.Net

I’m excited to announce the release of SPCHR. Pronounced as “speaker”. I know, I know. My apologies, it was too late at night and that’s the best I could come up with ;) It is a Windows desktop application for speech-to-text transcription. You can use it to “add” voice input to applications that don’t natively support it. It works anywhere you can type or paste text. You can use it entirely locally on your PC if you like, so it is private and secure. Key Features Flexible: SPCHR can use either Azure Speech Services or a local OpenAI Whisper model, giving you the flexibility to choose between cloud-based and local transcription. Zero Configuration: The application works immediately with local Whisper processing - no account setup required! Global Hotkey: Start and stop recording from any application with Ctrl+Alt+L. Seamless Integration: Transcribed text is automatically pasted into your active window. Getting Started Clone the repository Build the solution using Visual Studio and run it Press Ctrl+Alt+L and start speaking Watch as your words appear in your active window For those wanting cloud-based transcription, simply add your Azure Speech Services credentials to the configuration file. Open Source SPCHR is released under the MIT License, and I welcome contributions from the community. Whether you’re interested in adding features, fixing bugs, or improving documentation, your help is appreciated. ...

Xamarin’s cross-platform mobile application framework has Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android at its core. Both Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.iOS are based on Mono. Mono is an open source implementation of .NET (CLI and CLS). Xamarin’s customers are Microsoft (.NET) shops. Microsoft is open sourcing .NET itself. What does all this mean for Xamarin? Is Xamarin’s competitive advantage going to be undermined by the open source .NET? Microsoft’s Universal Application Platform (UAP) and the promise of making .NET applications run on Mac and Linux seems to indicate that Microsoft may be emerging as a threat to Xamarin. ...

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. ...

I will be attending Jason Beres’ “RIA with Silverlight and WCF” lecture on Saturday the 4th. Check-out the details here : Los Angeles .NET Developers Group. Let me know If you are planning to be there. It will be a great opportunity to meet.

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 : ...

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.