Fixing ReSharper inspection Results used from XAML

Finishing this week sprint I decided to inspect some code using ReSharper 6.1 EAP and I started to give ReSharper a chance to help me find some of broken code.

When I started I had some of the following inspection results. It is clearly showing that some properties wasn’t identified as used in a WPF binding.

So ReSharper proposed to make the property private which for sure was not ok for me has I knew it was used.

Some time ago I started to assign some design DataContext to be able to navigate from View to my ViewModel just by pressing Go to Declaration (CTRL-B in IDEA scheme) in ReSharper.

<UserControl x:Class="skyeEditor.View.StatusBarView"
             xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
             xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
             xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"
             xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008"
             xmlns:ViewModel="clr-namespace:skyeEditor.ViewModel"
             mc:Ignorable="d"
             d:DataContext="{d:DesignInstance Type=ViewModel:StatusBarViewModel}">

This for sure helps ReSharper code inspection as you can see on the following screenshot

Now I can navigate from View to ViewModel, can avoid to have developer deleting properties that are sued in XAML bindings, but I can also get an idea of where a ViewModel property is used by using ReSharper Find Usage (Alt-F7). I see right away that the StatusBarView.xaml is using the property ShowActivityProgress.

So don’t forget to add the d:DataContext into your XAML !

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An article by Laurent Kempé No Comments

DVCS and my usage of Git Svn

Sometime ago I moved “away” from subversion has my Version Control System (VCS) because I felt not free of my way of working with it. I found a great was to improve my work experience by using Git Svn in front of our central Subversion repository.

I started my experimentation with Mercurial and Hg Svn because I was already using Mercurial for my personal projects. I hit some much the wall with Hg Svn that I decided quite quickly to go and try Git Svn. I had no experience with Git at that time and I had the feeling that it was more complex to handle than Mercurial (which I still think).

So currently I use Git Svn to work on one of our product at Innoveo Solutions. I also made a presentation to the team during our techno pizza lunch about DVCS, Git, Git Flow and Git Svn.

And here is the list of what I personally gained as a developer:

1. 2 steps commit
   1. Stage/commit, Push
2. Local history / branching
   1. No connection to central repository needed to branch/to look at history
3. Experiment / Refactoring / Spikes
   1. Commit changes on one path, if wrong rollback
4. Smarter Merging
   1. Git’s focus on content rather file location
   2. Better at resolving merge conflicts for you (e.g. renames)
   3. Branching/Merging is daily workflow not anymore an ‘exceptional case’
5. Stash changes
6. Rebase / Rewriting history
   1. Until push you can use interactive rebase

Due to my 4h daily commute (more than 2h in the train), I very much appreciate the offline capabilities of DVCS. It lets me branch, watch the history without having a connection to the central repository. So that a really convenience thing in my day to day job.

But what I even prefer is working in local branches for experiment, refactoring. With that capability I am able again to commit small steps of code change. I particularly appreciate the possibility to experiment some refactoring and to rollback wrong changes when I feel that I went the wrong way with the change. In the past this was not possible and often you would not commit to SVN because that code would be shared with the others or t would break the build. Ok, I know I could do that with Svn working in a feature branch, but we all know the pain it is with the merging back, especially when you refactor and rename files. During refactoring it is important to be able to save/commit small chunk of code change and even more important is to be able to rollback those changes. So in that case DVCS is a perfect match to that problem.

What I currently don’t like in my current way of working with Git in front of Svn is that I have local branches which I don’t sync back to the central server. I don’t like it because if I have an issue with my local machine then those changes might be lost. I will investigate in the coming weeks about possible solutions even if the best one would be a migration of the central repository to Git. But his is another story because it means a wider change in the team.

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An article by Laurent Kempé 2 Comments

Unlock your Windows Phone 7 with ChevronWP7 Labs

ChevronWP7 Labs just realized their Windows Phone unlocking tool. This software will let you developer unlock your device for $9.

This is not a Jailbreaking tool, it let you upload your own homebrew applications on your Windows Phone 7 device without going through Microsoft's expensive ($99/year) developer program.

You might read more about it on their blog : ChevronWP7 Labs Availability

Still waiting that the 295 people in front of me get their phones unlocked… !

Update: And here is the result after unlocking !

I also quickly deployed successfully an application to the phone directly from Visual Studio 2010 !

Congrats to the ChevronWP7 team !

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An article by Laurent Kempé No Comments