WPF is a very powerful framework for GUI development. Among other things, it contains a unified approach to user input validation. Adding validation in WPF is very straightforward in most cases. However, validating DataGrid rows is slightly challenging. However, the good people of the world has already taken care of the problem and provided quite detailed walk-throughs. I recommend reading this interesting article (WPF DataGrid Practical Examples) about WPF DataGrid. … more »

Sometimes, while writing a WPF or WinForms GUI application, you might need to allow the user to send a pre-populated e-mail from her machine. A typical example would be sending an e-mail to your technical support from the application. A naive approach to implement this functionality is to use the following code sniplet: more »

Sometimes you would like to use a standard Windows system icon, such as error, warning, question etc. in your WPF program. The main reason is usually consistent look with the rest of the system. While you could have extracted the desired icon from one of the system resource files, there is a much better technique for doing it. First, add a reference to System.Drawing to your project. Then you can … more »

With arrival of WPF the usage of more »

I was quite eager to learn about Windows Phone 7 when the development preview came out. I downloaded the tools and tried to build a sample to get a feel. I must admit that developing .NET application for the new OS is quite easy. However one bit I couldn't make work - localization. With today's global markets and multi-language consumers it is important to be able to deliver your product … more »

WPF allows you to create localized applications with relatively little effort . The localized strings are put into resource files (.resx), one per target language, and maintained as needed. The editing facilities of Visual Studio, however, are not designed to help the localization efforts, however. The GUI can only show one resource file at a time. It would have been much more convenient if files could be edited side by … more »

Apparently, Microsoft allows users of Visual Studio to include some icons, supplied with the product. For example, to look at available icons in Visual Studio 2010, locate the file more »

Storing passwords securely in an application, for instance between different invocations, is a major challenge for a software developer. Storing a password or other sensitive data in plain text is very dangerous. One can attempt to obfuscate the data by means of a symmetric algorithm, but it can be always reverse-engineered from the application. On Windows there is a safer alternative - DPAPI (Data Protection API). The idea is that … more »

Apparently, the well-known hosting provider GoDaddy allows remote access to MySQL databases, created within its environments. Quoting from the help page : Direct Database Access allows you to remotely manage your hosting account databases with external tools such as Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express and MySQL Query Browser. These tools offer a fast connection to your database(s) and additional functionality for advanced users, however, it is a less secure … more »