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.

Joel Pobar (the guy behind LCG among other things) put me on to this great paper which does a nice job of arguing why it shouldn’t be static vs. dynamic, but rather: “Static Typing Where Possible, Dynamic Typing When Needed.”

I also particularly liked this quote:

Using XML instead of byte streams as a wire-format is one step
forward, but three steps backwards. While XML allows dealing
with semi-structured data, which as we argue is what we should
strive for, this comes at an enormous expense. XML is a prime
example of retarded innovation; it makes the life of the low-
level plumbing infrastructure easier by putting the burden on
the actual users by letting them parse the data themselves by
having them write abstract syntax tree, introducing an alien
data model (Infoset) and an overly complicated and verbose
type system (XSD) neither of which blends in very well with
the paradigm that programmers use to write their actual code.

Worth a read.

So far so good. Everything is working very nicely indeed. Highlights so far:

• Orcas perf and stability is very good.
• ReSharper perf and stability under Orcas is very good :-)
• ReSharper Unit Test runner now seems to be as fast as TD.NET. Is this the end of TD.NET?
• ReSharper Quick Fixes and Code Inspection stuff is working better.
• Increase in the number of static analysis and compiler warnings.

I can’t wait to hack Ruby on this stuff! :-)

UPDATE: I’m working on a .NET 2 solution. ReSharper’s support for .NET 3.5 is still crap :-(

If you’re like me you may have created some custom External Tool commands in the Visual Studio Tools menu. Unfortunately, External Tools cannot be imported/exported using the Import and Export Settings option so if you’ve upgraded to Orcas, here’s how to copy them over:

1. Jump into regedit and export the hive: \\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\External Tools
2. Open up the exported .reg file and change the 8.0 to 9.0
3. Double-click the .reg file to import the settings into the Orcas hive.

All done.

If anyone is looking for it I’ve created a dedicated page for my port of Rails’ inflector.