science – I so want one of these…

Pick of the Week

Comment Reflower – I’m not one for comments in source code. Most of the time they’re useless or worse yet, wrong. However, there are times when you have to document some assumption or use case. This tool makes it easy to wrap and format comments into something a bit more presentable.