This one is for all you bloggers or all you who intend to open a blog. If you have read Dev102 you probably saw that a couple of months back a lot of theme tweaks, moving stuff from here to there. I promised back then that I will tell you why we did that, so here goes.

We wanted to increase our number of page views. Back then we had about 1.20 page views per visit and we wanted to try and make that number grow. The changes to our theme were all test to see what will make people (you) stay and continue reading more posts and articles. We tried a lot of things but they were mainly two ways we tried to increase our page views, so here they come with their results.

Many times I want to make my WPF Controls have a 3D effect. For examples Headers of lists and such. Saddly there is no built in way to do it so we have to come up with a custom solution. I don’t want to use Bitmap effects due to performance reasons, I must say I don’t have much experience with them but from what I have I am not a big fan.

Here is my solution for a 3D effect on WPF Controls.

First of all a Quick demonstration. Which one looks better.

I don’t know about you but the second one is much nicer with that 3D effect.

How is it done? As I said before I don’t like using Bitmap effects if I don’t have to, so this is done with combining 2 borders together. The simple upper  one is a regular border with TextBlock

We never published a lists of blog posts we liked, so this will be the first time. I gathered some links from my Google Reader shared items, some of those links are old, some are new, but I liked them all. So here is the list of 7 post/articles I recommend:

1. Phil Haack is talking about the fact that The Design Is Never Right The First Time. I think that it is OK that the design won’t be right the first time, but it should be good at the first time. Explanation: the fact that Phil could change the implementation over night tells me that his initial design was very good. It is not that simple to change the design and the implementation so close to the deadline… I know some projects where you can’t replace some code just like that, it will take too much time to do it…
2. Scott Hanselman tells that there is a post at the Microsoft StyleCop blog that shows some rules about directives outside and inside the namespace declaration. In his post Back to Basics - Do namespace using directives affect Assembly Loading?, he discovers that we shouldn’t believe everything we read, even on a Microsoft Blog.
3. Jeff Atwood wrote about Dealing With Bad Apples in a team and that if you tolerate even one developer whom the other developers think is a problem, you’ll hurt the morale of the good developers. I totally agree, those situations lead to a very negative attitude in the team and after some time, it is too late because the “cancer” has spread to the whole team.
   
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This is a guest post by Ryan Lanciaux.

Hi my name is Ryan Lanciaux. I want the thank the guys at Dev102 for giving me the opportunity to write about a topic I find very interesting — jQuery and the ASP.NET MVC Framework.

With WebForms, integrating with Ajax libraries other than ASP.NET AJAX was slightly painful. With the new ASP.NET MVC Framework, however, you can use jQuery without these additional headaches. We’re going to take a quick look at how the Frickinsweet.com Theme Generator uses some of the built in ASP.NET MVC utilities combined w/ jQuery to give the user an update with out reloading the page. The example we’re going to look at is a little simplified but the concepts are still there.

The first thing we’re going to do is create an ASP.NET MVC (Preview 4) Project. Create a new view and controller action under your Home controller and add the following line to the view.

When we work on big projects, there is a need to set up a development tree (directory structure) and not just put everything in the bin\Debug or bin\Release folder. There are some “how to set up a good development tree” best practices and even a .NET development tree generator called Tree Surgeon. Some of the folders in this directory structure shall be “Resources” (set of icons and images) and “Config” (set of configuration files).

How many times did you search for a specific configuration file or a specific icon in the development tree (assuming it is a big one)? You come back to a component you wrote several years ago and can’t recall where did you locate your files. Wouldn’t it be nice if for each project, our resources and configuration files could be seen form visual studio? We would never need to find them using the windows explorer anymore and we will always have them right there even when coming back to a code which was written 2-3 years ago.

This is a guest post by Sam Agarwal from the Bitrix Team.

The first impression you might get when you open the Bitrix Site Manager’s Photo Album is that it resembles any other photo sharing application. However, as soon as you start working with it, the enormous differences become more than apparent.

Hey all

Here are some great tools that will help you diagnose problems and errors on your applications. Don’t leave home without them!

SQL Profiler

We all know that most problems start in the DataBase. SQL profiler will help you to locate…

This is the fifteen post of the series of programming job interview challenge, 37 readers provided an answer to job interview challenge #14. As you can understand from the title, I have a little announcement to make, but lets first head on to last weeks question answers.

This time, Omar was the first one to provide an efficient and correct detailed answer:

Draw a line from the single point (any direction will do).
Count the number of times that this line intersects with lines of the polygon.
An even count (including zero) indicates that the point is outside of the polygon.
An odd count indicates that the point is inside the polygon.

Here is a nice image taken from Jon von Gillern blog post

Usually, the WPF controls are declared in the .xaml file and not in the code behind (.xaml.cs file). However, we might need to use some of those controls in the code behind in order to manipulate them. How can we get the handle of such a control if it “resides” in the xaml file? Take a look at the following xaml code:

<Window x:Class="WpfApplication2.Window1"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    Title="Window1" Height="300" Width="300" MouseLeftButtonDown="window_Clicked">
    <Grid>
        <TextBlock x:Name="fullNameControl" FontSize="20"
                   Text="{Binding Path=FullName}">
        </TextBlock>
    </Grid>
</Window>

There is a TextBlock called fullNameControl, in the code behind I change its background color to gold when the window is clicked:

Hi all

July is over and it is time for the stats.

Exciting news! We got accepted to DMOZ! which is great. It seems that bugging them all those months finally paid out

Blogging Idol Content

As expected the numbers are lower than last month’s (no more 20k visits a day…) but still show progress. On the other hand Our efforts In the blogging Idol have taken us to  almost 600 RSS subscribers! So thanks to everyone who subscribed!

Writing Payout Increased

As promised, We have raised our offer for article writing, we will now pay 30$ for a well written, 500+ words article. Find out more on our Make money with Dev102 page.

Dev102 Link Directory

We have also Proud to announce the opening of the Dev102 Link Directory. If you have a blog or a WebSite and you want to swap links with us feel free to add you link there. If you can find a category that fits your WebSite contact us. We will not instantly approve all blogs, but if your blog is updated frequently and is not spam you will definitely get in.