Building a Colour Picker With HTML5, JavaScript and JQuery

I have recently been teaching myself HTML5 and JavaScript and had an idea for a project in which I would need to use a colour picker. After a little research I soon discovered the new HTML5 input types, one of which is a colour picker. Great! One problem though, although it does work very well in Chrome, it is not supported in Firefox 22 or IE10.

C# Dynamic Types

With C# 4.0 we saw the introduction of dynamic types. Objects declared as dynamic are assumed to support any property and method and are therefore not checked by the compiler when you build your solution. If you declare an object as dynamic and attempt to use a property or method not supported by that object a run-time exception will be generated.

Pluralize/Singularize Words with the .NET Framework

You may sometimes come across the need to pluralize or singularize words automatically within your applications. As the English language is a fairly complicated one this is not as straight forward as adding or removing an "S" on the end of a word. There are various different implementation out there that perform with a varying degree of success.

Custom Change Tracking Using The Entity Framework

Change tracking is a common feature I find I need to implement in my applications. I like to warn users about the potential loss of data if they cancel without saving changes, and when saving those changes I like to update only those fields in the database that have changed as it's inefficient to update every field.

Interprocess Communication with WCF - Part 2

In Part 1 I showed you how you can use WCF with named pipes to send messages from a client to a server. Now I will show you how we can modify that code to send messages in the other direction, from the server back to the client. We do this by creating a callback interface and referencing it in our service contract. We then implement the callback interface in our client.

Interprocess Communication with WCF - Part 1

With the introduction of Microsoft's Windows Communication Foundation from .NET 3.0 onwards we have been provided with a powerful framework for communicating across process boundaries, whether they are on the same machine, the same network or even across the internet. A huge range of configuration options are available for the many scenarios that WCF can be used as part of our solution and they can seem overwhelming to begin with.

MVVM - Binding to TreeView.SelectedItem

At first, binding to the TreeView's SelectedItem property sounds like a simple task, but if you give it a go you will soon realise it's not so straight forward. That's because the WPF TreeView's SelectedItem property is read-only so we can't set the binding in XAML like normal.