I've never used the UI designer, and do everything in XAML. Even Blend still scares the hell out of me to this day, and I'm a proficient WPF/XAML developer. Writing XAML is no different to a web developer writing HTML - nobody uses drag'n'drop interfaces on that platform. Admittedly it's easier to see your changes by just pressing F5 in the open browser window, rather than have to run the app...

Our organisation uses an in-house TFS server which I originally set up, but it's still running TFS2012 as it always seemed a hassle to upgrade, along with the potential disruption. In recent weeks I've been trialling VSTS, and have now made the decision to move over to it. I've been really impressed with it, although this may partly have something to do with comparing it to such an old version of TFS. On our in-house TFS I customised the build processes to perform additional steps such as changing version numbers in AssemblyInfo files before building, running StyleCop, generating setup.exe installers, etc. This sort of thing was a real black art, and not something I ever want to see again, but in VSTS things like this are trivially easy using build tasks. We also have an in-house NuGet repo, but it's a manual process to generate packages from a build (I ended up writing an app to automate some of this). Again this is trivial in VSTS, both to generate a package and to host it. The only issue I found with VSTS was the relatively small amount of free "build time" you get per month (240 mins I think). We utilise CI builds so would end up hitting this limit in no time at all so the plan is to upgrade to a CI/CD (hosted) pipeline that provides unlimited build time (£20/month I think). Unfortunately, being on such an old version of TFS we can't migrate to VSTS, so we'll end up adding all the solutions in from scratch, losing the earlier history. We'll probably end up keeping the in-house server as an "archive" for this purpose.

As a long-time user of TFS I decided to see what all the fuss was about with Git, so I've been having a play over the last couple of days. I'm using VS2017 and its built-in Git/Team Explorer by the way. All I can say is: come back TFS all is forgiven, and pray that MS have no plans to ditch it in favour of Git. While Git may be fine for those who have never used a VCS before, and don't know any better, compared with the likes of TFS or SVN, Git is a great lumbering, over-complicated, pedantic, jump-through-hoops mound of a system. An aid to productivity it ain't. [It seems I'm not alone in these opinions either]. My main gripe is the additional "tiers", particularly the local repository (and the "index", although I have still yet to get my head around that one). It feels like I can't do anything without first committing to the local repo, whether it's switching to a different branch, comparing files, merging branches, etc. It just seems to be an unnecessary extra step, and if you forget to commit before (say) switching to a different branch then I can imagine a whole world of pain erupting. Comparing a local file with what's on the server isn't straightforward either. It appears that I must first do a "fetch" in order to access the server-based history in order to compare with my local copy (even this is convoluted, but MS takes some of the blame on this one for their clunky UI). Performing any action in Git feels like it involves at least three steps. Admittedly I don't really "get" the idea of local branches. I believe many devs create a branch for each feature or bug fix, but I don't understand why (if someone could enlighten me). It just seems to be something else to have to keep track of where you are, and to potentially go wrong. I don't think our organisation will be moving away from TFS any time soon - there would be mutiny in the office. Rant over.

I found it - it's called the "WPF Bag of Tricks". The app was originally at bot.codeplex.com, but this has now gone and it can instead be found here: https://github.com/thinkpixellab/bot[^] Not sure why I thought it was something to do with Microsoft - perhaps the guys running this company were employees once.

I once came across an app (can't remember if it was Silverlight or WPF) that showcased various features of XAML, with things like transitions, drag/drop, and a whole load of other things, which you chose from a list down the left-hand side. I think the project had a bit of a weird name and was written by one of the XAML team at MS. I can't remember what it was called though, or where to find it. Anyone?

Has anyone else been seeing this ad embedded into web pages in recent days? It's appearing on an awful lot of IT sites and is driving me up the wall. It's cleverly embedded into the article text and expands from nowhere as you scroll down the page. Could it be adware, or just MS doing some aggressive marketing (the ad company seems to be called "teads.tv")? Still not as annoying as having to dismiss website cookie messages on an infuriatingly regular basis though...

I've recently been having doubts about the way I've been approaching certain aspects of OO design in my projects (C#), and am looking for some advice. I use Castle Windsor IoC/DI framework, where dependencies are injected via class constructors. I also use a mocking framework (Moq) for my unit tests. To support both frameworks I tend to find myself doing one of two things: - creating an interface for every class, even if it's internal, or unlikely to have more than one concrete implementation (such as helper classes) - or, I'll make such a class "mockable", which requires giving it a parameterless constructor, and marking its members as "virtual". Both of these approaches feel like I'm writing additional code just to satisfy these two frameworks (particularly unit testing), but it does mean I can test a class in isolation, without it calling into potentially complex helper class functionality (which is the whole point of a unit test isn't it?). My projects are typically self-contained desktop applications with no public API. Some articles I've read suggest that I should therefore not be using things like DI and interfaces, and I shouldn't even be unit testing internal classes. If I followed the latter advice then none of my code would be covered! (If you're wondering, I'm able to unit test internal classes because I use the "InternalsVisibleTo" attribute in my assemblies). I'm now wondering if I'm taking the "separation of concerns" aspect of OO too far? Am I right to be using dependency injection with internal classes that will only ever have one concrete implementation (e.g. a "helper" class)? Or should I ditch DI and just instantiate such dependent classes? The latter would of course create a strong-coupling, making unit testing more difficult, especially if that helper class contained complex functionality, did database work, etc. I hope I've made my concerns clear. To summarise, I guess I would like to know if I'm not using DI for its intended purpose, and whether my approach to unit testing and mocking is correct.

Although I have a Twitter account, I very rarely use it, but in recent days I've had a couple of strange tweets sent from my account. One simply said "Hi!" and another said "Fwd:(5)". I received an email from Twitter last night to say that they had reset my password as they suspected my account had been compromised. Needless to say I've changed my password, but I'm not sure how it could have been hacked in the first place - the original password was very strong, and I only access Twitter via Windows phone and iPad, so can't see malware being to blame on these platforms? This seems to have been a widespread thing, as I've found a number of people who have had the same "Fwd:" tweets sent from their accounts recently, but I've not heard anything about a possible Twitter hack/attack. Anyone?

Around 12 years old (31 years ago now!) on a Sinclair ZX-81. Those were the days, when you bought a computer that came with a programming manual! Before that I used to go into Laskys after school (a UK hi-fi/computer store back in the early 80s) and do the classic stuff like this on the various computers they had on display:- 10 PRINT "ANDREW" 20 GOTO 10 I was often asked to leave the store.

Resharper + Stylecop gets my vote too, if you are in the .Net world.

Doh, I hadn't seen the rather obvious yellow bars around the CP site asking me to reconfirm my email address. Oh well, sorted now.

Since changing employer a few months ago, and updating my Code Project login email, I've stopped getting the daily insider email. I've checked with our IT guys who have confirmed they aren't blocking emails from this domain, and can see CP emails coming in to other people in the company. Any ideas?

The probability of at least two people sharing the same birthday is 0.5073. Yay, I've found a use for Wolfram Alpha! http://www04.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=same+birthday&f1=23&f=BirthdayProblem.n_23&x=5&y=9[^]