SCIP.be - News

Photos of Ecuador and Gal�pagos islands

Stefan Cruysberghs — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 23:00:00 GMT

Photos of my 4-weeks during journey through Ecuador and the Gal�pagos islands. On the mainland we explored a few colonial cities such as Quito and Cuenca, we visited the colourful markets of Saquisili and Guamote, we spent 3 days in the Amazon jungle and twice stood at high altitude on the Cotopaxi and Chimborazo volcanos. On the wonderful Gal�pagos we explored 8 islands and during our boat trips, walks and snorkeling we could spot from close distance almost the all animals (iguanas, tortoises, sea lions, ...), birds (pelicans, gents, frigate birds, ...) and fish which can be found in this archipelago.

New version TscExcelExport for Delphi 2010

Stefan Cruysberghs — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 22:00:00 GMT

The TscExcelExport component is an advanced, powerful but easy to use VCL component which enables you to export all records of a dataset from Borland/CodeGear/Embarcadero Delphi to Microsoft Excel. Version 3.9 offers support for Embarcadero Delphi 2010. The component is free for non-commercial use and all sources are included.

Photo blog : Gal�pagos iguanas

Stefan Cruysberghs — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Close-ups of the amazing marine and land iguanas on the volcanic Gal�pagos islands in the Pacific Ocean.

Advanced databinding with ViewModels in Silverlight

Stefan Cruysberghs — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Silverlight and RIA Services are great technologies and the Model-View-ViewModel (M-V-VM) pattern is a nice approach to keep UI and logic separated. But using the combination of view models with item controls, dataforms and commands can be a laborious task because the databinding features in Silverlight are quite limited. In this article I will demonstrate how binding with ViewModels can be improved by using the BindingHelper class and by creating your own command behaviors.

Photos of a hike in Gran Paradiso

Stefan Cruysberghs — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Photos of my 6-day hike trip in the national park Gran Paradiso in the Italian Alps. The park is characterized by the different high summits with glaciers and there are still a lot of marmots, chamois and rock-goats which live there. We climbed the 2 mountains, the Gran Serra (3552m) and the Grand Paradiso (4096m), the highest mountain in Italy.

Photo blog : Fauna on Texel

Stefan Cruysberghs — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 22:00:00 GMT

A few photos of seals (common and grey) and birds (herring gull, pheasant) on the Wadden island Texel (The Netherlands).

Photo blog : New life

Stefan Cruysberghs — Mon, 18 May 2009 22:00:00 GMT

The spring new-borns are beginning to grow up. These photos were taken during some walks in my hometown Lommel and in Turnhout.

RIA Services - part 1

Stefan Cruysberghs — Sat, 16 May 2009 22:00:00 GMT

A few months ago Microsoft released the first preview of .NET RIA Services. This new framework promises to simplify building n-tier Line of Business (LoB) applications by providing patterns, components and tools to build services, query data, handle CRUD operations, resolve concurrency, manage data validation, ... In this first article I will focus on the current limitations and I will offer you some of my workarounds and tips.

New features on SCIP.be

Stefan Cruysberghs — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 22:00:00 GMT

My personal website SCIP.be has been updated and now it offers several new features and improvements. There is support for Media RSS feeds and the great browser plugin CoolIris which can be used to navigate through photo galleries in 3D. All images are improved, articles are linked to several categories and pages can be shared more easily.

New connection providers in LINQPad

Stefan Cruysberghs — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 22:00:00 GMT

LINQPad was introduced in 2007 and nowadays it is a very mature tool which should be in the toolbox of every .NET developer. Version 1.35 offers new connection providers and it has native support for LINQ to SQL and the ADO.NET Entity Framework data models. It also provides new query types like SQL and Entity-SQL. In this small article I will highlight some of the new features.

Sharing source code between .NET and Silverlight

Stefan Cruysberghs — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 23:00:00 GMT

A common problem when developing Silverlight applications is how to share classes and in particular (Entity Framework) entities which are compiled for the full .NET framework in a Silverlight application. Silverlight is a browser plugin and a subset of the full .NET framework. Therefore Visual Studio does not allow referencing .NET assemblies from your Silverlight application. In this article I will demonstrate a very simple technique to share source code and it will give several real world examples and some handy tips.

Cleaning up and organizing Outlook mailboxes

Stefan Cruysberghs — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 23:00:00 GMT

This small article contains a few C# scripts which can be executed in LINQPad to clean up and organize Outlook mailboxes. If you want to keep Outlook performing as fast as possible and to reduce the size of mailboxes then these scripts and my OutlookProvider component can simplify this job.

Photo blog : Lommel during winter time

Stefan Cruysberghs — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 23:00:00 GMT

A few photos from different spots in Lommel during the snow white but ice cold second week of 2009.

ADO.NET Entity Framework : Metadata extension methods

Stefan Cruysberghs — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 23:00:00 GMT

In addition to my article about querying the metadata of the ADO.NET Entity Framework I have implemented several extension methods that utilize this metadata. This article will describe a set of extension methods which can be used to extend the standard Entity Framework classes (ObjectQuery, EntityObject, ObjectStateManager, ...).

Photo blog : Lommel Sahara on freezing winters day

Stefan Cruysberghs — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 23:00:00 GMT

Photos of Lommel Sahara on the freezing cold but sunny morning of the last day of 2008. The Sahara is a small nature reserve with ponds, woods and some small sand dunes.

Querying Excel worksheets with LINQ

Stefan Cruysberghs — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 23:00:00 GMT

A while ago I was looking for a way to query Excel with LINQ. I needed a simple solution that allowed me to query tables in Excel worksheets in a tool like LINQPad. This article will describe how I implemented my ExcelProvider and it will demonstrate its features by giving an example of a LINQ query and the result in LINQPad.

ADO.NET Entity Framework : Querying metadata

Stefan Cruysberghs — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 23:00:00 GMT

A few months ago I posted several articles about the ADO.NET Entity Framework beta 3. In the meanwhile the Entity Framework has been officially released and a lot of resources about this technology have become available. In the last few weeks I have been taking a closer look at the metadata services. This article will demonstrate 20 examples which use LINQ to query the metadata collections of the ADO.NET Entity Framework. These queries can be used to examine the structure of your Entity Data Model or to get statistics about it.

Photo blog : Fungi

Stefan Cruysberghs — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 22:00:00 GMT

It's autumn in Belgium and so a lot of fungi are appearing again. Here some photos of peculiar fungi like the colorful fly agaric (Amanita muscaria).

Photos of the southwest of the USA

Stefan Cruysberghs — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Photos of my journey through the southwest of the USA (Nevada, Utah, Arizona, California) with a small group of people. We visited wonderful national parks such as the Valley of Fire, Zion, Bryce, Coral Pink Sand Dunes, Antelope Canyon, Monument Valley, Grand Canyon, Death Valley, Mono Lake and Yosemite. We drove on Route 66, in Bodie we sampled the atmosphere of the wild west, in Vegas we made a small bet and we finished our trip in San Francisco.

New version TscExcelExport (Delphi)

Stefan Cruysberghs — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 22:00:00 GMT

The TscExcelExport component is an advanced, powerful but easy to use VCL component which enables you to export all records of a dataset from Borland/CodeGear Delphi to Microsoft Excel. Version 3.7 supports CodeGear Delphi 2009 and it has several improvements and bugfixes. The component is free for non-commercial use and all sources are included

Photo blog : Stellar's Jay

Stefan Cruysberghs — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 22:00:00 GMT

In September I travelled through the southwest of the USA. A common bird in this region is the Stellar�s Jay. It is a beautiful blue and black bird with a wonderful crest. Here are some photos.

LINQ AsHierarchy() improvements

Stefan Cruysberghs — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 22:00:00 GMT

A few months ago I published an article about my LINQ AsHierarchy extension method. This extension method can be used to convert a flat collection of records to a hierarchical structure of nested collections. I got a lot of enthusiastic responses and questions so I decided to improve this technique a little further. This new article will describe the new features and demonstrates how to use the LINQ to Objects and the new LINQ to SQL AsHierarchy extension methods.

Photos of Iceland

Stefan Cruysberghs — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Photos of my journey to Iceland. With a group of friends we made a 6-day hike through a beautiful and varied area from Landmannalaugar to ��rsm�rk and then to Sk�gar. The last few days we hired two cars and visited some spectacular waterfalls like Svartifoss, Seljalandfoss and Gullfoss, the impressive glacier lake J�kuls�rlon, the geyser Strokkur and Cape Ing�lfsh�fdi where a lot of puffins breed.

Generic custom WPF/Silverlight value converters

Stefan Cruysberghs — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Data binding is one of the most powerful features of WPF/Silverlight. It allows developers to achieve more with less code. However, when building user interfaces with WPF/Silverlight, you often need to create your own value converters. A common mistake is to implement custom value converters for each and every binding that requires one. Of course value converters can be generalized an re-used. In this article I will show you the source code of my library of generic custom value converters and I will demonstrate in which scenarios you can use them.

Photo blog : Contest for Living Statues

Stefan Cruysberghs — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Last weekend my hometown Lommel organized the European Contest for Living Statues. More than 45 beautiful living statues were invited and during 2 days they demonstrated their skills. Hereby a few close-up photos of some of these artists.

Using the Google Maps HTTP geocoding service in .NET

Stefan Cruysberghs — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 22:00:00 GMT

This article will demonstrate how to use the Google Maps HTTP geocoding service and how to handle REST services and XML in general. The Google Maps service can be used to retrieve the latitude, longitude and a lot of other geographical data from a given address.

New macro photos

Stefan Cruysberghs — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 22:00:00 GMT

New macro photos (flowers, dragonflies, butterflies, sea urchins, ...) which I have made the past year have been added to the photo album with the macro pictures.

UI automation with the WPF UIAutomation framework

Stefan Cruysberghs — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 22:00:00 GMT

WPF UIAutomation is a framework from Microsoft to automate Windows applications. In this article I will demonstrate a lot of features (invoking button clicks, focusing controls, entering data, sending keystrokes, subscribing to events, ...) and compare it with the open-source project White.

UI automation with the White framework

Stefan Cruysberghs — Sat, 03 May 2008 22:00:00 GMT

This short article covers the most important features of the open-source White framework and the Microsoft UISpy tool. White can be used for UI automation and my C# .NET application demonstrates how to automate the Windows calculator by sending keystrokes, clicking on buttons and menus, pressing function keys, accessing textboxes, ...

LINQ AsHierarchy() extension method

Stefan Cruysberghs — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 23:00:00 GMT

This article explains how to convert data from a self referencing table (adjacency model) to a hierarchy of nested collections (nested set model). The new LINQ AsHierarchy() extension method can be used to convert data and bind it to WPF TreeViews.

WPF ProcessingControl and BackgroundWorker

Stefan Cruysberghs — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:00:00 GMT

This small article about the Windows Presentation Foundation will demonstrate how to use a WPF ProcessingControl and a BackgroundWorker thread to create responsive user interfaces and how to give visual feedback about the progress.

New version TscExcelExport (Delphi)

Stefan Cruysberghs — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 23:00:00 GMT

The TscExcelExport component is an advanced, powerful but easy to use VCL component which enables you to export all records of a dataset from Borland/CodeGear Delphi to Microsoft Excel. Version 3.7 supports new datatypes in Delphi 2007 and the new capacity improvements in Excel 2007. The component is free for non-commercial use and all sources are included

ADO.NET Entity Framework - part 3

Stefan Cruysberghs — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 23:00:00 GMT

In this third part of my series of articles about the ADO.NET Entity Framework I will demonstrate how to add and modify data, use change tracking and handle concurrency conflicts. I have also implemented a Dump() extension method which can be useful for displaying all change tracking information.

Modeling PowerToys for Visual Studio 2008

Stefan Cruysberghs — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 23:00:00 GMT

A new version of the open-source PowerToys for the Class Designer and Distributed System Designer has been released. These add-ins provides additional functionality for the Visual Studio Class Designer, such as HTML/XML export, new creation commands, filtering commands, formatting commands, a pan/zoom window, a documentation window, a floating properties window, ... This small post describes how to install it and shows a screenshot which highlights almost all features.

Background color problem with WinForms and WPF

Stefan Cruysberghs — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 23:00:00 GMT

This post briefly describes how to integrate a WPF user control in a Windows Forms application. It also provides a workaround to solve the background color problem of the ElementHost class. This workaround will demonstrate how you can map properties between Windows Forms controls and WPF UI elements.

ADO.NET Entity Framework - part 2

Stefan Cruysberghs — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 23:00:00 GMT

Second part of my series of articles about the ADO.NET Entity Framework. This article covers a few handy testing and learning tools like eSqlBlast and LINQPad. It also describes a few techniques on how to view the generated T-SQL statements when executing Entity SQL or LINQ to Entities queries.

ADO.NET Entity Framework - part 1

Stefan Cruysberghs — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 23:00:00 GMT

A few weeks ago Microsoft released Beta 3 of the ADO.NET Entity Framework (EF). The Entity Framework looks like an interesting technology which is more powerful and advanced than LINQ to SQL. I have created a small tutorial on how to start with the Entity Framework using the Northwind sample database. This first article covers the Entity Data Model (EDM), Entity SQL and LINQ to Entities. I will try to compare EF to LINQ to SQL if possible.

LINQ to SQL article - part 4

Stefan Cruysberghs — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 23:00:00 GMT

Fourth part of this series of articles about LINQ to SQL (.NET 3.5). This article shows the features of the 2 provided visualizers (LINQ to SQL Visualizer & Expression Tree Visualizer), the use of the Refresh method and how to create dynamic strong-typed Where- and OrderBy-clauses. Powerful expression trees can be created easily by using the PredicateBuilder class.

Mole Visualizer for Visual Studio

Stefan Cruysberghs — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 23:00:00 GMT

Last week version 4 of the Mole Visualizer for Visual Studio was released. Mole is a great visualizer while debugging WPF, WinForms and WCF applications. Mole does not only allow you to view objects and data, it also allows you to drill into properties and child objects. A lot of properties can be modified and the result is displayed in a live preview.

Photo blog : War cemetery on freezing winterday

Stefan Cruysberghs — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 23:00:00 GMT

Photos of the German war cemetery in my hometown Lommel on a freezing cold and white Saturday morning in December. It is one of the largest soldier cemeteries from WOII and 39.091 German soldiers are buried here.

WPF treeviews and LINQ to SQL

Stefan Cruysberghs — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 23:00:00 GMT

A few examples about .NET WPF applications using LINQ to SQL. This article will describe how to create nice looking treeviews which are populated with data using LINQ to SQL. Of course resources, templates, styles, datatriggers, value converters, ... will be utilized.

Photo blog : Winter sunset

Stefan Cruysberghs — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 23:00:00 GMT

Some photos which show the rich range of colors of a winter sunset.

Performance comparison Parallel Extensions

Stefan Cruysberghs — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 23:00:00 GMT

First tests with the Community Tech Preview of the Parallel Extensions for .NET 3.5. A comparison between sequential and parallel execution is made on the basis of charts. PLINQ and the ParallelTask Library can surely improve the performance of .NET applications.

Display Outlook contact pictures in WPF application

Stefan Cruysberghs — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 23:00:00 GMT

In this article I will show you how to create a ValueConverter class which can be used in a WPF application to display the pictures of the Outlook contacts.

Photo blog : Autumn colours

Stefan Cruysberghs — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 23:00:00 GMT

Almost all the leafs have now fallen from the trees, and every now and then there is already a heavy frost. Below are a few colourful pictures from the autumn.

Execute queries on Office data using LINQPad

Stefan Cruysberghs — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 23:00:00 GMT

This short article is an addition to my 'Querying Outlook and OneNote with LINQ' article. It describes how you can utilize the free LINQPad tool to execute queries on Office data.

Querying Outlook and OneNote with LINQ

Stefan Cruysberghs — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 23:00:00 GMT

In this article I will describe how I developed two wrapper classes for Outlook and OneNote. These classes can be used to execute LINQ to Objects (.NET 3.5) queries on emails, appointments, tasks, contacts, notebooks, sections, pages, ... So you could call it LINQ to Outlook and LINQ to OneNote.

LINQ to SQL - part 3

Stefan Cruysberghs — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 23:00:00 GMT

Third part of this series of articles about LINQ to SQL (.NET 3.5). This article includes some useful tips about adding sequences and using variables in a LINQ query. Further more the techniques of eager loading and query compiling are covered.

Photos of Uganda

Stefan Cruysberghs — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 22:00:00 GMT

Photos of a journey through Uganda, the 'pearl of Africa'. We visited some historical places like Lake Victoria and the sources of the Nile. We travelled through the national parks of Murchison and Queen Elizabeth. The most fascinating days were the close encounters with chimpanzees and mountain gorillas in the forests of Kibale and Bwindi.

Photo blog : Mountain gorillas

Stefan Cruysberghs — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 22:00:00 GMT

In September I went to Uganda, the 'pearl of Africa'. The most fascinating day was the gorilla tracking in Bwindi NP where we met the Nkuringo gorilla family. Here the most beautiful photos of the mountain gorillas Karibu and X-mas.