Every week in my shop we do cross training. Someone brings in something they are working on, some system that people are unfamiliar with, some new technology, basically anything related to any of our jobs as developers and maintainers of applications. Often enough I do presentations on Silverlight and Blend, introducing my coworkers to different tools and options that we have available to us. This blog is a write up of one such training presentation. I give you, the Silverlight Spinner.

In an IT department there is a tendency to classify operations as being reactive or proactive and, often, pressure to have more of the latter and less of the former. Pressure, that is, until a PC breaks down, a network connection drops, a data record goes missing, or any of a dozen other issues which will ultimately receive more attention than disaster recovery, employee development, business analysis, strategic planning and the rest of a long list of proactive tasks. Immediate, defined problems are far easier to focus on than tenuous concepts of proactive prevention.

Level of Pain

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I don't know how many times I've put together the same slow regexp to check if the user input is a valid phone number. I decided that this cannot go on and developed a simple phone number primitive. Now our main concern here is the performance of TryParse since it will be used the most. After running some performance tests the median timing was 400ns on a 3Ghz machine.

[Serializable]
public struct PhoneNumber : IEquatable<PhoneNumber>
{
    private const int AreaCodeShift = 54;
    private const int CentralOfficeCodeShift = 44;...

Internet Explorer 9 is available for a test drive Microsoft detailed its support for a number of HTML5 specifications, including CSS3, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), XHTML parsing, and the video and audio tags using industry-standard (H.264/MPEG4 and MP3/AAC) codecs, among others. In addition, Microsoft demonstrated a new JavaScript engine that uses the multiple cores of today’s modern chips to effectively manage computing resources and improve Web performance. By combining i...

Yesterday I made a post about using a queue instead of a list because the code was so much cleaner. I think it is very important that code is clean and easier to read. But then Denis asked about the performance differences between the 2 methods. I hadn't worried about the performance, because in my case the performance was good in both cases. But I aim to please my fellow LTDers, so I did a little performance test. And let me remind you that like most performance tests, this one is flawed as ...