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Almost exactly a year ago I posted a piece here about hiking out onto the Pequest Fill, perhaps the greatest mound of dirt and rock ever pushed up in one place by the hand of man. The so-called “Lackawanna Cut-off” that rode the top of that long dike provided the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad [...]

County route 517 leaves Hackettstown, NJ as High Street, heading north. Not far past the huge Mars candy plant on the outskirts of town the road lifts itself up and over the shoulder of Allamuchy Mt., and then it is just 517, the road to Andover and Sparta. As you drive northward past the little crossroads [...]

Last time out I introduced the DragHandle class, a small control that can be placed on a Canvas and moved around with the mouse. DragHandle is meant to provide one of the building blocks of shape editing in an application I have been working on. I ended that post with the DragHandle built and working, [...]

In my last post on the Silverlight drawing project I said I was going to stay away from the design and talk about code next. Quite a bit has changed, though, since then. For one thing the DrawStylus class has fallen victim to shrinking relevance and has been removed. The operations I initially envisioned for [...]

I see a lot of questions on the Silverlight.Net forums about control layout. Typically they follow the general pattern “I placed a {insert control} into a {insert container}, but {insert problem} is happening. Can you help?” I thought it would be useful to cover the main types of control containers available in WPF and Silverlight, [...]

When you start to design an application for producing drawings in Silverlight, there are some things you don’t have to worry too much about. You don’t have to come up with definitions for shapes, or figure out a fast way to render them. You don’t have to define a color space, and gradients, and geometries [...]

I’ve decided to write a couple of posts about the design and execution of a Silverlight application I’m working on. If you’re not familiar with Silverlight, here it is in one sentence: Silverlight is a downloadable subset of the WPF containing just enough of the framework to execute specialized WPF applications in a browser window. [...]

This post is about an online fantasy role playing game called Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. It is developed and operated by Mythic, now a division of Electronic Arts. I’ve been playing it for about a month now, on the Iron Rock server, with a bunch of former Dark Age gaming buddies. You would think [...]

There’s something a little melancholy, for me, in walking along an abandoned railroad. I feel it whenever I explore the remains of our national past, but old rights of way bring it out most strongly. Partly this is because I was always a little bit of a railfan, and partly it is the significance of [...]

The sandy loams of the Pine Barrens of Southern New Jersey are a porous filter for the water that trickles through purifying layers to feed one of the largest aquifers on the East Coast. Hours after the rain has fallen the ground is for the most part dry again, and undisturbed. Into this same ground [...]