Ash Tewari

.NET

Does Xamarin have a future?

tewari

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. The formidable Microsoft has perhaps spelled death for Xamarin by standing up a competitor to Mono. If you are a developer getting started with Xamarin or already using […]

Understanding and Using System.Transactions

tewari

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 […]

Dial Gauge is a ProgressBar

tewari

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 : Of course that is not all. The ControlTemplate must define some named elements of FrameworkElement type. Charles Petzold has explained it in detail : MSDN Magazine Article. So, I will not repeat it here. The sample code can be […]

WPF – LINQ to SQL Sample

tewari

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.