Warning: non-WPF content coming up...

While working on a little solo project in idle time, I had the need to use some sort of version control locally. I didn't want to create a Subversion repository on the server of our customer and installing a full-fledged SVN-server locally seemed a bit overkill.

Not to my surprise I wasn't the first person in the world to have this need. The first post I googled was called Version Control for the Solo Programmer and the blogpost at the other end of that link started out pretty much te same as this one does...

So, I did what the author did and installed Mercurial for Windows. Voilá, I had my own version control :) Pretty nifty! I'm using the command-line interface, so I feel like a power user as well :D

Tim Heuer put together an impressively long list of Off-the-shelf Silverlight Controls you can use. As Tim puts it:

This is a great list of those extending our platform and making Silverlight great as well as helping you to be productive and concentrate on other aspects of your application versus building something that already exists. I’m a HUGE fan of buy versus build most of the time – especially in things like components.

I couldn't agree more. My current client also has recently adopted a buy-unless strategy. Before they had a 'build-everything-even-though-we-allready-have-a-zillion-custom-apps' strategy, which turned out not be very efficient. If it's out there, why not spend $1000 dollars on a good suite of components. For that amount you can put a developer to work for maybe 2 days at most in which time he's now way capable of building the stuff himself.

The WPF Guru Josh Smith has written a great article on WPF Apps With The Model-View-ViewModel Design Pattern that appeared in MSDN Magazine.

By the end of this article, it will be clear how data templates, commands, data binding, the resource system, and the MVVM pattern all fit together to create a simple, testable, robust framework on which any WPF application can thrive. The demonstration program that accompanies this article can serve as a template for a real WPF application that uses MVVM as its core architecture. The unit tests in the demo solution show how easy it is to test the functionality of an application's user interface when that functionality exists in a set of ViewModel classes. Before diving into the details, let's review why you should use a pattern like MVVM in the first place.

There's a positive trend that more and more technologies start adopting unit-testing or even TDD! I like it. Too bad most clients fear Agile and TDD so much :(

After a long list of book review and a 'short history on Elliot Carter Charles Petzold finally blogs about WPF again. This time it's a fairly mathematical topic -of course, Petzold loves his math-: Canonical Splines.

These are a bit like the better known Bézier splines, but Canonical Splines go through every control point and have a tension parameter as well. If you want to dig into the math some more check out wikipedia on the subject, but Petzold does a better job at explaining if you ask me :)

He also has a live demo application that tells more than a thousand words:

I was working on a post about IronPython Studio, but it the install experience has been less than optimal so far, to say the least. It also takes quite a lot of time to install all the required stuff, so hopefully I'll finish that one this evening.

In the meantime you should check out this list of the 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors, compiled by the Computer Weakness Enumeration. It's pretty much language agnostic and a must-read for every developer if you ask me.