My First WPF Application

Well, not really my first application, but the first that I'd show to the public. Its a simple die rolling program that can handle rolling multiple dice, multi-sided dice (meaning dice that don't have 6 sides, I know all dice are multi-sided), additive/subtractive dice rolls, and roll modifiers. I've not been able to test it on other machines, so if it doesn't work, let me know. It probably requires .NET 3.5 to be installed on your machine, but if your reading my blog, you probably have it already.

Dice Roller v4.15
Example .NET 3.5 WPF Application

If any of you are wondering, dice rolling apps are my staple "hello world" app when learning a language/framework. They don't talk to a database (or at least this one doesn't), but they do involve string parsing, handling of arrays, visual layout, styling concerns, and "persistence" of settings when available (add some die rolls, close the app and open it again).

 

ASP.NET First Thoughts

I'd announced a few weeks back that I was taking a role as a .NET desktop developer, but I've found that I'm actually going to be doing a good bit of ASP.NET web development as well (w00t!). As such, I've shifted gears a bit and dropped my studies of WPF for ASP.NET, and although I'm certainly not an expert yet, I thought I'd share my first thoughts.

 

SQL Server Variable Declaration Gotcha

Part of my new job is to work more with Transact-SQL than I've ever done before, so I've been making stored procedures and batches of SQL commands all over the place. Today I ran into a nice little "gotcha" that had me stumped

 

"How to learn WPF (or anything else)"

While searching up additional resources on WPF, I stumbled across a neat little article on Philosophical Geek titled "How to learn WPF (or anything else)". Its a short read, and it perfectly matches my own feelings about learning a new language, technology, or piece of software: I've always found that its your own interest in something that can make or break your ability to learn about it. If you need to learn a new language, do the following: get an idea about what you can do with the language from examples, pick something that you would like to see done with it, and figure out how to make it happen.

 

Strange New World

As of yesterday, I'm now a Windows Presentation Foundation, desktop application developer by day. I've not given up on ColdFusion or anything like that, its just a simple matter of the economy: I can't move, and there aren't any ColdFusion jobs around where I live. The new position will train me in WPF, and also the underlying .NET framework, and those are skills that I can actually use around here.

I'll still be doing CF on the side, and hopefully moving back into a web based environment sometime soon, so I'm not going to stop posting on web topics. I just want to post some explanation for when the Adobe using ColdFusion guy starts making posts on .NET and Microsoft stuff.

 

How Do You Do This with ColdFusion 9 ORM ?

OK, so I've been working through build a new blog platform using the new ColdFusion 9 ORM setup, and I'm really impressed with how much of the basics it handles for you, but I'm starting to get into stuff thats more than just a simple CRUD action, and I'm finding that I've no idea how to make the ORM or HQL get me the results I need. Perhaps you can help me figure out what I need to do.

 

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Jon Hartmann, July 2011

I'm Jon Hartmann and I'm a Javascript fanatic, UX/UI evangelist and former ColdFusion master. I blog about mysterious error messages, user interface design questions, and all things baffling and irksome about programming for the web.

Learn more about me on LinkedIn.