Andrew Peters’ Blog

Today we were proud to announce the release of WPF Elements, a collection of foundational WPF components, missing from the built-in controls that ship with WPF, but no less essential in the toolbox of any self-respecting WPF developer.

The controls, crafted with care by our resident WPF guru and C# MVP, include:

• WPF Multicolumn TreeView control (aka WPF TreeListView)
• WPF Currency Text box (supports cultures too, passes the Turkey test)
• WPF Integer Text box
• WPF Numeric Text box
• WPF Masked Text box
• WPF DateTimePicker
• WPF DropDownDatePicker
• WPF MonthCalendar
• WPF Spin control (aka up-down control)
• WPF SpinDecorator
• WPF DropDownEditBox
• WPF ProportionalStackPanel

So download the trial and enjoy.

The BackgroundMotion community site and ASP.NET code sample that we worked with Microsoft to develop has gone live. w00t!

If you’re interested in ASP.NET you definitely want to check out the sample as it illustrates one approach to architecting .NET web apps. The architecture was really designed to facilitate rapid development so emphasizes things like testability etc. My personal highlights of the sample are:

• Use of a domain-driven design techniques. Repository and Unit of Work abstractions over LINQ to SQL
• Model-level validation using the Validation Block
• Dependency injection using Composite Web Block
• Using Lucene.NET to index a domain model
• Using MVP with declarative data-binding in the presentation layer

Let us know what you think.

Yesterday, we were excited to announce the formation of a partnership with Castle Stronghold, a best-of-breed .NET development shop and some of the fat-brains behind the Castle Project.

This is really exciting for us as we now have direct access to some of the best .NET talent in the world, including the likes of Castle project leader Hammett (Hamilton Verissimo).

For any New Zealand organisations considering undertaking a .NET web application, I strongly recommend talking to us. I believe you would be hard pressed to find a development partner who can deliver with the speed, quality and low-cost of Mindscape/Castle.

We at Mindscape are looking for beta testers to help us iron the wrinkles in our latest product. More info on our site.

I’m excited to announce Jeremy Boyd, John-Daniel Trask and myself have decided to go it alone and start a new company called Mindscape.

Watch this space :-)

Update: Our site is up :-)