Using Magnifier in presentations

This is a must know for anyone who gives presentations.

Windows 7 has an awesome tool - magnifier (magnify.exe)

Heres how you can use it :

• Windows logo key + Plus to zoom in
• Windows logo key + Minus to zoom out, and
• Windows logo key + ESC to exit.

Also, if you are showing code in Visual Studio, all you have to do is Ctrl + mouse scroll to increase or decrease the text size.

Debugging Blogspot+Silverlight+Dropbox issue

I traced my browser calls when it loaded the demo silverlight app and I got the following:

Request URL:http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4186718/Nitin.Spike.XAPHosting.xap
Request Method:GET
Status Code:200 OK
Response Headers
Content-Type:application/octet-stream
Date:Sun, 19 Sep 2010 06:12:06 GMT
Server:dbws
accept-ranges:bytes
cache-control:no-cache
content-length:4379
etag:10n
pragma:no-cache
x-robots-tag:noindex,nofollow

The problem is that the Content-Type is application/octet-stream, it should have been application/x-silverlight-app. Okay so we know the problem, how do we fix it? I am using dropbox, are they suppose to push with correct content-type or do i need to configure it somewhere... I have asked this question in their forums...

Testing Silverlight

Okay it doesnt work, but i see a lot of people displaying silverlight content on blogspot. I wonder whats going wrong. I guess i am done using these free blog hosting sites... its time to move to my own blog - its expensive but i will get to control a lot of stuff.

Update: I have finally hosted my silverlight XAP on a paid host and it works. :)

Enum extensions

Sharing these Enum extension methods I wrote yesterday.

using System;
using System.ComponentModel;

namespace Nitin.Spike.EnumExtensions
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main()
        {
            const Colors someColor = Colors.Red;
            string description = someColor.Description();
            if (someColor.HasDescription())
            {
                if (someColor.HasDescription("indicates stop", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase))
                {
                    Console.WriteLine("Works");
                }
            }
        }
    }
    public enum Colors
    {
        [Description("Indicates Stop")]
        Red,
        [Description("Indicates Nothing")]
        Blue,
        [Description("Indicates Go")]
        Green
    }
    public static class EnumExtensions
    {
        public static string Description(this Enum someEnum)
        {
            var memInfo = someEnum.GetType().GetMember(someEnum.ToString());

            if (memInfo != null && memInfo.Length > 0)
            {
                object[] attrs = memInfo[0].GetCustomAttributes(typeof(DescriptionAttribute),false);

                if (attrs != null && attrs.Length > 0)
                    return ((DescriptionAttribute)attrs[0]).Description;
            }
            return someEnum.ToString();
        }
        public static bool HasDescription(this Enum someEnum)
        {
            return !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(someEnum.Description());
        }
        public static bool HasDescription(this Enum someEnum, string expectedDescription)
        {
            return someEnum.Description().Equals(expectedDescription);
        }
        public static bool HasDescription(this Enum someEnum, string expectedDescription, StringComparison comparisionType)
        {
            return someEnum.Description().Equals(expectedDescription, comparisionType);
        }
    }
}

High Speed Internet

The first time I connected to internet was some 9 years back, I got my own internet connection around 8 years back, and at that point of time I used to get 56 Kbps speed, and today I have a 512 Kbps line.

Is this speed enough for me? Hell no.. why not? because even today I can’t watch my videos directly off the web. Although I can watch low quality videos online, but now I want HD quality. I wonder if I will ever be satisfied with my connection.

WPF Converter values

I posted this at stackoverflow : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3204422/wpf-corelating-multibindings-and-converters-values

The problem was how do you handle indexes when your converter value array is of large size. I thought over it and come up with this:

https://www.assembla.com/code/TechnologyAndMe/subversion/nodes/ConverterValues
(Download complete source using a SVN client from http://subversion.assembla.com/svn/TechnologyAndMe/ConverterValues/)

So now all you have to do is :

Here Prop1,Prop2,Prop3 are the actual values that you want to pass to the converter, Value1, Value2, Value3 are just ids for Properties below them. Now in the converter, just use my BoundValues class and accessing the properties become as easy as saying :

public object Convert(object[] values, Type targetType, object parameter, CultureInfo culture)
{
 var boundValues = new BoundValues(values);

 return string.Format("{0} {1} {2}", 
  boundValues["Value1"], boundValues["Value2"], boundValues["Value3"]);
}

Where BoundValues["Value1"] returns value of Prop1, so now I no longer have to worry about managing the sequence of bindings in my XAML.

Generic Singleton

****

What was I thinking, if I use any regular class here, it will not be singleton as you could always new() up an instance.

****
Once and for all, I am going to settle with this implementation of singleton.

https://www.assembla.com/code/TechnologyAndMe/subversion/nodes/Singleton
(Download complete source using a SVN client from http://subversion.assembla.com/svn/TechnologyAndMe/Singleton )

Singleton is now as easy as:
var instance = Singleton<SomeOtherClass>.Instance;