Author Archives: Richard Szalay

Configuring TDD-style isolated tests for Windows Phone

Posted on August 11, 2011

This article describes the setup instructions for configuring an environment to run isolated unit tests that are intended to run quicky, easily and often to enable test driven development. For integration tests that access isolated storage, web services or phone … Continue reading →

Posted in unit-testing, windows-phone | Leave a comment

Writing asynchronous unit tests with Rx and the Silverlight Unit Testing Framework

Posted on August 8, 2011

The Reactive Extensions provide a great way for composing asynchronous actions, particularly on Windows Phone where IO operations are asynchronous-only. The Silverlight Unit Testing framework (including my CI-supporting port) supports asynchronous unit tests, but if you’ve attempted to use them … Continue reading →

Posted in Rx, unit-testing, windows-phone | 1 Comment

Practical support for custom light/dark theme resources on Windows Phone 7

Posted on June 11, 2011

Windows Phone 7′s dark/light themes, which allow the user to choose between white-on-black or black-on-white, expose default resource keys for your application to consume. However, since this support doesn’t extend to declaring your own light/dark resources, I thought I’d look … Continue reading →

Posted in windows-phone | 3 Comments

Creating a strongly typed reactive wrapper to INotifyPropertyChanged

Posted on October 14, 2010

Practical Ugliness INotifyPropertyChanged is a great, built-in, way for property change notification to work in the WPF/Silverlight world. Attempting to use it from staticly typed code, however, gets messy: Things get even worse when we try to make this reactive: … Continue reading →

Posted in .NET, Rx | 3 Comments

Error installing Windows Phone 7 Series SDK

Posted on March 15, 2010

Now that Windows Phone 7 Series has been opened up a little, I was quick to download the SDK CTP. Unfortunately, I had some problems installing it (possibly caused by the recently uninstalled VS 2010 beta 2 on my machine). … Continue reading →

Posted in windows-phone problem workaround | 1 Comment

Massive SUO file causes Visual Studio to hang when doing pretty much anything

Posted on January 25, 2010

I’ve been dealing with horribly slow performance from Visual Studio 2008 (SP1) for a few weeks now. We’re talking seriously slow performance. Like 30-40 seconds of unresponsiveness to save the solution; 20-30 seconds of unresponsiveness after compilation if there were … Continue reading →

Posted in Visual Studio.NET | 5 Comments

Executing Powershell from CruiseControl.NET on 64-bit Windows

Posted on October 22, 2009

If you try to execute a Powershell script from a CruiseControl.NET build on a 64-bit OS, you’ll get the following error: File ~filename~.ps1 cannot be loaded because the execution of scripts is disabled on this system. Please see “get-help about_signing” … Continue reading →

Posted in 64-bit, cruisecontrol.net, powershell | 2 Comments

Hosts File Manager extension for IIS 7

Posted on August 30, 2009

I’ve just released the first version of my new side project, the Hosts File Manager extension for IIS 7. The extension does pretty much what it says on the can, providing a user interface to edit the local hosts file … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Debugging IIS 7 extensions in Windows 7

Posted on August 27, 2009

I came across some curious behavior when trying to debug an IIS extension that I’m working on. When I went to select “InetMgr.exe” as the startup program, it wasn’t there. I checked the folder using Windows Explorer and, sure enough, … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Enable net.pipes in IIS 7 on Windows 7 Professional

Posted on August 24, 2009

I recently went to configure a net pipes service in Windows 7 (Professional 64-bit) and found that it wasn’t available. I quickly proceeded to “Turn Windows features on or off”, but couldn’t find it there either. I eventually found the … Continue reading →