Sometimes even long error messages don't tell you much. This one is over 300 characters long and still does not clearly indicate what is wrong:Invoke operation '...' failed. Error in deserializing body of request message for operation '...'. OperationFormatter encountered an invalid Message body. Expected to find node type 'Element' with name '...' ......

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It looks like Silverlight 5's ComboBox is more restrictive. In Silverlight 4 I could change the ItemsSource of a ComboBox that had a SelectedItem != null, while in Silverlight 5 I have to set SelectedItem to null before I assign a new ItemsSource. Why even mention this? Isn't this obvious? Well, the Silverlight 4 ComboBox simply ignored the SelectedItem ......

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The last couple of months I have been working on an application that allows people to browse a data mart. Nice, but nothing new. In this context I have an idea that I want to publish before anyone else patents it: event notifications. You see, reporting systems are not used as much as we’d like. Typically, users don’t know where to look for reports ......

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No Silverlight today. I made a mistake. I created an application to upload a file and store it encrypted on a server. But I forgot to check on what machine it needed to be deployed. Yesterday I heard it was on an old ASP.NET 1.1 machine. Oops. Oh well, how hard can it be to change this simple application? Answer: much harder than I thought. Today I ......

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The title of this post could also have been "Move over Hyperlink, here comes Actionlink" or "Creating interactive text in Silverlight." But alas, there can be only one. Hyperlinks are very useful. However, they are also limited because their action is fixed: browse to a URL. This may have been adequate at the start of the Internet, but nowadays, in ......

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Sometimes it is really, really difficult to get rid of bad habits. One of these habits in our profession is the use of pages in web applications. The World Wide Web started as a system of interlinked hypertext documents contained on the Internet. Why is it that nowadays, two decades later, we still build web applications using the document concept, ......

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It's nice if a user can set the font size of all text displayed in an application, especially if this user is me and I am giving a demo - the font size that works for me (12.0) at my desk is not necessarily ideal during a presentation. So I have a FontSize property in my ViewModel that all controls observe. For RichTextArea controls that simply display ......

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