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Mastering Silverlight

Silverlight offers impressive talents and more than a few frustrations. From customizing your application UI to battling obscure bugs and error messages, this column helps with the transition to Silverlight tools.

Stable Composition in MEF

Learn how to work through debugging challenges posed by stable composition in MEF Preview 7, and get insight into using MEF with Silverlight.

Getting Current on MEF

ASK KATHLEEN: Readers explore Managed Extensibility Framework, using callback delegates and how to create the equivalent of a C# partial interface in Visual Basic.

Applying Model-View-View Model in Silverlight

Careful planning can help improve the manageability and quality of your next-generation Silverlight applications.

Fine-Tune Unit Testing in Visual Studio

With a few tweaks, you can turn Visual Studio's basic unit-testing capabilities into a powerful and extensible tool for improving code quality.

Visual Studio's T4 Code Generation

Learn how to create and debug templates using Microsoft's T4 templating language.

Working with MEF

Learn how to free your application from dependencies and interchange implementations using Managed Extensibility Framework.

Display Multiple Pages in Silverlight

Learn how to display multiple pages in Silverlight and discover the tools and controls that ship with it; track down a bug in a case statement; and take advantage of helpful tips for trying to obtain a clean Code Analysis.

Windows Workflow Changes Direction

Learn how Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) 4.0 changes everything you thought you knew about workflow. Also, learn why using string primary keys is a bad idea; find out where to get a data grid for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF); overcome the annoying issue of files not loading at runtime; and copy files into the executable directory.

What C# Devs Should Know About VB

VB and C# share many similarities, but also have a handful of significant differences; learn what you need to know to program effectively in VB as a C# programmer.

Control Exceptions

Take control of casting exceptions, determine whether parent records have children in LINQ to SQL, and resolve cref references in XML comments.

Understand Your Code Better

Visual Studio Team System's Code Metrics feature isn't perfect, but if you understand what it's measuring and how, you can use it to gain insight into your apps' overall complexity and to spot potential problem areas.

Customize Code Generation in EF

Learn how to exclude attributes from the code that Entity Framework generates for you automatically.

Customize Your Application Startup

Customize your application startup screen and add log-in functionality; learn how to view derived types in your projects; check for improper GUIDs; and drill down on extension methods.

Return Double Values in Excel

Learn how to work around a couple bugs in Excel to return double values; drill down on lists with anonymous types; and learn the difference between Build and Rebuild.