http://blog.bignickolson.com ...my blog on what I'm learning, working, or playing with in technology Thu, 12 Aug 2010 03:36:59 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Recently, I've been doing a fun side project.  It's always fun when you can come up with an excuse to combine your hobbies or interests.   So I came up with the idea of using a Wii remote to calculate the force of a strike on a heavy bag. I've had ... http://blog.bignickolson.com/2010/08/11/wii-remote-force-calculator/ So, as promised, here is the followup to what I was doing with Silverlight reflection that made me need access to Internal members of a class. Localization in Silverlight is still an interesting story and everybody seems to have their own way of doing it.  The client I'm on uses Excel ... http://blog.bignickolson.com/2010/04/27/uses-for-silverlight-reflection-pt-ii/ If you want to use reflection in Silverlight you have to come to grips with the fact that you can only reflect on public members of the class.  This is a very important part of the security features in Silverlight. However, I have a scenario that would be greatly ... http://blog.bignickolson.com/2010/04/20/silverlight-reflection-and-internal-members/ I've been doing some Windows Mobile work again and keep getting an issue with the Windows Mobile Device Center and my emulator.  Sometimes when I cradle the emulator it works just fine, other times it doesn't pick up the connection.  It seemed rebooting fixd the problem, but I'm ... http://blog.bignickolson.com/2010/04/02/cradling-device-emulator-on-windows-7-in-vs-2008/ One of the common things that comes up on multiple projects using WPF is the ability to overlay the screen or a certain portion of it.  Either to create a richer modal-type experience than a message box provides or to block access to a certain portion of the screen while ... http://blog.bignickolson.com/2009/10/15/overlaying-controls-in-wpf-with-adorners/ So, it's been a few months. Been very busy, got married, closing on a house in November.  Started a new project at work, for the government.  Despite my repeated requests I have yet to receive a dark pair of sunglasses and handgun.  I thought that they were standard issue for ... http://blog.bignickolson.com/2009/10/15/back-in-business/ More a short rant today than anything else.  If you are writing a DAL most of it can be generated and be completely boilerplate.  Everything looks the same, acts the same, is called the same way.very beautiful. There's always exceptions, however.  Sometimes you just NEED to do something more ... http://blog.bignickolson.com/2009/06/09/transactions-inside-stored-procedures/ I recently was working on the ubiquitous photo/slideshow app in WPF.  This is something I've been tinkering with off and on for last 6 months.  The original intention was to create a photo slideshow application for my upcoming wedding.  Being the nerd, a static video slideshow just wasn't going to ... http://blog.bignickolson.com/2009/05/18/frame-based-animation-in-wpf/ Virtualization in WPF is amazing when you get it, annoying when you lose it.  I'm working on a form where the user can dynamically filter and sort a ListBox.  I'm using a DataTemplate to give a nice card-like view to each object, which makes it take up a  lot of ... http://blog.bignickolson.com/2009/05/02/wpf-listbox-virtualization/ Last night I was fighting with repairing my MythTV box, the final remaining linux PC in my house.  My video card went down and trying to replacing it the nVidia that was in there with the ATI replacement I picked up turned out to be too frustrating.  Steps I went ... http://blog.bignickolson.com/2009/04/30/so-long-linux-remember-the-good-times/