Aaron Hoffman's Blog

I find it more and more difficult to attend a conference without the assistance of Twitter.  It allows me to quickly get a feel for the room.  The quotes that landed well with people, what they disagree with, the interesting side stories of the day.  I've often thought the Twitter Search function lacks much of what I wish it could do/should do.  How would Q & A sessions be improved if Twitter was used to crowd source the questions (or the answers for that matter)?  This idea, of course, can be applied more broadly and is not just relevant to conferences.  Analyzing tweets based on #hashtags, instant polls of crowds - How would our world change if this data was put to use? Now this may be considered a bad  example (in every way) of what I mean, but let's take a look at some of the most occurring @mentions in Tweets that can be related to the Thinc Iowa closing party.  One reason I would consider this a bad example is because numbe...

While tracking down the source of certain features (read bugs) within overly complex applications, I have sometimes found it useful to break on every call to every method within a file. The functionality to "Break on Every Method" is not built into Visual Studio, but it is possible to set up the necessary break points through a macro.  I did not originally write this macro, but while trying to find it again at a recent job I couldn't, so I decided to post it here for safe keeping.  It is fairly primitive, but it gets the job done.  Simply place the cursor within the file you are working with right before the first method you want to break on.  The macro will then search through the file for each opening brace "{" and place a break point at each one.  Hope it helps someone. To "install" this macro simply open up your macro explorer, edit a module and paste this macro/method in.  If you do not have any macros you will need to record an empty macro fi...

I find that if I’m working with data from a SQL query it is easier to manipulate, sort, and filter that data in Excel than it is in the SQL query itself.  I am also a fan of using Excel as a Data Visualization/Reporting tool.  Because of these two things I tend to work in Excel quite a bit and have developed a few macros to help make my life easier. Many times when you are working with data from a SQL query and you sort on a “dimension” column (example below) you will have many repeated values in a single column.  If you want to page through the data and find when the values changes from one to the next, Excel does not have the built in ability to do this.  However the Macro to perform this function is pretty easy to write. In the image below the data was sorted on the “Type” column.  If cell B3 is selected and the FindNextValueChangeInColumn macro is run, cell B7 would be selected.  If it is run a second time cell B12 would be selected and so on. ...

updated version can be found here:  https://aaron-hoffman.blogspot.com/2017/12/vs2017-visual-studio-2017-code-snippet-wpf-inotifypropertychanged.html In the ViewModel classes of projects following the M-V-VM pattern it is often necessary to raise a "PropertyChanged" event (to assist with INotifyPropertyChanged interface implementation) from within a property's setter.  This is a tedious task that will hopefully someday be solved by using the Compiler as a Service...  But until that day comes, I've created a handy Visual Studio Code Snippet for myself to help automate this task.  The XML for the code snippet, and an example of the code it produces are below (note the Base Class and the OnPropertyChanged() method call).  Continue reading to see how to "install" and implement this snippet. -------- <? xml version = " 1.0 " encoding = " utf-8 " ?> < CodeSnippets xmlns = " http://schemas.microsoft.com/VisualSt...

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...