Articles : Recent articles

On this page you will find an overview of all articles that I have written since 1997. The more recent articles deal with software development with .NET (C#, Visual Studio, LINQ, WPF, Silverlight, WCF RIA Services, ...) in particular. The older articles were often written for the purposes of courses or demonstrations at my computerclub and these articles are mostly about photo editing, databases, Windows, Office, Delphi and PHP.

Below the most recent additions are shown. Use the left panel to filter the more than 100 articles.

These articles can be used freely for personal use. Placing the full articles on other websites is not allowed without the permission of the author.

The Entity Framework together with LINQ to Entities are very powerful technologies to access and manipulate data from a database. But when you need to gain performance or need extra security, stored procedures and user defined functions are often required. In this first article in a series of three I will focus on how to use stored procedures in the Entity Framework 4.0. more 2010-08-30 - English - .NET, Entity Framework, Database

Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4 offer a lot of new features. I like all the new features but I was especially interested in improvements that could help my current developments which are based on a M-V-VM architecture with ViewModels and a lot of bindings with UI controls. In this article I will focus on the new design-time features. Along the way I will show a lot of screenshots and try to cover some other new Silverlight 4 features. more 2010-01-17 - English - .NET, Silverlight

Silverlight and RIA Services are great technologies and the Model-View-ViewModel (M-V-VM) pattern is a nice approach to keep UI and logic separated. But using the combination of view models with item controls, dataforms and commands can be a laborious task because the databinding features in Silverlight are quite limited. In this article I will demonstrate how binding with ViewModels can be improved by using the BindingHelper class and by creating your own command behaviors. more 2009-08-23 - English - .NET, Silverlight

A few months ago Microsoft released the first preview of .NET RIA Services. This new framework promises to simplify building n-tier Line of Business (LoB) applications by providing patterns, components and tools to build services, query data, handle CRUD operations, resolve concurrency, manage data validation, ... In this first article I will focus on the current limitations and I will offer you some of my workarounds and tips. more 2009-05-17 - English - .NET, RIA Services, Silverlight

My personal website SCIP.be has been updated and now it offers several new features and improvements. There is support for Media RSS feeds and the great browser plugin CoolIris which can be used to navigate through photo galleries in 3D. All images are improved, articles are linked to several categories and pages can be shared more easily. more 2009-04-23 - English - SCIP.be

LINQPad was introduced in 2007 and nowadays it is a very mature tool which should be in the toolbox of every .NET developer. Version 1.35 offers new connection providers and it has native support for LINQ to SQL and the ADO.NET Entity Framework data models. It also provides new query types like SQL and Entity-SQL. In this small article I will highlight some of the new features. more 2009-04-14 - English - .NET, LINQPad, LINQ, Entity Framework

A common problem when developing Silverlight applications is how to share classes and in particular (Entity Framework) entities which are compiled for the full .NET framework in a Silverlight application. Silverlight is a browser plugin and a subset of the full .NET framework. Therefore Visual Studio does not allow referencing .NET assemblies from your Silverlight application. In this article I will demonstrate a very simple technique to share source code and it will give several real world examples and some handy tips. more 2009-01-27 - English - .NET, Silverlight, Entity Framework, WCF

This small article contains a few C# scripts which can be executed in LINQPad to clean up and organize Outlook mailboxes. If you want to keep Outlook performing as fast as possible and to reduce the size of mailboxes then these scripts and my OutlookProvider component can simplify this job. more 2009-01-24 - English - .NET, Office, Outlook, LINQ, LINQPad

In addition to my article about querying the metadata of the ADO.NET Entity Framework I have implemented several extension methods that utilize this metadata. This article will describe a set of extension methods which can be used to extend the standard Entity Framework classes (ObjectQuery, EntityObject, ObjectStateManager, ...). more 2009-01-12 - English - .NET, Entity Framework

A while ago I was looking for a way to query Excel with LINQ. I needed a simple solution that allowed me to query tables in Excel worksheets in a tool like LINQPad. This article will describe how I implemented my ExcelProvider and it will demonstrate its features by giving an example of a LINQ query and the result in LINQPad. more 2008-12-17 - English - .NET, Office, Excel, LINQ, LINQPad

A few months ago I posted several articles about the ADO.NET Entity Framework beta 3. In the meanwhile the Entity Framework has been officially released and a lot of resources about this technology have become available. In the last few weeks I have been taking a closer look at the metadata services. This article will demonstrate 20 examples which use LINQ to query the metadata collections of the ADO.NET Entity Framework. These queries can be used to examine the structure of your Entity Data Model or to get statistics about it. more 2008-12-02 - English - .NET, Entity Framework

A few months ago I published an article about my LINQ AsHierarchy extension method. This extension method can be used to convert a flat collection of records to a hierarchical structure of nested collections. I got a lot of enthusiastic responses and questions so I decided to improve this technique a little further. This new article will describe the new features and demonstrates how to use the LINQ to Objects and the new LINQ to SQL AsHierarchy extension methods. more 2008-08-25 - English - .NET, LINQ, Entity Framework, LINQ to SQL

Data binding is one of the most powerful features of WPF/Silverlight. It allows developers to achieve more with less code. However, when building user interfaces with WPF/Silverlight, you often need to create your own value converters. A common mistake is to implement custom value converters for each and every binding that requires one. Of course value converters can be generalized an re-used. In this article I will show you the source code of my library of generic custom value converters and I will demonstrate in which scenarios you can use them. more 2008-07-17 - English - .NET, WPF, Silverlight

This article will demonstrate how to use the Google Maps HTTP geocoding service and how to handle REST services and XML in general. The Google Maps service can be used to retrieve the latitude, longitude and a lot of other geographical data from a given address. more 2008-06-20 - English - .NET, GIS/Geocoding

WPF UIAutomation is a framework from Microsoft to automate Windows applications. In this article I will demonstrate a lot of features (invoking button clicks, focusing controls, entering data, sending keystrokes, subscribing to events, ...) and compare it with the open-source project White. more 2008-06-06 - English - .NET, UI Automation, WPF, WinForms

This short article covers the most important features of the open-source White framework and the Microsoft UISpy tool. White can be used for UI automation and my C# .NET application demonstrates how to automate the Windows calculator by sending keystrokes, clicking on buttons and menus, pressing function keys, accessing textboxes, ... more 2008-05-04 - English - .NET, UI Automation, WPF, WinForms

This article explains how to convert data from a self referencing table (adjacency model) to a hierarchy of nested collections (nested set model). The new LINQ AsHierarchy() extension method can be used to convert data and bind it to WPF TreeViews. more 2008-03-29 - English - .NET, LINQ, Entity Framework, LINQ to SQL

This small article about the Windows Presentation Foundation will demonstrate how to use a WPF ProcessingControl and a BackgroundWorker thread to create responsive user interfaces and how to give visual feedback about the progress. more 2008-03-11 - English - .NET, WPF

In this third part of my series of articles about the ADO.NET Entity Framework I will demonstrate how to add and modify data, use change tracking and handle concurrency conflicts. I have also implemented a Dump() extension method which can be useful for displaying all change tracking information. more 2008-02-25 - English - .NET, Entity Framework

A new version of the open-source PowerToys for the Class Designer and Distributed System Designer has been released. These add-ins provides additional functionality for the Visual Studio Class Designer, such as HTML/XML export, new creation commands, filtering commands, formatting commands, a pan/zoom window, a documentation window, a floating properties window, ... This small post describes how to install it and shows a screenshot which highlights almost all features. more 2008-02-23 - English - .NET, Visual Studio, Tools

Stefan Cruysberghs