Dotmad.net

I did a small review of available components suites for WPF. I focused mainly on grid and charting controls, as the nature of WPF allows customization of the UI in ways that previously required 3rd party components in a Winforms development:

Xceed:
Grid control only
Express edition - Free
Professional edition - 500$
With source code - 1250$

Infragistics:
Netadvantage for WPF
Includes DataGrid, Carousel controls, Ribbon, Chart, editor controls (masked edit, datetime picker, etc)
Price - 800$
Source code not included

Component One:
Studio for WPF
Includes DataGrid, Chart, Report viewer, Schedule controls (datetime picker, calendar, scheduler)
Price - 800$
Source code not included

Syncfusion:
Essential studio WPF edition
Includes Chart, Docking manager, Ribbon, Groupbar, Taskbar, Datetime editor, Autocomplete textbox, Font listbox, Color picker, numeric updown, masked edit, Tree view
Currently no grid is available
Price (with source) - 600$

As you can see, there aren’t many options available at the moment. What is worse is the fact most tools don’t come with a source control, meaning using them means taking a risk of losing support in the future.

My recommendation: Don’t purchase anything unless you absolutly need to. The only thing worth considering purchasing at the moment is a charting control (as there is none from Microsoft), but you should also consider an open-source solution.

Coffee is good for you, as long as you don’t drink too much.
But how many of you can’t pass the day without drinking too many cups?
How many of you are addicted to coffee?

In the recent bloggers meeting in Microsoft Israel I complained about the pain it is to add a picture to a blog post using the Community server.
The reply?
“Why don’t you use Live Writer to publish posts instead of the online control panel?”

In a recent post Doron wrote about his love for ReSharper:
“I honestly can’t work without it anymore. It has changed the way I code, and I will never attempt a serious refactoring without it“

There are many great tools out there that can make you more productive. No argument about that. The problem starts when you become dependant of those tools.

That’s the problem with crutches - if you ever lose them, you become handicapped.

There are many cases in which you need to embed an image in a winform control (such as a button), and usually you’ll need the image to have a transparent background.
Someone showed me recently an easy way to do this:

1) Set the area surrounding the image to a uniform color which is different from the image’s colors.

2) Open Powerpoint, and add the picture to the presentation:

3) Show the image editing toolbar and choose the transparancy tool.

4) Click on the background.

For some reason David Brabant just wrote a post about NLog, another logging library for .Net, sadly last updated during 2006.
This tool joins the well known Log4Net (also long time since last sign of life), Raize’s commercial CodeSite 4.1 (excellent tool from personal experience), Gurock’s SmartInspect (also commercial), Enterprise library’s Logging application block, and various other OSS logging frameworks.

Browsing through code is always a lot easier using regions, and I keep grouping methods/fields/properties in my code in regions.
Now it seems I found the perfect tool for me:
Regionerate lets you define regions in your code and determine the way members (fields, methods, properties etc.) should be placed inside them.
Regionerate is a zero-friction tool - when setting up, you can choose a Code Layout (the way you want your code to look) or just use the default Code Layout. From that moment on, Regionerate will make sure your code follows that Code Layout.

You can see a very short screencast here.

(Thanks to Roy Osherov for the link)

Eugene Zakhareyev wrote a post about a company which “specialize in development of Products/Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System“.
As it turns out, people who purchased the product received nothing, and currently it seems the company site disappeared.
Back when I was testing reporting tools I immediately ruled out any product for which there was no trial or demo version - it reflects badly on the company selling the product.

Update: The owner of the company claimed the site was down temporarily and that they never sold anything, as their product is still released as trial versions. I still would not buy anything before getting a fully functional trial version to approve.