I’ve submitted my first application for Windows Phone! It is very simple app. Marketplace has a good amount of similar apps: Planning Poker. Anyway, I’ve wrote couple own behaviors for TextBox and want to share this code with you.

If you are Silverlight/WPF developer and have already used Blend than you should know what are Behaviors and Interactions. If not or if you forget what is it I will remind you. You can find these libraries in directory “c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Expression\Blend\” (in case if you have Windows x86 than you should remove from path (x86)). And of course these libraries exist only in case if Blend has been installed. In this directory you can find packs of libraries for WPF/Silverlight and WindowsPhone. If you don’t know what are Behaviors and Interaction I suggest you to read Expression Blend SDK for Windows Phone on MSDN. In few words: this is approach to extend default control’s features, more than! this approach allows you to use MVVM pattern.

Let’s extend some features of default TextBox control.

Silverlight 4 in Action (Manning, Pete Brown) – this is second book, which I read about Silverlight. First was Pro Silverlight 3 in C# (Apress, Matthew MacDonald), which helped me when I was need to very quickly know more about Silverlight after WPF. After reading Silverlight 4 in Action I think that this is best book about Silverlight. But maybe I should compare this book with Pro Business Applications with Silverlight.

I think that most of Silverlight and WPF developers know book’s author’s blog Pete Brown. Since 2009 author is Microsoft employee, since 2007 Silverlight became the main technology of development for him. You can think that Silverlight 4 in Action is second edition, because Manning has also Silverlight 2 in Action, which I didn’t read. But Silverlight 2 in Action has different authors than SL4 in Action. So talk about what’s new in Silverlight 4 in Action is no good, it is different book, written by another author. Looks like this is first book of Pete Brown, and it is written very good.

After buying paper book you will get also free e-book version (pdf), which you can read with Kindle device for example (only in album rotation). The book has about 800 pages, has 3 parts and 25 chapters.

First time when I familiarized with unit testing was 5 or 6 years ago. It was start of my developing career. I remember that somebody told me about code coverage. At that time I didn’t write any Unit tests. Guy, who was my team lead, told me “Do you see operator if with three conditions? You should check all of these conditions”. So, after that I had written some code, I should go to interface and try to invoke all code which I wrote from user interface. Nice? At current time I know little more about tests and unit testing. I have not participated in projects, designed by Test Driven Development (TDD). Basics of my knowledge are a spying code of my colleagues, some articles and screencasts. I had decide that I should know much more, and became a real professional of unit testing, this is why I had start to read book The art of Unit Testing with Examples in .NET. More than, in my current job place looks like I’m just one who writing unit tests for my code. I should show good examples of my tests.

At previous my blog post I wrote about how to implement validation with DataAnnotations. I this part of my article I will describe interfaces IDataErrorInfoand INotifyDataErrorInfo. I recommend you to read first part before read this part. Because I use example from previous part.

Silverlight 4 has some new ways for validate input values (some new approaches to implement validation in your application). First approach is DataAnnotation. In this case you should describe validation rules with attributes. Two other ways (both of them is came with Silverlight 4) – you should implement one of interfaces for your ViewModel: IDataErrorInfo or INotifyDataErrorInfo. I want to talk about all of these approaches, about pros and cons of using each of them. Goal of this article to get a best way to implement validation of input values in my and your applications. This part of article about DataAnnotations.

I got two new books from O’Reilly about Html 5 and JavaScript (ECMAScript 5):

• Mark Pilgrim - Html 5: Up and Running
• Shelley Powers – JavaScript Cookbook

Both of these books are published by O’Reilly. First book with mark Google Press.

I had read about Code Contracts long time ago, but I didn’t see a reason to use contract instead of simple tests and argument's check with Exception's throws. Only now I’m trying to use them at real project. I didn’t see why I need to write:

Contract.Requires<ArgumentNullException>(argument == null); 

Instead of like I did it before:

if (argument == null) 

    throw new ArgumentNullException(“argument”)

Couple of weeks ago I had reinstall my Windows 7 on my laptop (I bought SSD for my laptop). After I install ReSharper with Visual Studio 2010 after run I accidental choosed “Go to the metadata” instead of like usual “Go to Object Explorer” by Ctrl and Mouse Click. So when I clicked on some class of System.xxx (basic classes of .NET) I looked at source code of these classes and found that they are using Code Contracts. I thought this is why I need to understand why I need to use contracts in my code, so I started to use them in some small applications and tried to find some interesting case.

Couple days ago I got a question about how to register hotkey in Windows for WPF application. I remembered that one year ago I was solving the same problem in WinForms application, I was registering hot keys for my application, it was Vista Keys Extender project. I knew that my project worked, so I suggested author of question to use code of my project to solve his problem. But as we learned later in WPF message handle mechanism different from WinForms. So I started to find solution for WPF application. I copied my old code from my old project and started to rewrite it step-by-step.

Couple of weeks ago I wrote about my small utility Config Transformation Tool, which I wrote with base of web.config transformation task. In those moments I was thinking about opportunity to pass parameters to transform file, to tool can replaces parameters in transformation file with special values. Yesterday I resolved this issue. From now I use class Microsoft.Web.Publishing.Tasks.XmlTransformation which works with strings and XmlDocuments instead of files. I had two tasks: (a) I need method which will replace parameters on values, (b) I need method which will be parse command line and create dictionary of parameters.

Couple of weeks ago I got a paper copy of book Pablo Cibraro, Kurt Claeys, Fabio Cozzolino, Johann Grabner - Professional WCF 4: Windows Communication Foundation with .NET 4. This book has not a lot of pages, just about 400. Really, I don’t remember when I saw so thin book about some technology. But maybe this book has not a lot pages, but a lot of interesting themes.

First chapter is patterns and principles of SOA applications. This is the best chapter in this book. When I was reading this chapter I saw that authors have a lot experience of creating applications with Service-oriented architecture. Authors described all possible architecture principles, with which you can create SOA applications. And they did not limit themselves to the principles that are possible with WCF. I think that this chapter is “must read” for all developers, it is doesn’t matter what technologies you are using: php, java or .net. And this is good luck that Wrox published this chapter online: Design Principles and Patterns. It is about 30 pages, so read it right now.