Great SL Competency Test Part 1 (Answer)

Posted on September 1, 2010 by Jesse Liberty

On August 23rd I published part 1 of The Great Silverlight Competency Test.  The key tasks were to…

Running Project

…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. 

Continue reading →

Posted in Community, Data, Essentials, Patterns & Skills | Tagged , | 2 Comments

A Program I Want

Posted on August 31, 2010 by Jesse Liberty

I want a program that I can say “Watch what I do to this file” (change properties, unblock, etc.) and then be able to say “now do this for all the other files in the directory.”   Can’t be too hard to write, can it?  🙂

Posted in Opinion | 7 Comments

The Great Silverlight Competency Test – 2

Posted on August 30, 2010 by Jesse Liberty

businesswoman pressing a button 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. Continue reading →

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Tag-based Feeds

Posted on August 29, 2010 by Jesse Liberty

tag_istock In this posting I will show how to create Feedburner feeds based on queries in Word Press using the  Feedburner plugins.

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Posted in Community, News, Tools and Utilities | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Get Organized

Posted on August 29, 2010 by Jesse Liberty

BusyMan I have ADD, (“oh look, something shiny!”) which means getting organized is a challenge, and making sure I can put my hands on any given piece of information a huge life-long effort, but technology has helped a lot, and after trying, discarding, returning to and otherwise manipulating every conceivable combination, I have a system that works so well i thought I’d share it.

Continue reading →

Posted in Community, Opinion, Tools and Utilities | Tagged | 9 Comments

Migrated from 32 bit to 64 bit – Wow!

Posted on August 29, 2010 by Jesse Liberty

Made a quick and dirty video about it…  Be sure to watch in full screen.

Posted in Opinion, Tools and Utilities | Tagged , | 2 Comments

i2W: An iPhone Developer’s First Windows Phone 7 Application

Posted on August 27, 2010 by Jesse Liberty

i2WLogo2

Go to first Tutorial

In this tutorial we will build a meaningful, and nontrivial Windows phone 7 application. This will give us the opportunity to explore layout controls, interactive controls, Visual Studio and a good bit more.

[Updated 8/30/2010]

Continue reading →

Posted in iPhoneToWP7, Mini-Tutorial, Tools and Utilities, WindowsPhone | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

The Open Source Project Spec: With Reference To Me

Posted on August 26, 2010 by Jesse Liberty

http://WithReferenceTo.Me

stand out from the crowd

The application that we’ll be developing in the next phase of the HVP will allow the user to record and then look up everything that happened from day to day.

Continue reading →

Posted in Community, HyperVideo Player, WindowsPhone | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Programmer Superstitions

Posted on August 26, 2010 by Jesse Liberty

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.

Green poison

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

Continue reading →

Posted in Essentials, Opinion, Patterns & Skills | Tagged , | 16 Comments

Yeti: A Review

Posted on August 25, 2010 by Jesse Liberty

A brief review of the Yeti…

Comments welcome.

Posted in Opinion, Tools and Utilities | Tagged | Comments Off on Yeti: A Review

iPhone to Windows Phone 7

Posted on August 23, 2010 by Jesse Liberty

i2WLogo2

This is the zeroth (introduction) in a series of Tutorials aimed at iPhone developers who want to learn how to port existing applications or create new applications in Windows Phone 7.

About these Tutorials

The series will consist of brief tutorials, with a focus on the minimum you need to know to add Windows Phone 7 development to your skill set.

Hardware and Software Requirements


WindowsPhone Hardware

For all practical purposes, your choices come down to using a PC or a Mac with Bootcamp and…

  • 3 GB of disk space
  • 2GB of RAM
  • A DirectX 10 capable graphics card with the WDDM 1.1 driver.
Note: you cannot run the Windows Phone 7 (WP7) Emulator under a virtual machine such as Parallels or Fusion

Software

Continue reading →

Posted in iPhoneToWP7, Mini-Tutorial, WindowsPhone | Tagged , , | 11 Comments

The Great Silverlight Competency Test – Part 1

Posted on August 23, 2010 by Jesse Liberty

iStock_ScreamingAtLapTopXSmall 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.

Continue reading →

Posted in Community, Patterns & Skills, Tools and Utilities | Tagged , , | Comments Off on The Great Silverlight Competency Test – Part 1