Using delegates, func and lambdas: a tutorial with soldiers

In this tutorial, written for beginning programmers, I’d like to show a little demonstration on the usage of delegates and how we can go all crazy by refactoring and magically see all our duplicate code disappear.

Imagine we are writing the next ultimate Command&Conquer spinoff which can run on any computer …in console-mode.

Writing a WP7 website scraper application

In this tutorial I will explain how you write a WP7 application using the HtmlAgility Pack in order to use information scraped from a website.
Website scraping is the act of retrieving information from a website page. An act by some considered stealing, by others borrowing. Let’s leave that debate to the others. In this post I will show how easy it is to scrape content from a website so that you can (re)use it in your Windows Phone 7 application. As it is, this information will for the most part also work in other, non WP7, projects of course.
Sometimes website scraping is the only means available to consume certain information from a website. If the website doesn’t have some publicly available API or web service you can use you’re pretty much left with scraping, whether you like it or not.

Using enum flags to write filters in Linq

Here’s the premise. Suppose we have a cookbook that contains all possible recipes with their names and needed ingredients. Using Linq it should be easy to query the cookbook and, for example, only show those recipes you can make given one or more ingredients you have at your house. My solution is a) extremely nice or b) very strange, bloated and way wrong. I leave it up to you and make sure to message me if you have a much nicer solution…because franky, I’m not a big fan of what follows (I have the itching sensation that using the correct binary logic I can solve this problem much easier…).