Charles Petzold’s book, Applications = Code + Markup - received some critical press for not being very pretty. And it’s true that there’s a lot of text and code listings but (and as you’ll see below), he was methodical.

I recently wanted to upgrade a Windows Live Writer plug-in I’d written to use the Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) – instead of WinForms and a custom UI library.

However my first attempt to compile the application as a Class Library resulted in the following error…

“Library project file cannot specify ApplicationDefinition element”.

Thankfully I’d remembered the opening chapters of Charles’ book where he spent considerable time explaining the creation of the application class and initial window. The trick in this case is to remove the App.xaml file. You then need to create your own start-up class – like Program.cs – as shown below, and the application will compile fine as either a Windows Application or Class Library. In the example below extra parameters are passed to the constructor of the main window which is opened as a Dialog – and then checked for the DialogResult value when the window is closed.

public class Program : Application
{
    [STAThread]
    public static void Main()
    {
        var app = new Program();
        app.Run();
    }

    protected override void OnStartup(StartupEventArgs args)
    {
        base.OnStartup(args);

        var window = new PreCodeWindow(new PreCodeSettings(), PreCodeWindow.Mode.StandAlone);
        window.ShowDialog();
        if (window.DialogResult.HasValue && window.DialogResult.Value)
        {
            System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("OK");
            Clipboard.SetText(window.Code);
        }
        else
        {
            System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("Not OK");
        }        
    }
}

The downside to this approach is that you no longer have an application level location for placing resource dictionaries and other shared objects - and so these will need to be placed in each window as required.

Yet another great feature of IIS7  - declarative static content cache settings. It took a little detective work to find the settings for this feature – including a helpful post from Jörg Jooss.

I wanted to be able to set the client cache settings for the static content of a site I host at ORCS Web. In the past – unless offered by the control panel of your shared hosting provider – this would have meant emailing support and asking them to set the client cache header settings for the required directory in IIS6. In IIS7 this can be set now in the <system.webserver> section.

Note: If you’re going to try this on your local machine first, you will need to unlock the staticContent section in IIS7 (from the machine level) using the following appcmd…

appcmd unlock config /section:staticContent

You can also use appcmd to create the static content cache settings as shown in Jörg’s post above, which will add the correct section to your web.config – or you can directly edit/create the web.config file for the required directory.

I chose to hand edit the web.config – creating a new web.config located in the directory with the static content (i.e. images, style sheets, script files – all under the ‘assets’ directory in my case)

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>
  <system.webServer>
    <staticContent>
      <clientCache cacheControlCustom="private" cacheControlMode="UseMaxAge" cacheControlMaxAge="3.00:00:00" />
    </staticContent>
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>

A couple of things to note about these settings. Firstly – you can add any custom cache control header setting using the cacheControlCustom attribute (e.g. no-store, must-revalidate, private, public etc). Secondly using the http 1.1 max-age setting – you can specify days – by using the 1.00 notation for the hours portion of the hh:mm:ss timespan value. So the setting above will set the max-age value to 3 days – or 259200 seconds when you see it in the response header.

A little experimenting with Microsoft’s new search engine Bing - and I’m sold.

Even TechCrunch thinks it’s a hit.

What’s more – it comes in four different flavours!

When was the last time you searched and felt refreshed and relaxed too! Not even Google can compete with this one. Google in a bottle? Refreshing Google? Not even close...

Have a Bing today…. :-)

NOTE: Not kidding about the ‘fast’ part. Don’t know what’s up with Google over the past few months – both their regular search page and access to features such as analytics and webmaster tools are crawling. Bing – so far at least – has been super quick.