Andrew Arnott

Principal Software Engineer, Visual Studio Platform

Principal Software Engineer and OSS contributor. Visual Studio Platform.

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Calling WCF services from NetCF 3.5 using Compact WCF and NetCFSvcUtil.exe

The .NET Compact Framework 3.5 adds a subset of the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF or "Indigo") to smart devices, allowing them to communicate with desktop WCF components with all the flexibility of multiple, interchangeable service bindings and endpoints.  Although it ships out of the box only with support for message-level ...

Power Toys for .NET Compact Framework 3.5 CTP released

The .NET Compact Framework team just released the Consumer Technology Preview (CTP) of the Power Toys for .NET Compact Framework 3.5.  These Power Toys are tools to help you build, debug and optimizie your NetCF 3.5 applications.  My personal favorite is the NetCF ServiceModel Metadata Tool (NetCFSvcUtil.exe) which allows NetCF ...

Where are the InfoCard sites?

InfoCard is the greatest invention since the web browser!  In my opinion anyway.  If you don't agree or you haven't heard of InfoCard, please read from the www.identityblog.com, and in particular the post on the Laws of Identity.  It's really quite impressive what engineering problems InfoCard has been able to solve. I'm just...

How to find the focused ListBoxItem in WPF

One would expect that the WPF ListBox control would have some kind of FocusedIndex property to find out which item has the keyboard focus (and that dashed border around it) -- but it's not there.  It seems the workaround requires a few lines of code, which I present here. ListBox.SelectionMode = Single In a ListBox's default mode ...

Reflections on having multiple versions of NetCF on your device

The .NET Compact Framework has had several releases: V1 + 3 service packs, V2 + 2 service packs, V3.5 (to date just betas).  Which of these are installed on your device?  Can you have multiple versions installed simultaneously?  Which version will run your NetCF app if multiple versions are installed?  This post addresses ...

The WCF subset supported by NetCF

[Updated: 21Nov07 to clarify that custom headers are supported, but not in NetCFSvcUtil proxy generation] [Updated: 27Aug07 to correct Gzip sample, and clarify on transports & extensibility] [Updated: 23Aug07 to add SecurityAlgorithmSuite enumerable]Many people have been asking about what subset of .NET 3.0's Windows Communication ...

Gmail interface clone in 4 hours using WPF

I used Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 to try WPF for very nearly the first time.  I discuss how I managed to clone an interface I admire in four hours over on my JMPInline blog...

How to sort the console output of a hashtable in PowerShell

Hashtables are inherently unsorted, but when you're printing a hashtable's contents to the console, it can certainly be helpful to sort its contents by key.  Although it's not obvious, the way to do it is pretty easy. Let's start with defining a hashtable and play with it until it's obviously unsorted. Great. Now let's sort it: ...

Getting doskey macros to work in PowerShell

As much as I love to work with PowerShell, it was hard to give up the doskey macros I had defined for CMD.exe.  But I just found out that doskey can work all its magic for PowerShell too, so here's the trick... Doskey defaults to working only with cmd.exe, but by passing the /exename= parameter to it, you can set macros for PowerShell ...

How to (not) write an especially precarious app on .NET (Compact Framework)

As the .NET Compact Framework developers work to add features, fix bugs, and refactor code, we often have to determine whether a given change could break existing customer code.  The ideal is that NetCF 3.5 will run all apps that ran on NetCF 2.0 and 1.0.  We run hundreds of apps and many, many tests before shipping each product to ...