Whenever you pit designers against developers, it always seems to be the developer that loses. It's very rare that controls like the Silverlight DataGrid are left alone - designers want little tweaks and polish to increase the user experience. This tutorial is going to illustrate how to use one of the most flexible solutions to theming a DataGrid - the DataGridTemplateColumn.

The data center that holds our dedicated server suffered a power loss yesterday morning that unfortunately took down Switch On The Code for close to 14 hours. This incident, however, really showcases the potential of Twitter's real-time search. A simple query for "crucialparadigm" listed a handful of people experiencing the same outage.

Bindings are a major part of WPF, and a big part of what makes it quick to create user interfaces in. They can be a little wordy and hard to debug sometimes, but overall they are extremely useful. Hopefully, after today's tutorial, you will find them even more useful - because today we are going to talk about building validation rules right into your bindings. Yup, you heard right - bindings in WPF have built in support for validation, and a number of the common controls have built in ways for displaying validation errors.

Any graphics library is a little hard to handle when first getting started -there are so many different concepts to get a grasp on. This tutorial is here to start you down the path of using OpenGL ES for the iPhone. Creating OpenGL based applications in games involve a little bit more ground work to get things rolling, but on the plus side we can remove Interface Builder from the equation entirely. If you haven't built anything for the iPhone before I recommend you check out our beginner's tutorial for building iPhone applications - it will give you good starting point.

Almost every control in WPF uses a control template to define how it displays itself and its contents. In fact, you can override the control template on every built-in control to make it appear and act exactly like you want. Rather than overriding an existing template, however, this tutorial is going to demonstrate how to build a custom content control and use a control template to define how it looks.

The need to display a graph of some kind comes up surprisingly often when developing applications. Because of this, for almost every language and framework under the sun, there is some sort of graphing/plotting library (and sometimes a lot more than just one). While there is no built in library for graphing for iPhone applications, there is an open source library called Core Plot. This library is under active development and can be used to create a number of different types of graphs - if you want, you can check our their example page here.

The near impossible has been achieved - a third episode of three people ranting about random tech news and tutorials. Among the topics discussed include the new iPhone 3G S and OS 3.0, latest iPhone tutorials, Google Chrome extensions, Microsoft Bing, horrible Internet Explorer 8 marketing, and our WPF Datagrid tutorial.

Audio Downloads: 

SOTC Episode 3 - Negative I am a Meat Popsicle.mp3

Generally, the iPhone SDK is not that bad, however they left out an important feature that app developers really need - the ability to change the color of navigation buttons. Navigation buttons live on the very top of the application and are usually there to navigation backwards and forwards through views. Sometimes, though, they're used as confirmation or to save data that has been entered. This is when they need a different color. This tutorial is going to demonstrate how to create and place a blue button in the navigation controller.

WPF comes with a large number of built in controls, but from the beginning it has lacked something that many application developers find extremely important - a DataGrid. You can use the ListView to create something approximating a DataGrid (I've talked about it in a couple different tutorials), but it is a lot of work and not particularly straightforward. Thankfully, Microsoft realizes how important a full-featured DataGrid is - and how you probably don't want to wait for the next version of WPF to be able to use one. This is where the WPF Toolkit comes in. The WPF Toolkit is "a collection of WPF features and components that are being made available outside of the normal .NET Framework ship cycle" which to me translates as "handy new controls I don't have to wait for".

Icons are our forgotten friends. Every app needs them, but often times they are thrown in at the very end. Of course when building an app single handedly, you should not focus on such things when code needs to be written. But when it comes time to build a user interface, they are typically an after thought. Today, however, I will show you some pretty useful sites to find what you need quick.