If your Windows Phone 7 project isn’t starting at all – you’re not even hitting App.xaml.cs, you’ve probably renamed the app project. Fix: Set the startup object on the app project’s properties page In the .csproj file, this corresponds to the SilverlightAppEntry element: <SilverlightAppEntry>PhotoDiary.App</SilverlightAppEntry> I would call it a bug, that you cannot rename a [...]

I previously wrote a blog post titled Performing any Selector on the Main Thread detailing a convenience category on NSInvoication for easily creating invocation objects that could be invoked on any thread. This category has served me well, and even got traction in the iOS developer community, so I never bothered to stop and think [...]

Why you might ask? A perfectly valid and sane question, let me explain. Right now I’m setting up continuous integration for both an Azure project and an Android project. I’ve covered my struggle with the Azure project in an earlier post. But now it was time to get the Amazon EC2 Windows Server 2008 with [...]

The chaos monkey, a mythical creature. I had actually never heard of it until I read Jeff Atwood’s post (which is excellent and you should read it). Then I realized that I’ve worked with and fought against chaos monkeys my entire career. Tough love sometimes, but the monkey always pushed the software to become more [...]

Adding an implicit cast functionality to Lazy<T> can give you an option to writing null checkers in your delayed instantiation properties. The problem Today in our project a colleague was cussing over the fact that he kept writing the same block of code over and over again when null checking a property with a backing [...]

Have you ever wanted to dynamically choose from many potential implementations of some code? Would you like to have the power of metadata filtering and lazy instantiation of the selected implementation? Here is how to do just that using Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) and also a neat trick to handle your implementation/metadata pairs that I [...]

Many UI frameworks, including AppKit for Mac OS X and UIKit for iPhone OS, require that all methods to UI components are sent on the main UI thread. Cocoa and Cocoa Touch make this quite easy by providing for example -[NSObject performSelectorOnMainThread:withObject:waitUntilDone:] in Foundation. Making updating the text for a text field a snap: [someTextField [...]