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.

New WP 7.5 ebook review copy arrived

I just received a review copy of a soon to be published book, titled “Windows Phone 7.5 Data Cookbook” by Ramesh Thalli from Packt Publishers. I will put up a review of it soon. However, I can already hint, after quickly flicking through the pages, that many who liked its unofficial predecessor “Silverlight 4 Data Services Cookbook” by Gill Cleeren and Kevi Dockx will also like this one a lot. If you can’t wait for my review, check out a sample chapter (chapter 2 on using Isolated Storage for data storage) here.

Using Linq to filter a databound listbox in WPF/Silverlight

In this short tutorial I show how to use Linq in order to filter the items shown in a listbox, which in turn is databound to an ObservableCollection.

Suppose we use the listbox created in the previous tutorial where we show the age and name of each user in the collection. All our databinding code-remains the same as before. What we have to add is a new collection in between our original source and the listbox. The in between collection is our Linq-query result. Each time we wish to change our filter, we change the query.

Adding buttons to databound listbox items in WPF

Introduction

In this tutorial I will demonstrate how to create a listbox in WPF which is databound to a collection, we then would like to add a button to each item in the listbox. Clicking this button will button will delete that item from the collection.

Tutorial on Silverlight 4 databinding in code-behind, custom user controls, etc.

Introduction

This small tutorial was written to show the students the following aspects of Silverlight:

• Writing a class that can be used for databinding
• Perform data-binding through code instead of XAML
• Creating a custom user control
• Writing simple data converters

Suppose we are creating a Silverlight game in which each player is represented as a pawn. However, the player class itself is somewhere deep inside the game-engine and we would like the pawn user control to be only loosely coupled to this player class. By doing this, we are able to make a rapid Silverlight prototype and if we later decide that the frontend is pretty lame, we can simply redesign it without too much fuss.