Developer Support

Advocacy and Innovation

Power Toys for .NET Compact Framework 3.5 CTP released

September 12, 2007 Sep 12, 2007 09/12/07
Andrew Arnott
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?

September 6, 2007 Sep 6, 2007 09/6/07
Andrew Arnott
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

September 5, 2007 Sep 5, 2007 09/5/07
Andrew Arnott
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 ...

The WCF subset supported by NetCF

August 20, 2007 Aug 20, 2007 08/20/07
Andrew Arnott
[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 ...

How to sort the console output of a hashtable in PowerShell

July 9, 2007 Jul 9, 2007 07/9/07
Andrew Arnott
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.PS C:\> $h = @{b=2;a=3;c=1} ...

Getting doskey macros to work in PowerShell

July 9, 2007 Jul 9, 2007 07/9/07
Andrew Arnott
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)

July 2, 2007 Jul 2, 2007 07/2/07
Andrew Arnott
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 ...

Identity crisis

June 15, 2007 Jun 15, 2007 06/15/07
Andrew Arnott
I now have three blogs that I post to: this one, JMPInline, and NetCFTeam.  Which posts will I put where?  I think I'll post everything software-related to both JMPInline and this one, then for those that specifically relate to NetCF I will post a link to the NetCFTeam blog as a small post.  Rather than copying posts I've ...