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Writings of Urda

Your friendly West Coast Software Engineer

Blog Post Archive

Understanding Path Limits in TFS

Team Foundation Server (TFS) is bound to a some limitations that can potentially break your Visual Studio project. One of these limitations is the character count limit in a file path. If you overshoot this limit you will run into issue when adding new files to TFS or attempting to ... Read More

Random C# Tricks

I wanted to share a few C# tricks I reviewed today. Some programmers will use them all the time, others barely know about their existence. In this short source code example I will be demoing the ?? operator, chaining ??, and String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace() which is a newer .NET method. So here ... Read More

Windows Communication Foundation - A Simple Client and Server

Windows Communication Foundation (or WCF for short) is an interface located inside the .NET Framework for creating connected, service-oriented applications. We can use C# and Visual Studio 2010 to build a simple WCF Client and WCF Server. We will start by developing the server and the service it will provide, ... Read More

Inking in Silverlight

Users with touch screens, stylus-enabled screens, or USB stylus pads appreciate the ability to write and markup documents and files. Plenty of modern applications today support inking natively (Example: OneNote 2010, one application I use in conjunction with my Lenovo tablet as a digital notebook on most days of the ... Read More

Write to XML with C#

So we can read XML in a variety of ways (one example here, and another here). So can we write it in C#? Of course we can! So lets jump right into shall we? So here is the steps I take in this sample: 1 2 3 4 5 6 ... Read More

Solution Folders in Visual Studio 2010 Explained

If you are new to Visual Studio, you may not be familiar with how “Solution Folders” work. Visual Studio allows you to group together any number of sub-projects that your root solution may contain. However, what is strange about Solution Folders in Visual Studio is that they do not create ... Read More

Using LINQ to Extract Information from XML in C#

Yesterday I talked about using C# to extract information from a simple XML file. Well today we can take it one step further. Instead of using the regular XML library and commands, we can use LINQ to build a query to extract the information we desire, and place it into ... Read More

Extracting Information From XML With C#

XML is a wonderful way to store information that needs to be read in by a machine or piece of software. It is simple to follow, and you can use it to store and transmit your custom data structures and information across an internet connection or in between bits of ... Read More

Lambda Expressions and Delegates in C#

In a previous post I discussed chaining C# delegates together. In the source code example, I created a generic DelegateMath class to house a few basic math operations. This time we will replace those functions with simpler and shorter lambda expressions. So what exactly is a lambda expression? What does ... Read More

Delegate Chain of Command

Another cool thing about delegates is the ability to chain them together. Say for example you have an object modification process, and you need a given object to be manipulated in a very specific order. Well you could use a delegate chain to accomplish that. For a simple example I ... Read More