Don't Move or I Will Shoot Your Bindings
WPF bindings and MVVM are nice when they work, but can become a royal pain when they don’t. This is especially annoying when you create bindings in code, because then […]
ContextMenu strikes again: data context not properly updated
Since context menu is not part of visual tree, you cannot use things like ElementName in its bindings. However, a context menu, that context menu will inherit DataContext of its […]
How to design systems so you can waste your time debugging
A couple of days ago I spent several hours thanks to these two little design quirks. Quirk #1. Deadlock prone protocol design. Our program uses two client-server protocols. Let’s call […]
IEnumerable: lazy and dangerous
Time and time again I am burnt by the same bug. There are two kinds of enumerables in .NET: enumerators and generators. Enumerators go over some collection and return its […]
Apache 2.2.17: HTTPS+CONNECT still broken
The scenario is: someone opens an SSL connection to the Apache server, authenticates himself, and requests access to another host/port via CONNECT command. This is good for secure connection via […]
Another version of this product is already installed…
Trying to upgrade my Apache server, and getting this helpful message from Windows Installer. Well, this time I know it is Apache, but how many times I did not? How […]
WPF Grid: Showing Tooltip over Empty Space
You can define a tooltip on a grid (or border), but it will show up only when the mouse hovers over space “occupied” by a grid item. Empty space will […]
WPF Custom Panels: Thou Shalt Measure Your Children
Custom panels must call Measure() on their children, even if they ignore the result. Calling just Arrange() causes weird behavior: wrap panels don’t wrap, controls get out of bounds, etc. […]
If your custom WPF control just would not show up
Story in a nutshell – my custom control was not visible. Reason: we defined default style for the control in our own resource dictionary, which was merged into application resources. […]
Why I don’t like SQL
Had a discussion with some friends where I said I don’t like SQL and consider it an atavism. They disagreed and said that SQL is a very insightful language and […]