I just released a minor update for NetDrives, which fixes an issue that caused settings not to be persisted correctly. NetDrives is a Windows utility that helps you manage your network shares and mapped network drives.

Download and further infos: http://www.hardcodet.net/netdrives

This is an introductory tutorial on SLF, the Simple Logging Façade. This tutorial covers the basics, which will be all you’ll ever need in most projects. I’m planning on writing a second tutorial that will show custom factories and resolvers soon.

Downloading SLF

To get started, visit http://slf.codeplex.com and download the latest release. Source code is available as a Visual Studio 2008 solution, but if you’re working with VS2005, there’s also precompiled binaries for .NET 2.0 available (.NET 1.0 or 1.1 is not supported).

Sample Projects

SLF comes with a lot of samples, all organized as independent projects that discuss a specific use case. As you will see, most scenarios only require a few lines of code. We are planning to extend this section over time, based on your feedback.

Read more…

Release days are good days – Colin Eberhardt and I are very happy to announce SLF 1.0!

SLF is a framework with a simple but ambitious mission: To provide every developer with the means to easily plug in logging functionality into her application. As such, it aims at two fundamental goals:

1. Simplicity: SLF allows you to plug in solid logging functionality into your application with literally one line of code, while providing you with an upgrade path to complex logging scenarios at any time.
2. Flexibility: SLF provides you with a common interface that decouples the logging framework of your choice (e.g. log4net or NLog)  from your code. This eliminates dependencies on a given framework, thus allowing you to switch (or even combine!) frameworks at any time. Furthermore, SLF’s modular architecture allows you to plug-in custom logging strategies very easily.

Read more…

Marlon updated the WPF Disciples resources page, which now lists a great selection of the group members’ contributions (including lots of MVVM goodness). Here’s the list:

http://wpfdisciples.wordpress.com/resources/

I’ve first encountered this issue with my WPF NotifyIcon, and now again while writing a plug-in for Windows Live Writer: If you try to display a WPF popup without any Windows open (the Popup is the only UI component there is), certain controls such as TextBox, ListView, or ListBox don’t receive proper mouse and/or keyboard input, and cannot be selected.

The reason for this issue is buried in the WPF framework, and how it interacts with Windows. Fellow WPF Disciple Andrew Smith pointed me in the right direction:

…because a Popup’s HWND has the WS_EX_NOACTIVATE so the WPF framework will not attempt to actually focus the associated hwnd (because its usually used with a window and you don’t want to deactivate the window when you focus something in the popup).

Accordingly, you’ll have to fiddle with Windows Interop to make things work. Here’s the snippet:

public static class WinApi
{
  /// <summary>
  /// Gives focus to a given window.
  /// </summary>
  [DllImport("USER32.DLL")]
  public static extern bool SetForegroundWindow(IntPtr hWnd);

  public static void ActivatePopup(Popup popup)
  {
    //try to get a handle on the popup itself (via its child)
    HwndSource source = (HwndSource)PresentationSource.FromVisual(popup.Child);
    IntPtr handle = source.Handle;

    //activate the popup
    SetForegroundWindow(handle);
  }
}

I just made a few minor updates to two libraries which assemble as set of helper classes for C# and WPF and thought: Why not share them? The libraries aren’t really intended to be used directly in your code, but you might find one or another helper method or snippet that might make a nice addition to your own toolbox

Hardcodet.Commons (C#, .NET 3.5)

Common helper classes and snippets (simple base classes, file management, weak events, extension methods etc.)

Hardcodet.Wpf.Commons (C#, .NET 3.5)

Stuff I commonly use in WPF projects, such as checking for design time, base classes for commands and converters, data binding helpers and other stuff.

I’ll keep these libraries up-to-date, version history will be posted here.

History:

2009.09.14  Initial blog release