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WPF Bindings are pretty straight-forward. However, when you're in the thick of things sometimes you need a cheat sheet to jog your memory. The following cheat sheet (not of my making) has been very useful: http://www.cheat-sheets.org/saved-copy/WpfBinding.pdf Thanks to whomever posted and maintains it over at Cheat-Sheets.org !

I've never had the opportunity to work with the Code First approach in Entity Framework. All my work professionally has been against existing databases. However, I was given the opportunity to create two new applications for another business unit and decided it was time to try Code First. Code First definitely feels strange to me, as I was brought up to design the database first and work from there. Computers are about data, right? So, why wouldn't you start there when building a new application. But, it's always good to try something new and perhaps gain a fresh perspective. Code First isn't something I expect to use much but, heck, why not give it a try? Okay, first off, all those videos on YouTube where people rip through a Code First example in under ten minutes? Bah. In real life, I'm not working against an instance of LocalDb or SqlExpress -- I'm hitting an instance of a full-fledged SQL Server engine on a server somewhere deep in the bowels of the co...

Disconnecting my regular Dell Inspiron from the monitors and such is a real pain in the neck. Plus, I always like having a backup or second computer in case something happens to the primary. My original backup computer, a stout and reliable Gateway (which used to be my primary until I bought the Dell) died in an unfortunate and probably preventable water-related incident. So, I recently bought a low-end or entry-level notebook computer for travel and to use in demos. Overall, it's been a good experience. The only thing I don't like -- and I'm willing to chalk it up to it's-just-new-and-I'll-get-used-to-it -- is Windows 8.1. I really consider Windows 7 to be the best .NET programming environment. It was snappy, everything was a click away or a command line away, and it was all about just getting work done. Windows 8.1, on the other hand, really wants you to use the Charms and their new Start paradigm. Ugh. Don't give me tiles, don't give me fancy animat...

In an earlier post, I discussed why the blockchain is important and you should get familiar with it . More and more articles are starting to pop up, each mentioning some startup or project applying blockchain technology to address an issue . Below are three that caught my eye this week: How One Startup Will Use Blockchain Tech to Disrupt Online Gaming Play, a Chinese/international startup team that plans to disrupt the incumbent online game industry using blockchain tech to remove trust, has recently 'gone public' as a decentralized autonomous company (DAC) on crowdfunding platform DACx.com. In its prospectus, Play claims it offers a third-party verifiable mechanism to ensure true randomness and fairness for gamers by placing the games' logic on a blockchain. This would remove the need for trust in centralized institutions, it says . I like the idea of using the blockchain to verify randomness. Implemented correctly, this approach not only provides untainted rand...

I haven't forgotten to follow up on federated security and WCF. Indeed, it's been quite fun and interesting digging around in it before I do any more write-ups on it. What I thought was going to be a two-part piece on WSFederationHttpBinding will in all likelihood be a four-part piece. WCF: WS-* Federation HTTP Binding (WSFederationHttpBinding), Part 1 Part 1 is an overview and is can be found here . WCF: WS-* Federation HTTP Binding (WSFederationHttpBinding), Part 2 This will cover installing, configuring, and managing a security token service (STS). In the real world, this will probably have already been done by the time you consider WSFederationHttpBinding. (If you have ActiveDirectory, for instance, you're pretty much already done.) But, for the purposes of having something we can play with, we'll need to find, install, configure, and use a simple STS. WCF: WS-* Federation HTTP Binding (WSFederationHttpBinding), Part 3 With part 3 we'll look at connec...

In my previous post concerning weekly Raspberry Pi maintenance , not much was said about keeping the Linux kernel and Raspberry Pi firmware up to date. I finally had some time this week (and found the motivation) to look into the issue. As it turns out (and as expected), the kernel and firmware are Debian packages, so they are indeed checked and updated by apt-get . So, as long as you're running apt-get update and apt-get upgrade or apt-get dist-upgrade , your kernel and firmware will remain current. The versions pulled by apt-get, though, are the current stable releases. Stable releases of the kernel and firmware undergo quite a bit more scrutiny than other packages may. As a result, updates and the new features and optimizations to the kernel and firmware may take longer to get into the stable release than similar changes within other packages. If you're the daring (or trusting) type, then you can run more recent and experimental versions. The easiest way so far to ma...

Work's been crazy lately but in the course of testing a WCF service we have here, I cranked out the typical quick-and-dirty self-hosting console application. A simply addition I made to my usual code is the display of the endpoints on which the service is listening. The result looks like this: The list of service endpoints is useful so you can verify the configuration of the client without having to go back into Visual Studio, find the app.config file, open it, and dig through it until you find the addresses. Here's the code; important pieces are highlighted: using System; using System.ServiceModel; using CNEG.RetailGasSystem.ServiceFacade; namespace StarTesterSelfHost { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { int exitCode = 0; try { ServiceHost serviceHost = new ServiceHost(typeof(StarService)); serviceHost.Open(); Console.WriteLine("Service ho...