It's been a busy few months since my last post.  Ben's building his vocabulary and knows a bunch of words.  He's also working on his "animal sounds".  He knows that a cow says "moo" and a bunch of others.  If you ask him what a pig says, he makes a sort of coughing sound.  I figured out he is saying the end of the word "oinK".  Ben was a little late to the game for walking. But he really got the hang of it and was very proud to be walking around.  But then he had a bit of an accident and broke his leg!  It sounds pretty crazy but the doctor says it is really quite common.  The specific break is actually called a "toddler's fracture"  To be clear, we aren't talking about one of those nasty "dangling limb" breaks.  Just a crack.  It still sucks for a 15 month old kid.  So poor Benny has a cast on his leg and that put an end to walking for a while. 

It's actually quite interesting to see Ben respond to this situation.  When the accident happened he was really unhappy and scared.  I don't think he was in a terrible amount of pain if he kept still.  But he was really scared, he knew something was not right in a serious way.  It took a while in the hospital and he did not like it when they splinted and wrapped his leg (the cast would get put on the next day at the Orthopedist's office).  However, as soon as his leg was immobilized he was out of pain and started turning back to normal, even playing a bit.  I expected him to play with the splint or try and take it off.  But he just ignored it.  I think somehow he actually understood that it was helping him.  Even when the cast got put on, he never pulled at it or anything.  He just accepted the situation - "now I have a cast on my leg, what's next?" He was back to crawling full time but didn't seem to care about the broken leg at all.  He eventually started to stand on it (leaning  on furniture) and now even takes as many as 8-10 steps on it!  He's not really supposed to but it isn't so easy to keep him off it.  The worst part of the whole thing is 6 weeks with no baths (not real ones, anyway), sand, swimming, dirt etc.  Anyway, in 2 weeks the cast is coming off.  My expectation is he'll quickly adjust back, start walking and that will be the end of that story.

We've also joined the Philadelphia Zoo.  This is a great idea for any family and we are really liking it, with 2 trips in so far this summer.  Benny loves it and points and yells at the animals.  We've also seen a lot of family lately including a visit to the park with Grandma and Longstreet Farm with his cousins. 

The last new thing is that we've been taking Ben for bike rides (he hangs out in a trailer), it's fun for the whole family.  Wow, so much to talk about, I really need to post these things more often!  Here's a bunch of photos:

• Craft Time for Ben, Mommy and cousin Fiona!

• With Grandma on Passover.  A classic "how big is Benny?" photo!

• Me and Ben at the Philadelphia Zoo.  Also... Making a mess eating ice cream, helping out in the garden, and Ben with his car (the best selling car in America!) and a picnic with Mommy and Grandma.

• Here's a shot of Ben with his cast.

• Benny's catching a free ride with Uncle Dennis, and posing with cousins Kaycie, Allie, Sami and Jake at Longstreet Farm.  Also Benny is his bike trailer - and looking cool too!

When using strongly typed views, don't name the controller action arguments with the same name as another form value!

I've been working with ASP.NET MVC for a couple of months now.  It is really pretty awesome.  It's worked so well, I haven't had much to blog about!  The other day I ran into an issue so I'm sharing the solution.   MVC will "automagically" bind the parameters of a controller action based on the values in the form.  And if your View is strongly typed and your controller action has a parameter of that same type, it will bind it too.  But in my case, the parameter was null.  MVC wasn't loading it. And there was no exception to help me out.

Here's a simple demo, I'm not showing every line of code...

Typical for an MVC application, I have a view that is strongly typed:

          <%@
          Page
          Title
          =""
          Language
          ="C#"
          MasterPageFile
          ="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master"
          

          Inherits
          ="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<OrganizationRole>"
          %> 
        

The View has a simple form which includes two text boxes:

          <
          p
          > 
          <
          label
          for
          ="OrganizationName">OrganizationName:</label> <%= Html.TextBox("OrganizationName") %> <%= Html.ValidationMessage("OrganizationName", "*") %> </p>
<p> <labelfor="Role">Role:</label> <%= Html.TextBox("Role") %> <%= Html.ValidationMessage("Role", "*") %> </p> 

A button on the form posts back to the controller, calling the Create Action.  Here is Action Code:

[AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)] publicActionResult Create(OrganizationRole role)
{ // Do Something Here... return View();
} 

In the screenshot below, you can see that when I debug the app, the role parameter has not been loaded.

The fix was simple but it took a while to figure it out!  All I had to do was re-name the parameter from "role" to "organizationRole":

[AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)]
publicActionResult Create(OrganizationRole organizationRole)
{
    // Do Something Here...
    return View();
}

You see, I was being lazy and abbreviated the argument's name.  That is ok, you can name the parameter almost anything you want.  But I gave the parameter the same name as one of the other form variables!  Notice above that my form has a text box named "Role"!  MVC tried to load the values of my parameters - it takes each of the posted values from the form ("OrganizationName" and "Role") and tries to match them up with arguments with the same names (it is not case sensitive) if they exist.  It also tries to load the entire form value (strongly typed as the class OrganizationRole) to the argument of type OrganizationRole, if one exists.  But an argument of type OrganizationRole with the name "Role" screws the who thing up!  The only problem is that it doesn't throw any exceptions.  Anyway, I changed the name and presto, it works.

It's hard to keep up with posting these photos of Ben.  Time flies.  Lots more news since my last blog post.  First of all, Ben had his 1st birthday!  His grandma made him an awesome cake (and cupcakes) and they were a big hit. 

Ben is really trying to gain some weight (he's a on the small side).  The Dr. put him on a "butter" diet, telling us to put butter on everything he eats.  Somehow he got the message.  All of a sudden he started eating everything in sight.  He gained 1 lb in 6 weeks.  Then he stopped eating again and got really finicky and cranky.  After a few days Rebecca took him to the Dr. to find out that he had an ear infection!  After a day or 2 of antibiotics, he was back to eating again.  He's a pretty funny eater.  One day he'll be eating Brussels sprout (yes, spelled with an "s" at the end, I looked it up), broccoli, meatloaf, spaghetti and meat sauce, salmon, and more.  It's like he loves all different flavor foods.  And the next day, he's bored of it all and won't eat anything!

Right around the time of the ear infection Benny developed another ailment, much to our dismay.  He's become a bit of a "momma's boy"!  All he wants is for his mommy to hold him.  It's pretty funny too because if it's just me and him hanging out, it's all good. He laughs and plays and is perfectly content.  But when Rebecca comes in the room, he starts to get cranky and he just wants her.  I'm sure this is pretty typical behavior for a kid his age.  For me, it's a little insulting - "what, I'm not good enough for you?".  But for Rebecca it is just plain annoying because she can't get anything done when he is around.  This too shall pass.

We've had a few other big achievements lately.  Ben started taking some steps on his own.  Still just 2 or 3 at a time, but people say once it starts, he'll be walking soon enough.  He also has increased his vast vocabulary to 3 words.  In addition to "momma" and "dadda", he now says "dog".  Well, more like "daw daw" but we are impressed.  It's funny too because we don't have a dog.  But he gets excited when he sees them on TV or out walking around, or at friends' houses.

OK, as usual, here are some recent photos...

No, that first one isn't Ben, but a classic just the same.  Big Steve eating Chicken Holiday!  Below are pictures of ben playing, at the park with Grandma, and showing off his new "Vail" shirt (he wants to go skiing there next year!).  Also, three classic "messy face" pictures.  The first is Ben eating his 1st Birthday Cake (his first sugar fix ever).  I think he liked it because you can see him eating his friend Ricky's cake too (with the red icing).  Think he enjoyed it?  And there's another with him covered in Oreo cookie!  Don't worry, he eats a lot of veggies and fruit too!

If you are looking to learn about Silverlight development, here is your chance.  Our local Microsoft Developer Evangelists are running a free full day event this Saturday featuring a good variety of information. 

To learn more or register, click here.

If you are a beginner or haven't gotten started yet, this is a great opportunity.  I'm not a beginner and my weekends are pretty busy these days.  So initially, I was going to skip this event.  But from my conversation with Dani Diaz last night, it sounds like there will be a decent range of information here, so I think I will attend too. 

I don't know the full agenda but some of the speakers include Dani, Lindsay Rutter, Bill Wolff and Pete Brown.  That's a good line up but to be perfectly honest, Pete Brown is the big draw for me.  I've been reading his blog since I started doing Silverlight development, this guy really knows his stuff.  One thing I've learned over time is that if a good speaker if giving a talk, even on a topic that I think I know fairly well, it is worth attending.  You never know what kind of tidbit you may pick up from them!

Hope to see you there.

One thing I really hate about doing Silverlight development is trying to search for good information on the Internet.  When I look for a solution to a problem I am having, I always run into a lot of "noise" in the form of outdated posts that aren't relevant anymore.  There are a ton of questions, answers, and sample solutions on the web from developers working with the Silverlight 2 Beta release.  I know this was all helpful information to share at the time, but a lot of it is useless now.  The problem is, sometimes you have to read the post a bit in order to figure out that the developer was on the Beta.  I've gotten to the point where the first thing I do is look at the date on the post before I read on.  What makes this even more complicated, is sometimes the information in these posts is still relevant and very helpful! 

Oh well, at least we are lucky to be developers in an age where so much information is shared among members of the community.  Can you imaging having to read manuals for all your information ;) ?  I don't mean to discourage anyone from posting.  Don't take me too seriously, I'm just ranting.

The other day I was working on a Silverlight app when I got this error:  Layout Cycle Detected.  The good news is that Silverlight actually gave me an error message that meant something.  That is unusual for Silverlight.  Of course the message didn't tell me what caused it, or how to fix it!  Luckily, there is this thing called the Internet ;-).  I found some information on David Yack's blog (I don't know him) that helped.

It turns out that Silverlight doesn't like it if you put too many TextBoxes in a ListBox (or possibly any other "repeater" kind of list control).  I'm not sure why it only applies to TextBoxes and not other controls, but here is my understanding of the problem...  Each time you add a TextBox to a ListBox it needs to figure out how much space to give the control, as well as all the other controls around it.  It figures that out, and then sizes all of the controls that don't have specific sizes set, and then lays everything out for you.  But I guess in a list, it needs to do this over and over and over again and Silverlight thinks it has gone into an endless loop, so at a certain point it cuts it off and says "Layout Cycle Detected".  Each time a control gets resized, the controls around it get resized, and that goes on and on until you get to the top level control.  I guess I can understand that it could be a problem, but I think the developers at Microsoft have got to come up with a better way to resolve this.  If I want to put a lot of TextBoxes in a list, I should be allowed to do so!  Also, the limit is supposedly 250 TextBoxes, but I am pretty sure I had less than that.

There are a few ways to get around the problem, as far as I know.  In my case there are a bunch of controls that made up the DataTemplate for my ListBox.  Since they are in a StackPanel, I put a fixed size on the StackPanel.  That prevents the "bubble up" of resizing going all the way to the page level.  That seemed to fix my problem most of the time, but not all of the time.  I could probably have kept playing with the layout and putting fixed sizes on more panels.  Instead, I gave in. 

I didn't want to fight with Silverlight any more so I changed all of my TextBoxes to TextBlocks.  Then I set the the ListBox items up so that you can switch them into "Edit Mode".  The problem here is that the ListBox doesn't have built in support for that.  So here is how I did it.  By the way, this is not dependent upon the "SelectedItem" in the ListBox, so you can have multiple items in EditMode at the same time.

The purpose of my list is to display a list of Services to the user.  My ListBox is bound to a collection: ObservableCollection<ServiceListItem>.  ServiceListItem is just a class that represents my data.  Among it's other properties, the ServiceListItem has a property for IsInEditMode.  It is nothing fancy:

          public
          bool IsInEditMode
{ get { return _isInEditMode;
} set  { if (_isInEditMode
== value) return;
_isInEditMode = value; NotifyPropertyChanged("IsInEditMode");
} } privatebool _isInEditMode; 

In my DataTemplate for the ListBox I have two StackPanels, one for ReadOnly mode and one for Edit Mode.  The ReadOnly template has a button to switch to EditMode.  The EditMode template has two buttons.  The Cancel button reverts the data to it's original state and switched to ReadOnly mode.  The Save button saves the data and switched to ReadOnly Mode.  Here is the one that puts the template into Edit Mode (nothing fancy here):

            <
            Button
             x
            :
            Name
            ="EditService"
             Click
            ="EditService_Click"> 
            
            
            <
            Button.Template
            > 
            
            
            <
            ControlTemplate
            > 
            
            
            <
            Image
             Source
            ="../images/pencil.png"
             Height
            ="10"
             Width
            ="10"
             Cursor
            ="Hand"
             VerticalAlignment
            ="Center"
             HorizontalAlignment
            ="Center"/> 
            
            
            </
            ControlTemplate
            > 
            
            
            </
            Button.Template
            >
</
            Button
            >
          

The code for the button click is pretty simple too:

          private
          void EditService_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{ ServiceListItem item = (ServiceListItem)((Button)sender).DataContext;
item.IsInEditMode = true; } 

Actually, the only cool part of this is how the control figures out which StackPanel to display.  Each one has it's Visibility Property bound to the IsInEditMode property!

                           < StackPanel x : Name ="EditPanel"
                                       Visibility="{Binding IsInEditMode, Converter={StaticResource BoolVisibilityConverter}}" 
                                       Orientation="Horizontal" Height="20" >

The trick is the Converter.  We're using a Converter that converts a boolean value into a value from the Visibility Enumeration:

          public
          class
          BoolVisibilityConverter : IValueConverter  { publicobject Convert(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, CultureInfo culture)
{ if (value == null || string.IsNullOrEmpty(value.ToString())
|| !(bool)value) returnVisibility.Collapsed; returnVisibility.Visible;
} publicobject ConvertBack(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, CultureInfo culture)
{ // we don't need it to convert back but we could
implement that later. return value;
} }

          Don't forget to add the Converter to your
user control's resources:
        

          
          
          <
          UserControl.Resources
          > 
          
          
          <
          ClientUtilties
          :
          BoolVisibilityConverter
           x
          :
          Key
          ="BoolVisibilityConverter"
/> 
          
          
          <
          ClientUtilties
          :
          BoolInverseVisibilityConverter
           x
          :
          Key
          ="BoolInverseVisibilityConverter"
/> 
          
          
          </
          UserControl.Resources
          > 
        

          And
it all just works!
        

          From this, you should be able to figure
out the other end of this, switching back to Read Only Mode. 
        

          I hope this helps. 
        

If you read my last post about Ben, you'll know that the winter wasn't going so well.  It seemed like Ben was always sick and in a "bad mood".  Well not anymore!  The little guy that we love is back and crazier than ever.  One day he just changed completely back to his old self.  These days he is sleeping great, eating great, playful as can be and all about having fun!

Ben is loving "real" food.  He really wants to feed himself so we let him do that most of the time.  He eats pasta, scrambled eggs, sweet potatoes and regular potatoes, chicken nuggets, fish sticks, pears, turkey meatloaf, veggie burgers, pizza (crust), peas, broccoli, carrots, mac and cheese and a bunch of other stuff.  He watches what Mommy and Daddy eat and always wants food off of our plates.  Plus, he is taking his bottles more too.  So all that is going well.

Play time is completely different these days.  Benny really seems to "get" the game.  I don't know what goes on in his mind but he is really starting to learn things.  The little gears are really turning in his head.  He loves to play with his Fisher Price "House".  He plays peek-a-boo by lifting the window up and down.  He also loves his "Little People".  And he has car that he can ride on and walk behind.  We are noticing more hand coordination too as he can put balls into a slot or put his blocks together (sometimes).  He's very proud of himself too, especially when he is walking (with our help), standing - yes on his own for a few seconds at a time, and other fun stuff.  Yesterday I said "How big is Benny" and up went his hands.  I had been trying that for a while with him with no result.  But it just clicked and how he does it all the time. 

Ben is really looking forward to turning 1 year old.  He had a lot of fun with his cousin Grace at her Birthday party.  She's older by 10 days!  Check out the picture of them together, it is pretty funny because Grace is big for her age, while Ben is pretty small.

OK, here are some of my favorite pictures from the last few weeks.  Oh, by the way, Benny got his first haircut too.