Announcing SPMReader

So after a few comments on the DX18 Template Editing Application showing some interest I decided to create a quick POC type project on GitHub. The application is called SPMReader. This application reads the SPM files from Spektrum radios (currently only the DX18). Currently it is written in .NET 4.5.1. There’s no reason that it couldn’t be compiled in a more Mono friendly version of .NET, though. If you’re on a WinOS or have access to a Windows VM I suggest grabbing the latest version of Visual Studio Dev Express and trying it out. I’m not ruling out a Java port. I’m … Continue reading

Updated: Avalon Wizard MVVM Project

Here’s an updated version of the Avalon Wizard MVVM Project that I posted about a while ago. This newly updated solution contains step navigation along the right hand side. Also, I’ve included a test solution for testing. Just a note, the testing project is pretty rough. I haven’t commented it much as I didn’t really think I’d include it. I have been just using it for internal testing. When I get a moment I’ll go through and explain what I’m testing and how everything works. For now I wanted to touch on a few things that I are in the … Continue reading

NuGet Package Publishing

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Remember when I told you about the awesomeness that is NuGet? No?! Well go read about it silly! I only told you half the story. Consuming packages in your projects is very helpful for most developers. Why reinvent the wheel? However, once you create a library why not share it with others? This article will explain how to go about publish a package to a NuGet feed. I will discuss what you need to prepare your library for package style deployment. Covering the actual packaging will follow the preparation phase.  The last item I will cover will be versioning. Turning Your Library Into … Continue reading

NuGet, A New Way to Get Libraries

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How Do You Manage Dependencies in Your .NET Project? Every .NET developer has been there, sitting down, opening up VisualStudio, creating a new solution for some project (ha! no pun intended), and then adding the miriad of references to external libraries that you need in order to keep yourself sane through the coding experience. Each library you download and add to your projects becomes a dependency, almost a liability. Enter Nuget. It’s pronounced “new get”. Quite simply NuGet is an open source (free) package management tool for .NET. If you’re familiar with Maven in Java then you’ll have a good … Continue reading

Xceed DataGridControl Watermark Removal Example Application

Some people have had trouble working through my example for the Xceed Community DataGridControl Watermark Removal. I had several posts show up on the Community Toolkit discussion thread asking for help or that it didn’t work. Linked at the bottom of this post is a VS2012 project that gives an example of how to use the extension method. From reading the discussion thread it seems that some may not understand extension methods. Here is a link to a MSDN C# programming article about extension methods. If there is interest I’ll write up a post going though the article with my … Continue reading

Avalon Wizard MVVM

For the past year I’ve been relying upon a wonderful library called Avalon Wizard. It can be found over at its CodePlex site. I did my best trying to contact the maintainer of the site, but wasn’t able to get a hold of him. Turns out that he answered my discussion post, but for some reason CodePlex never alerted me to his reply! I actually had my CodePlex account setup to send to a wrong email. Avalon Wizard is a WPF control that lets you take a Window object and turn it into a wizard that looks like it came straight … Continue reading

When You Want A User To Notice A Button

HTML Got Rid Of Blink But that doesn’t mean you can’t reproduce it. Well, I’m not using HTML; I’m using WPF. Our users were consistently missing a button because they would get into a click-through freenzy. I decided to make it standout a little more with this code: What Does That Do? It takes this image  and overlays this image  on top of it. The opacity of the image changes from 1 to 0 to 1 every 1/2 second. Of course, you switch the Panel.ZOrder from the highlight image to the other image and it will give a red glow outline to your … Continue reading

Xceed Community DataGridControl Watermark Removal

Update 2 I put together a sample application to show this code working. I’m all for accreditation of code. Especially when it is released open source. However, when your open source code contains an “unremovable” watermark it seems to me that has crossed a line. Why not just release a closed-source lite version of the software and retain rights to it. For the record I could easily download your source and remove the offending watermark code. I decided to do the community a favor and post an extension for the Xceed Grid from the Extended WPF Toolkit to remove the watermark in C#. … Continue reading