C# on Ash Tewari

Agentic finetuning using a custom harness

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 02:56:11 +0000

The goal was to figure out whether a small model running on my own hardware could do the job of intent classification and structured parameter extraction well enough for one of my use-cases - read a request like “add 8 spare tent stakes to the camping box” and turn it into something the application can act on.

I created an agentic fine-tuning and evaluation loop with a custom evaluation harness: an AI agent proposes one change at a time, a custom evaluation harness measures it against a frozen test set, and every run gets appended to a log with its settings, result and next decision. The agent does the all the work of dataset generation, training, evaluation and diagnosis.

Universal Windows Platform Application on Raspberry Pi

Sat, 23 May 2020 02:57:40 +0000

Universal Windows Platform (UWP) provides a common app platform on every device that runs Windows 10. The core APIs in UWP are the same on all Windows devices – including Desktop PC, Mobile Phone, XBox, Hololens, IOT devices and others.

You can target specific device capabilities of a device family with extension SDKs, but you don’t have to do that if you are only using core APIs. Those core APIs include a very impressive set of UI capabilities. What that means is that you can create a UWP application using C# and XAML which will run on an ARM based processor on Raspberry Pi – because Windows 10 IOT Core runs on that.

Creating Android Apps using C# and Xamarin

Sat, 21 Feb 2015 17:30:25 +0000

You can create native Android and iOS applications using C#, with Xamarin. I explored the capabilities of Xamarin tools and the development experience with Xamarin to create an Android version of CensusMapper. CensusMapper displays U.S. Census data on a Map. I created the original application for Windows 8 (WinRT) using C#. I have since converted it to an MVVM (C#) application, HTML/Javascript (WinJS) version and more recently to a Universal Windows App running on Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 8.1. In that tradition, now it is faithfully ported to run on Android devices, using C# and Xamarin. CensusMapper is available on Google Play Store.

Using Layer Diagrams – Keeping your MVVM code from turning into spaghetti

Sat, 09 Nov 2013 20:46:16 +0000

Raleigh Code Camp 2013 is wrapping up this afternoon. The venue and the crowd was phenomenal. I really enjoyed presenting“Using Layer Diagrams - Keeping your MVVM code from turning into spaghetti”. Thanks to everyone who attended the presentation.

John Sonmez, Our Keynote Speaker, made my day by accepting my request to attend my presentation. It was awesome to have him in the audience and to get feedback from him!

Understanding and Using System.Transactions

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 16:10:42 +0000

These are some resources to help grasp System.Transactions functionality and use it effectively in your projects:

Features Provided by System.Transactions to create transactional applications
Implementing an Implicit Transaction using Transaction Scope
MSDN Magazine Articles by John Papa:
- ADO.NET and System.Transactions
- Revisiting System.Transactions
These are specific to TransactionScope(the way to go in most cases):
- Here is a practical example of Using TransactionScope to handle transactions in .net.
- This article in MSDN Magazine gets in depth with the way a TransactionScope like functionality can be implemented. Gives you a good understanding of what is happening under the hood when using TransactionScope in some Repository implementations in multi-threaded scenarios.
- This CodeProject article is another example of implementing a transactional repository.
- There are excellent tips here about configuring TransactionScope when using it with SQL Server.
This is a good resource for understanding CommitableTransaction usage.
And this one on the CodeProject has brilliant, in-depth and under-the-hood coverage - Truly Understanding .NET Transactions and WCF Implementation.

Using Model-View-ViewModel in WPF Applications

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:23:39 +0000

I am presenting at SoCalCodeCamp this weekend (January 30th, 2010) - Advanced WPF - Using Model-View-ViewModel in WPF Applications.

tasklist-mockup

Agenda :

1. Roles of the M-V-VM triad

2. Why use M-V-VM ?

3. Characteristics of the ViewModel

4. Build a Sample WPF Application using M-V-VM

Resources :

MSDN Magazine Article and Sample Application Download
Martin Fowler’s description of the ‘Presentation Model ‘
Jeremy Miller’s ‘Build Your Own CAB’ series

Job Opening - Windows GUI Developer

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 21:04:30 +0000

We have a 3-4 month contract position open for a Windows GUI Developer in our group at Calabasas, California:

2+ years experience developing C++/C# Windows thick-client applications
Expert in GUI development on Windows
Expert in Object Oriented Analysis and Design (OOA/OOD)
Deep understanding of client-server software development
Experience in multithreading, and thread synchronization
Excellent communication skills (written and verbal)
Highly organized and detail oriented
BSCS/BSEE or equivalent

If you are interested, contact me. The position is available now.

Dial Gauge is a ProgressBar

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 06:49:43 +0000

I am not just being philosophical here. In WPF, ControlTemplates allow you to transform a control’s appearance. This is not the same as applying stylesheets. This is an entirely new level of customization. What you see in the screenshot below looks like a Dial but is actually a simple ProgressBar control wearing a “Dial” template. The Dial template was created using Microsoft Expression Blend .

Include the ControlTemplate as a Window.Resource and then assign it to ProgressBar element’s Template attribute :

PostSharp with SharpDevelop

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 05:04:43 +0000

SharpDevelop3.0 uses MSBuild. Including PostSharp in your build process is transparent if you are doing a global install using PostSharp installer. If you are doing a per-project installation using “Binary - No Installer”download, you will need to import the PostSharp targets into your .csproj file -


 True

C:\code\PostSharp-1.0.8.316-Binary\

For more details, read the install instructions included in the PostSharp download and under-the-hood-of-msbuild-integration.

To use local PostSharp binaries (relative to your project) , modify your .csproj file as follows -

Using Custom Converter in XAML

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 05:22:12 +0000

In my previous post : WPF-LINQ To SQL Sample, I had to resort to modifying .dbml file to get the images stored as varbinary into the WPF ListView control. I had to change the Type of image fields to System.Byte[], instead of using System.Data.Linq.Binary. A better way to do this is to use a custom converter. WPF allows you to specify custom converter as part of the Binding in .xaml, like this -

WPF - LINQ to SQL Sample

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 07:15:35 +0000

This exercise in binding a WPF ListView control with LINQ to SQL was a lot of fun ! The following image shows data from AdventureWorks sample database displayed in the ListView control. The end result is very admirable, even in this very basic demo. Feeling a complete sense of freedom is unavoidable when working with WPF.

This sample demonstrates :

LINQ to SQL mapping.
WPF ListView Control DataBinding.
Displaying images stored in database as varbinary in WPF control.

The sample code can be downloaded here : WPF-LINQ to SQL Sample License : Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Customize log4net Output Path

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:56:55 +0000

The default log4net output path is relative to the startup directory of your executable. To customize the output path, you can override the base Appender’s File property in your own Appender class. The following example describes how to route the log files relative to the temp folder :

 public class MyOwnAppender : log4net.Appender.RollingFileAppender
 {
 public override string File
 {
 get
 {
 return base.File;
 }

 set
 {
 if (Path.IsPathRooted(value))
 {
 base.File = value;
 }
 else
 {
 base.File = Path.Combine(Path.GetTempPath(), value);
 }
 }
 }
 }

Your log4net config file must be modified so that log4net can locate and use your custom Appender. If MyOwnAppender is in MyNamespace and you have implemented it in MyLoggerLib.dll :

Database Schema Version Control Tool

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 03:05:52 +0000

It is essential to treat database schema as source code and apply all the norms and best practices applicable to it. From what I hear and read, database schema version control is non-existent in too many projects.

Various techniques to accomplish version control of database schemas have been discussed and published. Martin Fowler and Pramod Sadagale has written a comprehensive article on Evolutionary Database Design. It is a must-read for everyone involved with database development.