Aaron Hoffman's Blog

During a Silverlight project I finished up a while ago I needed to create a "simple" Color Picker ComboBox (or DropDownList for us ASP.NET Developers).  By "simple" I mean limited to only a handful of colors, not as complex as something like Paint.NET (read PhotoShop) would provide.  This is the easiest solution that I found. The first thing you need to know is that the ComboBox has an ItemTemplate .  This template allows you to completely control the look and feel of each entry in the ComboBox.  From simple things like binding to a property to change the background color (hint hint, that is what we are about to do), to more complex things like changing the entire template based on the type of class being bound to this item in the ComboBox (ex: the ComboBox is bound to a list of "fruits" some are apples and some are bananas.  The apples all use one template, the bananas use a completely different template - powerful). We'll be binding this ComboBox...

-- Scott Hanselman ( http://www.hanselman.com/ ,  http://twitter.com/shanselman ) recently tweet'd, " I need a keyboard with an "http://www." button. " To which I replied, " @shanselman you still type the "http" part? I didn't think you had to anymore... "  Oooh, hahahaha, how smart and funny am I!?  ....Apparently not very... :-) shanselman responded (as well as to others with the same smart remarks), " @aaron_hoffman in tweetdeck or Twitter, you do. "  --Aaaah, I get it now, he's not in a browser! okay, he has me in Check . Now I just had to solve this problem.  Well automation/degree in laziness (with years of laziness experience) to the rescue!  At first I thought PowerShell  - but since I am on a WinXP SP2 machine, that wouldn't do.  I'll have to fall back to the console app & desktop shortcut combination of yester-system. Steps to Simple Keystroke Automation (w/ WinXP SP2 Handicap) 1. Create .N...

Ever notice how similar a lot of the "English" alphabet's characters look? The guy who put this together must have really phoned it in that day. He really could only come up with these: ABCDEFGHIJK_MNOPQRSTUV_XY_ and then just flipped a few around a bit to get up to 26: J L M W S Z And it isn't just those three, a lot of the original list look eerily similar to each other as well, but I guess we'll count them: B R E F H K M N O Q U V T Y Y X but then he needed to come up with 10 more numbers... well none of those are unique! 0 O 1 I 2 Z 3 E 4 P 5 S 6 G 7 L 8 B 9 P So in the end, if you are looking for unique characters that you can use, that will not be confused with any other characters, you're only left with: A well that isn't very many... -

Iowa played Michigan State last night in East Lansing, Michigan. I am not a sports writer, so I will not attempt it here, but it was one of the best games of football that I have ever watched. A total of three field goals through three quarters of play, two goal line stands from under five yards out, and a last minute drive from behind by the Hawkeyes. There were records broken on both sides. All through the game they fought. -

I'm not sure why, but I had a sudden rush of Norwegian pride today.