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With WPF and the classes in the System.Windows.Media.Imaging namespace, creating thumbnails from source images has never been easier to do. The code fragment below illustrates how to create thumbnails from a source image using TransformedBitmap and ScaleTransform. You can use the same technique to apply other types of transforms to an image, such as rotations. [...]

Recently I went hunting for an open source slideshow tool that would work with my WordPress installation. I found lots of alternatives, but most of them interacted with the WordPress database in one way or another, typically by requiring the slideshow to be defined by attaching pics from the media library to a post, and [...]

If you’ve worked on the Microsoft ASP.NET platform for any length of time, in an environment where you had to manage deployment of your application across multiple servers, then you’ve probably stared at .config files until your head pounds. In the past we often managed this by keeping multiple copies of each .config and using [...]

I’ve never really been a huge javascript fan. I learned to program using an interpreted, weakly-typed language called BASIC. It was fun, interactive, stream-of-consciousness, creative, and a great way to learn the, um, basics. It was also pretty hard to write big, complicated programs in it. I happened to learn the language back in the [...]

So you want to do some iOS development, but you’ve heard that memory management is a chore? Have no fear. All you have to do is keep track of a reference count on every object in your application, making sure that when the last live pointer to each dies, the object has a ref count [...]

Pretty much since the beginning of this project I’ve been aware of a bug in the iPhone app I am finishing. About a week in I figured out how to reproduce it. If you ran the app, then hit the home button to dismiss it, then tapped the program icon to bring it back and [...]

I’ve only been developing for iOS for a couple of weeks now, but it’s already obvious how ubiquitous the UITableView is in user interfaces. This makes sense. iPhone/Pad/Pod apps are often of the “list info and drill” variety, and the UITableView brings a lot of utility to the, um, table for lists, and even for [...]

Today I ran into a memory error in the iOS application I am working on. The event had special significance for me because I think Clinton was president the last time I saw an actual access violation. C# .NET programmers enjoy the benefits of a managed execution environment, and we don’t see those things much [...]

Well, I may have been a little premature in my post below on using port forwarding to connect a remote client to the Visual Studio development web server. When I tested the approach my app was able to connect and begin a request, but there was a database problem that was masking the result, and [...]

The integrated development web server in Visual Studio is a handy tool. Since its introduction developers of ASP.NET web applications and web services have been able to build and test their code locally, without having to take the post-build step of publishing to an IIS server first. A nice tool, but a slightly crippled one. Presumably because Microsoft [...]