Because empty tags are bad

Well, not always, but there are times when they are so…what can I do to avoid them.

Custom WPF check box with inner shadow effect.

Today I will show you how to override the CheckBox control template to style it in custom way and add a sexy looking shadow effect.

MVC custom validator with client side validation

I wanted to have a reusable email validator since there have been a few cases already where I needed one. Previously I just used the RegularExpressionAttribute but that’s verbose for email. So, without thinking much, I created an attribute that derived from RegularExpressionAttribute and supplied it with a regex I used – that turned out to be a surprise.

WPF Caching visual elements for better performance

More precisely how can we cache UI elements, since the property I’m going to describe is located at UIElement class, to improve the performance of the WPF control.

dotPeek is out

Remember .net reflector?

WYSIWYG, WYSIWYM and all that jazz

So you have a requirement – supply the possibility to create and edit rich formatted text in a web application. Seems pretty straightforward – use a ready editor and you’re done.

Now, add some constraints to that, like – the editor needs to be dead simple because the target user does not care about all that semantic stuff (that’s your job), it needs to perform well and be as intuitive as it gets.

This is a pretty valid requirement and in todays web is pretty common, but as it turns out, there isn’t a lot of maneuvering space here.

String concatenation and the myths that go with it

I’ve heard a lot of advice about how I should and how I should not concatenate strings. I’ve stuck to them, but the moment of questioning was inevitable. So I spun up a small app to see what’s what. If you’re interested, read along.

Support for All()/Any() in WCF Data Services 5.0

9th of April 2012 the new version of WCF Data Services was released with number 5.0 and support for V3 OData protocol. You can download this version from here.

You can read more about all new features added to this release of Data Services on WCF Data Services Team Blog

Practical differences between ASP.NET Web API and WCF Data Services

In this post I would like to point out the main practical differences between ASP.NET Web API and WCF Data Services (OData). For those who does not yet know too much about Web API there is a lot of articles and tutorial about this topic on the net. The starting point is of course Microsoft ASP.NET team site which provides all related information and a bunch of tutorials. Concer…

Expanding text area jQuery plugin

Here’s a handy little widget that may be of use. It’s based on this article, with some minor corrections.