A friend sent me the other day a screenshot from the installer of Microwords Pro Greek version on Windows 10 that was showing gibberish instead of Greek. At their school on Windows 10 it was showing up fine, so they wondered what the issue was. They mentioned that on Windows 10 english it was showing […]

OwnCloud is an interesting solution for setting up a file sharing cloud for a group of people. However,one issue I’ve found with its Windows desktop client’s current version (which looks clean of any viruses since I always check first) is that if your Windows 10 is configured with a preferred language that the desktop client’s […]

Some time ago, at a WordPress 3.3 blog, a friend was getting a blank main area at the administration UI (just the menu was showing up there) when they visited the classic URL of the form http://somesite/wp-admin/. Here is a writeup of some notes I had kept while troubleshooting that issue and then upgrading to […]

At MonoX Social CMS, which I use at both ClipFlair Social and Trafilm websites, I was in the need of hiding some HTML markup when the user is not signed-in. The solution for this is to add runat="server" to the HMTL element one wants to hide and then set the Visible property that the object […]

I was recently adding drop-files support to ClipFlair Studio, so I had to do some research on the related API that is available to Silverlight apps. Silverlight supports a limited set of Drag-and-Drop interaction with the operating system (supposedly for security reasons, but most probably because of the classic cross-platform implementation ...

It seems that CaptureMouse is behaving differently in WPF and Silverlight, in that in the former one it immediately calls OnLostMouseCapture at a Visual, whereas in Silverlight it doesn’t get called if the element didn’t have the mouse capture already (btw, in Silverlight that method is at a UIElement – there is no Visual ...

My contribution to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1101841/linq-how-to-perform-max-on-a-property-of-all-objects-in-a-collection-and-ret Based on  another answer there, here is what I’ve just added to my enhanced version of SilverFlow library’s FloatingWindowHost (copying from FloatingWindowHost.cs at ...

I have submitted the following issue to Microsoft Connect (product feedback center): http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/809084/point-class-issue-with-two-way-databinding Point class issue with two-way databinding   In Silverlight, when using databinding code like the following: <StackPanel ...

This is my contribution to: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/303116/system-windows-threading-dispatcher-and-winforms Sometimes a Timer component is useful and easy to setup in WinForms, just set its interval and then enable it, then make sure the first thing you do in its Tick event handler is to disable itself. I think Timer runs the code in ...

I was just adding a storable (persistent) Volume property to the MediaPlayerView class used at ClipFlair’s MediaPlayerWindow (connected to the underlying SMF player’s VolumeLevel property), when I realized that after reloading saved state, the SMF player’s Volume control would show a different value than the value set to it (which I could confirm ...

While stepping through “ShowDialog()” method of OpenFileDialog with Visual Studio 2010 debugger, at the Silverlight code pictured below (for loading a ClipFlair window’s stored options), I got a “Dialogs must be user-initiated” exception. Same behaviour will be shown with SaveFileDialog too, every time you try to step through the “ShowDialog()” ...

For ClipFlair, I’m looking into implementing advanced search using Silverlight PivotViewer   A really nice example of PivotViewer search is at: http://www.appletoncompassion.org/VirtualExhibitViewer This may take long time to load, since its loading 10000 children art DeepZoom image tiles You can use the mousewheel to zoom in there or the ...

An annoying feature of Skype of recent Skype versions is that by default it shows an icon on the Windows taskbar apart from the one at the taskbar tray while you’re signed in. This also means it shows in the ALT+TAB key sequence when switching between open windows, which you might not always want to [...]

Since our onoing project ClipFlair is a follow-up of the succesful project LeViS, during its development I’m also looking at covering possible use-cases I infer from feedback entries at LvS application issue tracker on Codeplex (note that ClipFlair is also opensourced on Codeplex at http://ClipFlair.codeplex.com). One such issue ...

In the context of ClipFlair development, I was recently adding independent scaling (zooming) functionality to its ZUI container’s floating windows (apart from the container zooming functionality) and came across some strange behavior, where the windows seemed to also move apart from getting scaled. After banging my head a bit I decided to take a ...

At LvS (the opensource application of LeViS), I’ve been using this (VB.net) code to set the UI language (for example to Greek): Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo("el") Others seem to have been using (C# – that’s why there is a trailing semicolon): Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = ...

I’ve managed to combine http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/85603/A-WPF-custom-control-for-zooming-and-panning and a cut-down version of it for Silverlight that was out there: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/167453/A-Silverlight-custom-control-for-zooming-and-panni I did it in a way that the Silverlight version is source-code compatible ...

Copying here my answer at: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wpf/thread/11a42336-8d87-4656-91a3-275413d3cc19 What seems to work for me is the following (copying from the source code of http://ClipFlair.codeplex.com [currently under development]) note I’m using Build Action = "Page" and Custom ...

Just came across http://wangmo.wordpress.com/2007/09/27/themesgenericxaml/ which gave me a hint on why a WPF control wasn’t getting instantiated correctly when loaded from an external assembly (dll): to load generic.xaml for WPF, at the start of Properties\AssemblyInfo.cs you need (note this isn’t used/needed in Silverlight): using System.Windows; ...

Since widescreen format in monitors gets more and more common, how about a twist to the classic tabbed windows UI? Imagine being able to pin a tab and have it move to a side-view area in the same window. That are would keep the pinned tabs separated from the rest using a splitter / split-view [...]

Windows 7 has kept the taskbar tray from previous versions of Windows, but is providing a different means of managing which icons always show up and when (e.g. can set a specific icon to show up only if they have notifications, or even to never show up on the tray). When you press the “up” [...]

You probably know already that on Windows 7 you can right click icons for executing tasks (applications) on the taskbar and select to Pin them there. You must have also noticed that Windows 7 aware applications show common tasks there, while Windows also shows recent files opened by some application even at cases where the [...]

Copying from Expression Blend 4 User Guide’s “Learning and community resources” section: Apart from this User Guide, the following additional content and resources are available. Expression Blend and other Expression Studio products Expression community website (training, tutorials, videos, and webcasts) Expression Blend and Expression Design team ...

Now who has to be more clever? Me or the Twitter programmers who apart from not being polite have managed to fail in simple character counting? They have added automatic link shortening if your message exceeds 140 chars, but fail to count the resulting chars correctly and allow you to press the Tweet button which [...]

Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) has at last introduced a nice download manager, as shown below. This was long needed, since in IE8 there were cases were downloads with the same filename, when launched from different windows, could get corrupted. The download manager will also show resume download button when needed. IE8 could also resume downloads, [...]