The task: Create a custom button that has non-standard visual behavior when you hover over it, and when you click it but which otherwise acts exactly like a button.
The idea was to be able to do this in under an hour. This posting will review one solution.
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I am please, excited and terrified to announce that Yet Another Podcast will be launching on September 20, 2010.
This is not your momma’s podcast.
Here are my guiding principles:
- Do not waste the listener’s time
- This is not radio
- Discuss, don’t interview
- Focus, focus, focus
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This is the third of twelve questions in The Great Silverlight Competency Test – each of which I believe a competent Silverlight Programmer ought to be able to complete within no more than 1 hour.
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On August 23rd I published part 1 of The Great Silverlight Competency Test. The key tasks were to…

…write a Silverlight program mimicking a problem report system, that allows you to go to your db and call up a record by phone number and view and/or edit all of the following fields. Do not implement membership or roles feel free to prepopulate the db with randomized data.
- Full name
- Address
- Email(s)
- Phone(s)
- Date of first contact
- Date of last contact
- Reason for calling (1 of 5 possible)
- Product (1 of 20 possible)
- Computer(s) running on
- Description of problem
The idea was to be able to do this in under an hour. This posting will review one solution.
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This is the second of twelve questions in The Great Silverlight Competency Test – each of which I believe a competent Silverlight Programmer ought to be able to complete within no more than 1 hour. Read more…
There are a number of practices that we engage in –– no, that we cling to, and defend, and teach to others, – that amount to magical thinking, or at best, rational failure.

This is often just fine, no harm done (other than to our self-image as rational geeks) but some of these totemic-rituals are stumbling blocks in our ability to produce reliable software.
From time to time we might want to stop and question our most cherished assumptions to see if we’ve fallen into any of these traps:
- Secrecy and Mystery
- Ancestor Worship
- Apophenia
- Argument From Authority
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This begins The Great Silverlight Competency Test – an entirely arbitrary set of a dozen challenges, each of which I believe a competent Silverlight Programmer ought to be able to complete within no more than 1 hour.
Each of the twelve tests will appear on Monday, a viable solution will be provided 10 days later on the following Wednesday.
The solution I provide will tell you how to self-score your own solution (each on a scale of 0-100), and at the end I’ll try to provide a metric for the entire experience. 25 points for each bug you find in my code!
On the honor system you may post your scores into the book giveaway and I will give one of the top scorers a copy of the book. (Microsoft employees not eligible, void where prohibited, yadda yadda).
Please feel free to help one another by discussing the problem, ideas and questions in the comments for each exercise.
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