Recently I’ve been fighting a lot with the OpenXML SDK working on some cool data driven presentation engine. One of issues I had was how to clone slides. I did some search and found multiple blogs on how to do it but none of them really worked. Most of them shows you how to clone a simple slide and few how to deal with charts. In my case I had images, drawings, embedded Excell workbooks and charts all together on a single slide. After some time I managed to create an extension method that creates full slide clone. Enjoy. [More]

A few months ago I finished recording my very first Pluralsight course, which was published early February. The whole recording business took me a few long months but in the end it was good fun. This post captures the whole story and what I've learnt from it. [More]

I've been playing with the Git bash prompt trying to make it nicer and, let’s be honest here, more fun. After some digging I found one that looks quite cool https://github.com/magicmonty/bash-git-prompt. It needed a few small modifications to make it useful in Windows environment and here is the effect. [More]

Recently I had some problems with a query that took a very long time to execute, it took over 20 minutes to do 150 inserts, that's whopping 9-ish seconds per one insert. There was nothing I could see straight away that would shed any light to the problem. The code itself was very simple, just loop through a collection and do insert for each one.

After half a day of tearing my way through unknown land of wait stats, events and complex SQL I finally got my stats. Here is how. [More]

Did you know that .NET allows encrypting any section of the .config file? It can be either a section within web.config or app.config files or in any of linked files such as confirmit.config etc. A very useful feature if you want to protect passwords or other secret data.

The best of all is that your application will work unaffected if you encrypt configuration file. There is no code change required. You can work in your development environment with plain configuration and encrypt it when released. .NET will decrypt configuration transparently. This functionality is basically provided by the ASP.NET but you can use it outside web environment as well.

Recently I had to do it at work and, as I haven’t done that for ages now, it took me a moment to figure out all bits and bobs. For your entertainment and my memory here is how to do it. [More]

Follow-up to the "DataGrid with dynamic columns post". This time I deal with unexpected reentrancy error when applying binding with a converter. [More]

I’ve been working on a Silverlight page that should display a grid. There is nothing exciting in that except the fact that the grid had to have dynamic columns depending on data that is coming to the grid.
In this post I'm showing a very simple (and probably obvious) way of doing that. [More]

As some of my friends know there were some changes recently. Just a bit over week ago I said goodbye to my team at Symantec. It’s been great few years in Symantec and I know I will miss some of you there. Right after “between jobs” break in amazing Alpe d’Huez, we packed all our belongings and moved from quiet Gloucester to London. “The big smoke” as some tends to say, though I honestly can’t say why. As it happens Gloucester has some chest infections problem, not London. On Monday I will be starting in McKinsey Solutions with with some good nerds I knew before, and some I didn’t. Now I need to find more dev community around and sink in it. I’m certainly not going to run a user group again, at least not for a while. Hope GL.NET will be fine. Franck, don’t give up on them!

So, the new Office 2013 preview is available and, as a notorious early adopter, I’ve installed it just hours after it was released. Unfortunately that broke my Visual Studio 2012 RC. When trying start it getting the “The procedure entry point_Atomic_fetch_sub_4 could not be located in the dynamic link library MSVCR110.dll”. After a few try..catch attempts I found that Visual Studio 2012 repair is not working, neither just removing the Office 2013. Solution, in my case, was to uninstall both Office 2013 and Visual Studio 2012 and then install VS2012 again.  Apparently another solution is to install July 2012 update to Visual Studio. You can download it from here.

The DDD South West premiere of my new talk went quite well. Many thanks to all who attended. The feedback I got was quite good and got some very constructive comments. This post goes through some comments I've got and changes I've made in the talk. Also telling you where you can see it. [More]