faking data in WP7 and other .Net platforms

I needed to fake some data for a WP7 app yesterday and I was about to write a couple of classes when I thought why not check out what's available out there already...There were already a couple of NuGet packages out there but I wanted to try out my forking skills on GitHub :) I had a quick conversation with Ben Smith about faker-cs and producing a NuGet package. Introducing Faker.Net on NuGet, with support for .Net 3.5 SP1, .Net 4.0, Silverlight...

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Coupling and cohesion

I was reading ploeh's blog this morning and it made me think about coupling and cohesion in general. These are import concepts in software development, Wikipedia has great definitions for both here & here. These are often contrasted together but they are different concepts and just because you have low coupling doesn't mean you'll have high cohesion.Using a car analogy the headlight unit for my Audi has tight (high) coupling because it's designed only to be fitted to a particular version. You could say...

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Integrating jasmine into Visual Studio 2010/2011 beta

Following on from my previous post about testing javascript with jasmine. I was interested to explore integration into visual studio 2010 so I could run them along side test written in another language like C#.I found the VS 2010 extension Chutpah (pronounced  'hutz-pah'). This got me up and running with the ability to run test manually and to my surprised it worked by only have the SpecRunner.html file open. I didn't a csproj or sln file containing...

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Playing around with jasmine

I believe like a lot of devs that javascript is going to become more prevalent in a lot if not all areas of application development, whether that be with a server side framework like node.js or client side with frameworks like backbone.js & knockout.js. I've built a couple of sites with backbone and I'm very interested in what Derik Bailey is doing with marionette, but with all my investigations into backbone I haven't as...

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Building a multilingual MVVM app

Last week I built a sample multilingual app in WPF using MVVM for a proof of concept. This was the first time I've built a desktop app which supported different languages at runtime. Previously I've worked on multilingual websites and desktop apps but not ones that support changing the language of the UI dynamically via a UI control like a menu item.The app was pretty simple, a single input field representing a number where the value has to be within...

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Getting NLog working with Azure is as easy as 1, 2, 3...

After getting past my confusion with how to set-up diagnostics for a web sited deployed in Azure, it was actually very easy to get NLog to route all messages to the Azure diagnostics table - WADLogsTable.Firstly you need to configure the Azure role for diagnostics, there seems to be 2 ways to do this either in-code via the OnStart() method or using a config file. Obviously the use of a config file is the preferred way when dealing with...

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Showing a message box from a ViewModel in MVVM

I was doing a code review with a client last week for a WPF app using MVVM and they asked 'How can I show a message from the ViewModel?'. What follows is how I would (and have) solved the problem in the past.When I hear the words 'show a message...' I instantly think you mean show a transient modal message box that requires the user input before continuing 'with something else' - once the user has interacted with the message box it will disappear....

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