Kevin McNeish [C# and .NET]

Silverlight 4 101: Debugging WCF RIA Services

KevinMcNeish — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 21:26:00 GMT

By default, he error messages that are generated from WCF RIA Services are less than useful. They are often generic messages that do little to help you understand the root of the problem. Fortunately, there is a great tool, called Fiddler ( http://www...(read more)

Getting your Silverlight Assemblies to Appear in the VS 2010 Add References Dialog

KevinMcNeish — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 16:07:00 GMT

If you are creating custom Silverlight assemblies you want to reference from multiple projects, it's great for those assemblies to appear in Visual Studio's Add References dialog. It's easy to do this, although I didn't see documentation...(read more)

Getting a project's GUID

KevinMcNeish — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 17:08:00 GMT

OK, this was much harder than it should have been. I was in the process of creating my own custom Silverlight project templates (I don't consider the default template usable since it requires you to put your business entities in the host web project...(read more)

Multi-Project Visual Studio Template Tricks

KevinMcNeish — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 14:09:00 GMT

I've been knee-deep in Visual Studio project and item templates since the first version of Visual Studio, but this was the first time I needed to create a template that added multiple projects to a single solution...specifically, I wanted to create...(read more)

Why do I get a TypeLoadException when moving my project to .NET 4?

KevinMcNeish — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 18:38:00 GMT

There have been some security changes in the .NET 4.0 Framework, so when moving a project to .NET 4.0 you may get the following exception: TypeLoadException - Derived Types must either match the security accessibility of the base type or be less accessible...(read more)

Silverlight 4 101: Using Silverlight Assemblies in your non-Silverlight Projects

KevinMcNeish — Fri, 28 May 2010 14:04:00 GMT

If you're like me, you have been coding in .NET for a long time (for me, pre-version 1.0) and you have many libraries containing classes you would like to reuse in your Silverlight applications. However, if you try to reference a non-Silverlight assembly...(read more)

Silverlight 4 101: Silverlight Project Templates

KevinMcNeish — Wed, 19 May 2010 10:46:00 GMT

In Silverlight 4 with Visual Studio 2010, there are five Silverlight project templates to choose from. Here is a summary of each: Silverlight Application Creates a blank Silverlight project. After selecting this template, a dialog appears asking you to...(read more)

Silverlight 4 101: Installing Silverlight

KevinMcNeish — Tue, 18 May 2010 10:10:00 GMT

Microsoft releases new versions of Silverlight out of step with the release cycle for Visual Studio, so even if you have the latest updates for Visual Studio installed on your development machine, you still need to go to the Microsoft Silverlight site...(read more)

Using NUnit in Visual Studio 2010

KevinMcNeish — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 10:13:00 GMT

To use NUnit with Visual Studio 2010, follow these steps: 1. Make sure you have the latest version of NUnit installed 2. In Visual Studio, open up the nunit.exe.config file found at: C:\Program Files\NUnit 2.x.x\bin\net-2.0\ 3. Under the <configuration>...(read more)

WPF: Setting Focus in a Custom User Control

KevinMcNeish — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:50:00 GMT

When you create a custom user control, it typically contains child user interface elements. To provide a proper "Focus" experience at run time, you need to do the following: 1. Select your user control in design mode and check the Focusable...(read more)

Silverlight: Fixing the "Tag Expander Does Not Exist" Compiler Error

KevinMcNeish — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:38:00 GMT

If you create a new Silverlight Navigation project, then compile immediately with no changes, you will get the following compiler error: The tag 'Expander' does not exist in XML namespace 'clr-namespace:System.Windows.Controls;assenbly=System...(read more)

WPF: Setting the Height or Width to Auto in Code

KevinMcNeish — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:37:00 GMT

At times, you may want to programmatically set the Height or Width of a WPF element to Auto in code. To do this, just use the Double.NaN (Not a Number) value. For example, in C#: this.txtName.Width = Double.NaN; And in VB .NET: Me.txtName.Width = Double...(read more)

Setting Entity Framework MergeOptions - What Works, What Doesn't

KevinMcNeish — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 21:59:00 GMT

The Basics When retrieving entities using object queries with the Entity Framework, there is a MergeOption setting that allows you to specify how you want entities to be retrieved. The default value is AppendOnly, which specifiies that if an entity already...(read more)

Preventing WPF Controls from Being Displayed in the Visual Studio Toolbox

KevinMcNeish — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:45:00 GMT

In other technologies such as Windows Forms and Web Forms, you can adorn a class with the [ToolboxItem(false)] attribute and it will not appear in the Visual Studio Toolbox. In Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) you use the [ToolboxBrowsable(false...(read more)

Fixing WPF TextBox Mouse Events Not Firing

KevinMcNeish — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 15:10:00 GMT

If you create a handler for the WPF TextBox's mouse events, you will find that the code in your handler never fires. This is because the event is marked as "handled" in the .NET Framework, so it never reaches your code. To get around this...(read more)

Fixing "Configuration System Failed to Initalize" Exception

KevinMcNeish — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 16:04:00 GMT

If you see the "Configuration System Failed to Initialize" exception at run time, it is typically caused by an invalid entry in your app.config or web.config file. In my case, I encountered this exception when I had an "<add key...>"...(read more)

Fixing LINQ Error: Sequence contains no elements

KevinMcNeish — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 21:21:00 GMT

When you get theLINQ Error "Sequence contains no elements", this is usually because you are using the First() or Single() command rather than FirstOrDefault() and SingleOrDefault(). Take for example the following code that uses First() on the...(read more)

Entity Framework: Fixing "The number of errors in the conceptual type...does not match with the number of members on the object side type..."

KevinMcNeish — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 11:02:00 GMT

You will typically get the error "The number of errors in the conceptual type...does not match with the number of members on the object side type" in version 1.0 of the Entity Framework when you have manually edited one or more of your entities...(read more)

Entity Framework: Programmatically determining the Entity Set name of an Entity

KevinMcNeish — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:08:00 GMT

Here is an extension method for the Object Context that allows you to programmatically derive an Entity Set name associated with a particular entity. To put this in context, when adding a new entity object to an Object Context, you need to specify the...(read more)

Understanding the Entity Framework ConcurrencyException: Store update, insert, or delete statement affected an unexpected number of rows...

KevinMcNeish — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 14:08:00 GMT

When working with the Entity Framework in n-Tier applications where you are unattaching and attaching entities from an object context, you may encounter this exception: Store update, insert, or delete statement affected an unexpected number of rows (0...(read more)