Tips

  • Soliciting hand drawn feedback from your users

    There are many instances when using screen capture is essential in communicating. In this tip, contributor Walt Ritscher explains how to create hand drawn notes on screen captured images with WPF I...

  • Navigating your code in Visual Studio 2010

    Once you get a couple pages of code written for a project, you'll want to use the Visual Studio navigation features to move intelligently through your code. Read this tip to learn about Visual Stud...

  • Using the Client Networking Stack in Silverlight

    There are many scenarios where you need to communicate with a webserver from your Silverlight application. For example you might want to lazy load files from your server to your application when th...

  • Using the extension in Visual Studio 2010

    Visual Studio 2010 has implemented a great new extension with Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools. In this tip, contributor Walt Ritscher explains the multiple functions of this extension and provid...

  • How to write scalable Silverlight applications

    There are many ways to scale a Silverlight application and these tips should provide a decent foundation to start from.

  • Profiling Silverlight 4 applications with Visual Studio

    Profiling Silverlight applications is a proactive step to ensure your applications are fine-tuned to deliver the best possible experience to the customer.

  • Changing the cursor in WPF

    Expert Walt Ritscher discusses how in Windows Presentation Foundation you can set the mouse pointer for any element using the Cursor property.

  • Setting defaults for null values in WPF

    Dealing with null values in data sources can be tricky. Windows Presentation Foundation has built in support for binding to null data sources.

  • Getting a DialogResult

    When interacting with the user, you need to gather information for use later in the application. Dialog windows are a common way to solicit this information.

  • Performance tips for Visual Studio 2010

    Find performance tips that may accelerate your experience while using Visual Studio 2010.

  • Using TFS to manage distributed teams

    Microsoft Visual Studio the latest version of Team Foundation Service (TFS) is packed with features that facilitate the coordination and management of distributed teams.

  • Taming the help engine in Visual Studio 2010

    Learn a few pointers that are find handy when using the help engine in Visual Studio 2010.

  • Managing large databases with SQL Server partitioning

    When you're dealing with really large data sets (think in terabytes of data) it's especially important to save time wherever you can. Partitioning, and the resulting partition elimination, can save...

  • Using search engines effectively in Visual Studio 2010

    Visual Studio provides a number of handy search tools. The most obvious place to use search is in your source code but Microsoft has also made search available in other parts of the IDE like the To...

  • Moveable Tooltip for Silverlight

    Expert Walt Ritscher discusses using Tooltips and Popups for images in Silverlight.

  • Intro to Visual Studio’s new Scrum 1.0 template

    Visual Studio’s new Scrum 1.0 template is the perfect process template for agile managers. It combines a simple, flexible, and easy to use interface with powerful reports and work item types to hel...

  • Tooltips in child elements

    A tooltip is a simple concept. You put a tooltip on a WPF control and whenever the mouse hovers over the control WPF launches the tooltip. This article explores some of these idiosyncrasies in WPF.

  • Draw a bounding rectangle during selection

    The bounding rectangle's purpose is to provide feedback to the designer during the selection process. It's a convenient way to show what is currently selected before applying the next operation.

  • Using images in tooltips

    The tooltip came from an idea regarding how to show contextual help in the user interface and is now considered an essential part of a UX designer's tool bag.

  • Working with ColorDialog in WPF

    In Windows, there is a native ColorDialog window. This dialog is not very friendly to WPF applications however. This tip shows how to force the dialog to give you the color in the correct WPF format.