Dispatches from the front lines of the war on gnarly problems.
Chris Idzerda 14 May 2008, 5:27 PM

XML-serializing a derived collection

A class derived from a collection class will XML-serialize only the collection, not any additional properties in your derived class. public class NamedNodeList : List<Node>{    public string Name { get; set; } // ignored during XML serialization} ... Read post
Rick Taylor 12 May 2008, 4:56 PM

Exploring F# with Conway’s Game of Life

The other day, I asked around here at Vertigo to see if anyone understood some new concepts that I had run across, those being monads and continuations. These are both concepts that you find in more functional languages such as Lisp, Scheme, Haskell, and ... Read post
Alan Le 11 May 2008, 6:25 PM

Loading Resource Dictionaries from an External DLL

I had problems with the way skins were being referenced in Witty. To solve it, I moved the skins into their own project and needed to load them dynamically. To reference the resources, I use the Pack URI scheme. Typical you can load the skin resource ... Read post
Scott Stanfield 06 May 2008, 9:06 AM

Vertigo’s Custom Gibson for Guitar Hero III

Check this out: http://scottstanfield.com/gibson/gibson.html This is a 195MB 8-bit TIFF (5433 x 12,474 pixel) uncompressed image, converted by Seadragon.The image is a composite of 12 individual images, taken with the following equipment: Canon EOS 30D ... Read post
Rick Taylor 30 April 2008, 5:42 PM

Computer vision processing in .Net, part II

In which we use AForge.Net to process images, find regions, and then use parallax techniques to determine range to those objects and their size. In my last blog post, I discussed how you might be able to determine distance to objects by using two web ... Read post
Adrian Anttila 29 April 2008, 2:41 PM

Vista Explorer Search Tips

Quite by accident, I discovered some advanced search options using the built-in search box in Windows Explorer. It's the little box in the top right-hand corner of your Explorer windows: If you search for something but name but can't find it, you get ... Read post
Ralph Arvesen 25 April 2008, 9:02 AM

Set cookies in Silverlight

Here is a simple class that demostates how to set cookies from a Silverlight application. public static class Cookie {     // set cookie without expiration     public static void Set(string name, string value)     {         ... Read post
Andrew Thompson 22 April 2008, 1:35 PM

Saving Energy At The Office

Today is Earth Day, and being someone who likes to offer solutions rather than simply complain I decided to do something to reduce my energy consumption at the office. I recently moved out of my cubicle and into an enclosed office, complete with obnoxious ... Read post
Petar Vucetin 21 April 2008, 7:15 PM

Still alive after slowing down!

So I lived! Driving 55 mph was not that bad. I finally ran out of gas last Friday and had to tank up. At $3.98 I was happy that my car did 448 miles on 15 gallons!! The strange thing is that my car mpgs went down as I was approaching the empty tank. So ... Read post
Petar Vucetin 11 April 2008, 7:58 PM

Slowing Down

...not because I am getting old :-) but because I wanted to conduct a little experiment. I decided to not exceed 55 miles per hour (90 km/h) on any highway where the legal speed limit was greater than 55 mph. This is my 5th day into the experiment and ... Read post
Keith Craig 09 April 2008, 11:31 AM

Using SourceGear's DiffMerge as the merge tool in Microsoft Team System

In an earlier post, I discussed using and configuring WinMerge as a compare tool in Team System. Here I discuss using SourceGear's DiffMerge as a custom merge tool. It all started recently when I had a tricky merge to do in Team System, and I realized ... Read post
Rick Taylor 08 April 2008, 6:08 PM

Computer vision processing in .Net

In my spare time, I have been playing around with vision processing. Basically, I have an ongoing robotics project I’m fiddling with off and on. What I need to figure out at this stage is how to do rangefinding, that is, finding the distance to objects ... Read post
Keith Craig 03 April 2008, 11:11 AM

Scrum and feedback in process optimization

Scrum has a direct and timely feedback loop built in for optimizing the software development process—the retrospective. Here are some of my thoughts about feedback and optimization of process in software development. Development in large organizations ... Read post
David Bautista 02 April 2008, 6:56 PM

Adding IntelliSense to Custom .config Editing

     A few people have posted this already—though for older versions of VS—but the Visual Studio XML editor will add IntelliSense if it can associate the file you’re editing with an XML schema. How it does this varies with the Visual Studio version, and ... Read post
Keith Craig 02 April 2008, 5:32 PM

Retrospectives: a key part of the Scrum process

The retrospective is a key and often overlooked part of the Scrum process. I believe one reason for the success of my Scrum team in the past few years is related to our consistency in doing retrospectives at the end of each sprint. I've seen other teams ... Read post
Adrian Anttila 01 April 2008, 3:01 PM

TimeZoneInfo : Another reason to love .NET 3.5

One of the new classes in .NET 3.5 is TimeZoneInfo. MSDN's vague and all-encompassing description states "Represents any time zone in the world." Scrolling further down, you'll find a list of actual things that TimeZoneInfo can do: Retrieving ... Read post
Adrian Anttila 28 March 2008, 3:03 PM

Excel and CSV Reference

I've been doing a lot of work with CSV and Excel imports recently. There are a lot of poorly documented or disparate pieces of information that are required to interface with a CSV or Excel data source, so I'm recording it here. Formatting Overview ... Read post
Petar Vucetin 27 March 2008, 3:49 PM

Silverlight debugging mysteriously stops working

If you experience sudden death of you break points in Visual Studio while debugging Silverlight application I found this to work for me. Open the properties page of your Web project (right click on your project, select properties): Advance port number by ... Read post