I had some free time during the holidays and saw at the MIX09 website that they have a contest entitled MIX09 10K Challenge where they ask participant to create a web application that is either using Microsoft® Silverlight™ or Windows Presentation Foundation, as a XAML Browser Application running in Partial Trust or as a ClickOnce application in 10 kilobytes or less. I decided to take a stab at it and this is what I've comed up with

SilverCalendar: A Silverlight Pregancy Calendar

You can see the app live here http://2009.visitmix.com/MIXtify/TenKDisplay.aspx?SubmissionID=0051

Dont forget to vote when you're there :P LOL

My primary motivation when I built the app is the idea of having something that is going to be useful and at the same time fun to build. My wife is currently 34 weeks pregnant and it made me think that a pregnancy calendar would be q great application to do since it relates to me and my current day to day life. I love pregnancy calendars because it gives you a good daily insight on the progress of your baby and what you might expected as you go along in your daily life as a soon to be parent. 

The application that i built is using Microsoft Silverlight 2 with a backend WCF web service. You can find the pregnancy calendar web service here. I wasn't able to add any animations to the application because I decided to concentrate in adding functionality to app rather than the eye candy' With that said, I'll be posting the non-10K application this week.

Be sure to comeback on this blog in the coming weeks because I'll be publishing the source code to both project soon together with a 11 part tutorial and screencast walkthrough that i have prepared to show how to to build an application using .NET 3.5, WCF, WPF and Silverlight.

I've been keeping this for months now because I wanted to announce it at this years Thanksgiving... :) 

On June 7, 2008 we learned about this wonderful news:

Yup, I'm going to be a father soon! :) My wife and I are very excited about this blessing to our family. We can't wait to see our baby on February 2009.

Below is the first picture of our baby taken at 6 weeks:

Next is our babys picture at 20 weeks:

I don't have her new picture scanned yet but I'll post it a soon as I have them.4 weeks ago we learned that we are having a baby girl. Sweet! 

As with all first time dads, there's a lot of things to learn. I'm learning a bunch of new stuff everyday and I highly recommend going BabyCenter.com. BabyCenter.com is a site dedicated to babies and parenting in general. They have a ton on articles about babies, pregnancy and parenting which i really love. I go there everyday to check out articles and information that will help me become a great dad. Also, JustMommies.com is a great site too. They have this calendar thingy where you can check out the progress of your baby day-by-day which is pretty cool!

This is what me and my wife are thankful for this Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! God Bless!

and now I respect him even more...

http://sports.espn.go.com/broadband/video/video?id=3569702

I just wish more and more athletes can be like this guy. A lot of the athletes nowadays are either drunkards, gamblers or womanizers which is pretty sad considering that a lot of kids in this generation look up to sport professionals as their role model. 

Tim Tebow is different. He keeps himself grounded and models the message of his faith to people around him which makes him a step above and beyond among his peers.

Thanks and God Bless Tim for being a model to this generation!

I just love the guys from DevExpress!

First, they gave away a free version of Refactor! for VB.NET, ASP.NET and C++. Next, they gave away their .NET components for FREE and I mean really FREE! And now they are treating us with CodeRush Xpress!

"CodeRush Xpress is freely available to all Visual Studio 2008 developers and offers a comprehensive suite of tools that enable you and your team to simplify and shape complex code - making it easier to read and less costly to maintain."

I've been using CodeRush + Refactor Pro! for 3+ years now and I could say that it is great productivity tool for any .NET developer. I just love it! It's one of those things that would get you hooked to it wit your first Ctrl+~.

To prove my point that this is great, look at what happened to Jeff's IDE after installing CodeRush and Refactor!

Seriously, It really makes coding that fun when you have CodeRush and Refactor Pro installed (I'm not saying you can play a game inside your IDE, but you got the point right?).

CodeRush Xpress installs a subset of the functionality that you can find with CodeRush and Refactor Pro! but it's worth the download considering the amount of productivity you will gain from these set of functionalities:

CodeRush Xpress includes the following features.

• Duplicate Line
• Highlight All References
• Increase or Reduce Selection
• Smart Clipboard Operations
• Generate from Using (TDD)
• Quick Navigation Window
• Quick File Navigation

Additionally CodeRush XPress includes this refactorings

• Add Block Delimiters 
• Combine Conditionals
• Compress to Lambda Expression
• Compress to Ternary Expression
• Convert to Auto-implemented Property
• Convert to Initializer
• Create Backing Store
• Decompose Initializer
• Decompose Parameter
• Expand Lambda Expression
• Expand Ternary Expression 
• Extract Method
• Flatten Conditional
• Inline Delegate
• Inline Temp
• Introduce Local
• Make Explicit
• Make Implicit
• Move Type to File
• Name Anonymous Method
• Name Anonymous Type
• Reverse Conditional
• Split Conditional
• Use String.Format
• Use StringBuilder

What are you waiting for? Go ahead and download CodeRushX! I promise you, you wont regret it!

A week ago, I started a contest at DevPinoy.org about writing a Bible application and a few people have asked me if I tried my own challenge. I actually did took the challenge and built my own Bible application. I wasn't able to post it as soon as I wanted to do it due to time constrainst. What I built is a WPF Bible application but still needs some polishing to truely call it a "WPF app". 

Now let's begin the tour of the WPF app that I built.

The screen below shows the main interface for the program. The first tab is the browsing tab that allows the user to select a Book and a Chapter they want and displays the contents of your selection on the list below the Comboxes

The bold letters on the upper right side of the list tells you what book and chapter you are currently reading

The second tab is the search tab. This tab has a textbox that allows you to enter your search parameters

It allows you to search by keyword\s

By book and chapter

or by specifying the Book, Chapter and Verse

There are a few more things that I wanted to add this app but wasn't able to do so like building a TreeView similar to CryptoKnight's implementation that allows you to see the Document Map and also a matching word highlighting on the search screen would be a great addition too. Another thing that could be improve is refactoring the code and making the service layer a little bit more generic. I wanted to refactor it a bit more after I finished it but never had a chance to do so. I'll leave it as is for now and hope to update it in the future.

There's a lot more improvements I could think of but I'll leave it for you guys to check and comment on what I could do with this app to improve it. Maybe we could make it an OpenSource application someday.

Anyhow, you can get the source code for this project here. KeithRull.NBible.zip (1.84 MB)

Thanks to everyone who tried the challenge. I promise to do more of these type of contest in the future. 

Again, Thank you, God Bless and Mabuhay ka Filipino Developer!