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Although Microsoft delivered Composite WPF with the unity container it is possible to use a different IoC container. In this post I will explain how it can be done and what caveats you are going to encounter when replacing the IoC container in Composite WPF with Spring.NET Where to start Replacing the IoC container is somewhat more advanced than ...

Vacation is the best time to solve some serious puzzles, at least it is for me. The problem I was having with Composite WPF was the fact that I could create composite user interfaces, but there wasn't any support for showing views in dialogs. And because dialogs are widely used I had to come up with a fix for this.In this post I will talk ...

Composite WPF comes with the notion of modules, but without any standard classes for controllers and/or viewmodels. This might sound weird to developers who have worked with the Composite Application Block before. In this post we will talk about how you can create them yourself and why base classes for these constructions aren't actually ...

One of the new features in WCF for .NET 3.5 is the possibility to create REST Services. These services allow you to create services that eat raw HTTP requests with XML in them and return a raw HTTP response with XML content in them. Normally this only works by deserializing objects and serializing objects. It is however perfectly possible to ...

One of the very cool features of modular application in my opinion is the possibility to install features when they are actually required by the application. Microsoft uses this since Office 2000 to provide the user with the possibility to install a module on demand when the module is marked install on first use. To make on demand ...

CompositeWPF offers modularity by making it possible to load modules from disk on demand or loading a set modules at startup of the application. One thing that I was missing with this was the possibility lookup the status of modules and which modules are actually available to the application at the moment. To solve this I wrote a new extension on ...

CompositeWPF works with regions to make the user interface composable. Standard you have the itemscontrol that can be used as a region for views. This control is already very flexible and best of all, there are a lot of WPF controls based on the itemscontrol so you should be able to come up with a lot of possible schemes in your user interface. I ...

CompositeWPF is a new framework created by Microsoft to allow developers to build composite user interfaces and modular applications in WPF. Or as I like to call it, build higher quality WPF applications. The framework is quite easy to get running, I got a sample working in under an hour complete with some pretty cool tricks. One of the things I ...

There's a lively discussion going on at http://codebetter.com/blogs/jean-paul_boodhoo/archive/2008/04/22/got-var.aspx about whether or not you should use implicit typed variables in your codebase. Personally I think that using implicit typed variables is acceptable, but this only works when methods are short and the developer reading ...

Again I have too much time on my hands so I started looking for new frameworks to take a peek at. Normally I turn to Microsoft for new frameworks. However I thought that it would be a good idea to look for a different kind of challenge this time. CSLA is a framework for business objects, it offers n-level undo and transaction support. It is ...