Coding Zen

I recently ran into an issue with when using the SqlFunctions.StringConvert function (as required by LINQ to cast scalars to a string). What I didn’t realize at first is that the StringConvert function pads the string that it casts to. As it turns out this causes some issues with defining a selected item in the list.

I recently worked on a project that used the Entity Framework and T4 POCO generation. I ran into a little snag during the implementation of the Repository pattern that took a few minutes for me to figure so I thought that I would save someone else the time and share here. I resolved this with one line.

YES it is here! Today Microsoft announced they have officially released the Kinect for Windows SDK and Hardware and yes it is commercial friendly. Check out this quote from the Kinect for Windows FAQS. The Beta license was restrictive and did not allow for distribution of commercial applications. How does the license work with this release? The commercial license for this release authorizes development and distribution of commercial applications. The prior SDK  [ Read More ]

UPDATED: I was recently presented with an issue of casting a Bitmap Image (System.Drawing.Image) to a BitmapImage (System.Windows.Media.Imaging). Unfortunately WPF has no converter for this. To solve this issue I created…

I recently began work on a RESTful web service using WCF 4. One of our requirements was to implement basic HTTP authentication (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_access_authentication). This wasn’t quite as straight forward as I initially thought it might be. After some digging around I came across a wonderful extension library WcfRestContrib (https://github.com/mikeobrien/WcfRestContrib) . Proceeding after finding this library and use of their documentation I basic auth integrated quickly into the service. At this  [ Read More ]

UPDATED: A newer version has been released visit this POST Earlier this week I received an email informing me of the release of the EDSDK 2.9 library. I must say that this has been a quick release cycle for Canon and their SDK. Upon reviewing the change notes for this release there really only appears to be 2 changes. First, Canon added support for their latest EOS camera the Canon  [ Read More ]

This post is the first of what should be many to come. I have decided to put a project that I have long had on hold (2 years or so). I am going to build a multi-touch table like the Microsoft Surface for myself. I have long read on this product and dreamed to have one, but alas I just don’t have $12,000 laying around to drop on one of  [ Read More ]

It’s been a loooong time between posts and I apologize for that. The resent months have been quite busy and a somewhat recent change in direction on my software development has led to me no longer diving into WIA. In this post I am providing a functional class that provides a means to enumerate the devices properties, set a device property and take a picture. What this class does not  [ Read More ]

So I’ve been working on a tether program for my Nikon D40x. My current development platform is 32-bit Vista, but my target machine is a 64-bit Vista machine. So today I’ve finally got everything working on my development machine and migrate it to my target machine. Everything seems fine under normal test cases until I go to exercise a couple of key events used to detect if the camera is  [ Read More ]

Welcome, in this article I am going to how to get your project setup to use WIA, how successfully connect to an image device and finally how to enumerate all the properties and events the device supports. While this article will only touch the surface of what all you can do with WIA subsequent articles will continue to delve deeper into WIA’s full capabilities. Related Posts:Project: multi-touch table