| Applications |
| Components |
| Articles |
| Photos/Travel |
| Kleinkunst |
| Applications |
| Components |
| Articles |
| Photos/Travel |
| Kleinkunst |
Welcome to my personal website: SCIP.be (Stefan Cruysberghs' Internet Pages). I am a software developer and I live in Lommel (Flanders/Belgium). These webpages show some of my hobbies and interests.
On this site you will find all sorts of articles about software development (.NET, C#, Visual Studio, Delphi, ...), databases and digital photography. In addition it's possible to download my components and some older freeware applications. There is also a large collection with photographs of my journeys.
The tabs at the top of the page can be used to navigate between the different categories. At the left all subitems are shown. Below you will find the most recent additions:
| Photo blog |
| Winter in Lommel (2010-01-09) |
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Some photos of winter time in my hometown Lommel.
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| Photo blog |
| Winter in Lommel (2010-01-09) |
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Some photos of winter time in my hometown Lommel.
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| Silverlight 4 design-time features for ViewModels |
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Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4 offer a lot of new features. I like all the new features but I was especially interested in improvements that could help my current developments which are based on a M-V-VM architecture with ViewModels and a lot of bindings with UI controls. In this article I will focus on the improved design-time features. Along the way I will show a lot of screenshots and try to cover some other new Silverlight 4 features. more
2010-01-17 - Article, .NET, Silverlight |
| Photo blog : Winter in Lommel |
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Some photos of winter time in my hometown Lommel. more
2010-01-09 - Photos, winter, Lommel |
| Photos of Ecuador and Galápagos islands |
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Photos of my 4-weeks during journey through Ecuador and the Galápagos islands. On the mainland we explored a few colonial cities such as Quito and Cuenca, we visited the colourful markets of Saquisili and Guamote, we spent 3 days in the Amazon jungle and twice stood at high altitude on the Cotopaxi and Chimborazo volcanos. On the wonderful Galápagos we explored 8 islands and during our boat trips, walks and snorkeling we could spot from close distance almost the all animals (iguanas, tortoises, sea lions, ...), birds (pelicans, gents, frigate birds, ...) and fish which can be found in this archipelago. more
2009-10-26 - Photos, Ecuador, Galápagos |
| New version TscExcelExport for Delphi 2010 |
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The TscExcelExport component is an advanced, powerful but easy to use VCL component which enables you to export all records of a dataset from Borland/CodeGear/Embarcadero Delphi to Microsoft Excel. Version 3.9 offers support for Embarcadero Delphi 2010. The component is free for non-commercial use and all sources are included. more
2009-10-25 - Component, Delphi |
| Photo blog : Galápagos iguanas |
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Close-ups of the amazing marine and land iguanas on the volcanic Galápagos islands in the Pacific Ocean. more
2009-10-15 - Photos, Galápagos, iguanas |
| Advanced databinding with ViewModels in Silverlight |
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Silverlight and RIA Services are great technologies and the Model-View-ViewModel (M-V-VM) pattern is a nice approach to keep UI and logic separated. But using the combination of view models with item controls, dataforms and commands can be a laborious task because the databinding features in Silverlight are quite limited. In this article I will demonstrate how binding with ViewModels can be improved by using the BindingHelper class and by creating your own command behaviors. more
2009-08-23 - Article, .NET, Silverlight |
| Photos of a hike in Gran Paradiso |
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Photos of my 6-day hike trip in the national park Gran Paradiso in the Italian Alps. The park is characterized by the different high summits with glaciers and there are still a lot of marmots, chamois and rock-goats which live there. We climbed the 2 mountains, the Gran Serra (3552m) and the Grand Paradiso (4096m), the highest mountain in Italy. more 2009-07-26 - Photos, Italy |
| Photo blog : Fauna on Texel |
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A few photos of seals (common and grey) and birds (herring gull, pheasant) on the Wadden island Texel (The Netherlands). more
2009-06-28 - Photos, Texel, fauna |
| Photo blog : New life |
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The spring new-borns are beginning to grow up. These photos were taken during some walks in my hometown Lommel and in Turnhout. more
2009-05-19 - Photos, spring, animals |
| RIA Services - part 1 |
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A few months ago Microsoft released the first preview of .NET RIA Services. This new framework promises to simplify building n-tier Line of Business (LoB) applications by providing patterns, components and tools to build services, query data, handle CRUD operations, resolve concurrency, manage data validation, ... In this first article I will focus on the current limitations and I will offer you some of my workarounds and tips. more
2009-05-17 - Article, .NET, RIA Services, Silverlight |
| New features on SCIP.be |
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My personal website SCIP.be has been updated and now it offers several new features and improvements. There is support for Media RSS feeds and the great browser plugin CoolIris which can be used to navigate through photo galleries in 3D. All images are improved, articles are linked to several categories and pages can be shared more easily. more
2009-04-23 - SCIP.be |
| New connection providers in LINQPad |
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LINQPad was introduced in 2007 and nowadays it is a very mature tool which should be in the toolbox of every .NET developer. Version 1.35 offers new connection providers and it has native support for LINQ to SQL and the ADO.NET Entity Framework data models. It also provides new query types like SQL and Entity-SQL. In this small article I will highlight some of the new features. more
2009-04-14 - Article, .NET, LINQPad, LINQ, Entity Framework |
| Sharing source code between .NET and Silverlight |
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A common problem when developing Silverlight applications is how to share classes and in particular (Entity Framework) entities which are compiled for the full .NET framework in a Silverlight application. Silverlight is a browser plugin and a subset of the full .NET framework. Therefore Visual Studio does not allow referencing .NET assemblies from your Silverlight application. In this article I will demonstrate a very simple technique to share source code and it will give several real world examples and some handy tips. more
2009-01-27 - Article, .NET, Silverlight, Entity Framework, WCF |
| Cleaning up and organizing Outlook mailboxes |
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This small article contains a few C# scripts which can be executed in LINQPad to clean up and organize Outlook mailboxes. If you want to keep Outlook performing as fast as possible and to reduce the size of mailboxes then these scripts and my OutlookProvider component can simplify this job. more
2009-01-24 - Article, .NET, Office, Outlook, LINQ, LINQPad |
| Photo blog : Lommel during winter time |
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A few photos from different spots in Lommel during the snow white but ice cold second week of 2009. more
2009-01-16 - Photos, Lommel, winter |
| ADO.NET Entity Framework : Metadata extension methods |
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In addition to my article about querying the metadata of the ADO.NET Entity Framework I have implemented several extension methods that utilize this metadata. This article will describe a set of extension methods which can be used to extend the standard Entity Framework classes (ObjectQuery, EntityObject, ObjectStateManager, ...). more
2009-01-12 - Article, .NET, Entity Framework |
| Photo blog : Lommel Sahara on freezing winters day |
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Photos of Lommel Sahara on the freezing cold but sunny morning of the last day of 2008. The Sahara is a small nature reserve with ponds, woods and some small sand dunes. more
2008-12-31 - Photos, Lommel, Sahara, winter |
| Querying Excel worksheets with LINQ |
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A while ago I was looking for a way to query Excel with LINQ. I needed a simple solution that allowed me to query tables in Excel worksheets in a tool like LINQPad. This article will describe how I implemented my ExcelProvider and it will demonstrate its features by giving an example of a LINQ query and the result in LINQPad. more
2008-12-17 - Article, .NET, Office, Excel, LINQ, LINQPad |
| ADO.NET Entity Framework : Querying metadata |
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A few months ago I posted several articles about the ADO.NET Entity Framework beta 3. In the meanwhile the Entity Framework has been officially released and a lot of resources about this technology have become available. In the last few weeks I have been taking a closer look at the metadata services. This article will demonstrate 20 examples which use LINQ to query the metadata collections of the ADO.NET Entity Framework. These queries can be used to examine the structure of your Entity Data Model or to get statistics about it. more
2008-12-02 - Article, .NET, Entity Framework |
| Photo blog : Fungi |
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It's autumn in Belgium and so a lot of fungi are appearing again. Here some photos of peculiar fungi like the colorful fly agaric (Amanita muscaria). more
2008-10-25 - Photos, Autumn, Fungi |
| Photos of the southwest of the USA |
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Photos of my journey through the southwest of the USA (Nevada, Utah, Arizona, California) with a small group of people. We visited wonderful national parks such as the Valley of Fire, Zion, Bryce, Coral Pink Sand Dunes, Antelope Canyon, Monument Valley, Grand Canyon, Death Valley, Mono Lake and Yosemite. We drove on Route 66, in Bodie we sampled the atmosphere of the wild west, in Vegas we made a small bet and we finished our trip in San Francisco. more
2008-10-19 - Photos, USA |
| New version TscExcelExport (Delphi) |
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The TscExcelExport component is an advanced, powerful but easy to use VCL component which enables you to export all records of a dataset from Borland/CodeGear Delphi to Microsoft Excel. Version 3.7 supports CodeGear Delphi 2009 and it has several improvements and bugfixes. The component is free for non-commercial use and all sources are included more
2008-10-11 - Component, Delphi |
| Photo blog : Stellar's Jay |
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In September I travelled through the southwest of the USA. A common bird in this region is the Stellar’s Jay. It is a beautiful blue and black bird with a wonderful crest. Here are some photos. more
2008-10-08 - Photos, USA, Stellar's Jay |
| LINQ AsHierarchy() improvements |
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A few months ago I published an article about my LINQ AsHierarchy extension method. This extension method can be used to convert a flat collection of records to a hierarchical structure of nested collections. I got a lot of enthusiastic responses and questions so I decided to improve this technique a little further. This new article will describe the new features and demonstrates how to use the LINQ to Objects and the new LINQ to SQL AsHierarchy extension methods. more
2008-08-25 - Article, .NET, LINQ, Entity Framework, LINQ to SQL |
| Photos of Iceland |
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Photos of my journey to Iceland. With a group of friends we made a 6-day hike through a beautiful and varied area from Landmannalaugar to Ţórsmörk and then to Skógar. The last few days we hired two cars and visited some spectacular waterfalls like Svartifoss, Seljalandfoss and Gullfoss, the impressive glacier lake Jökulsárlon, the geyser Strokkur and Cape Ingólfshöfdi where a lot of puffins breed. more
2008-07-30 - Photos, Iceland |
| Generic custom WPF/Silverlight value converters |
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Data binding is one of the most powerful features of WPF/Silverlight. It allows developers to achieve more with less code. However, when building user interfaces with WPF/Silverlight, you often need to create your own value converters. A common mistake is to implement custom value converters for each and every binding that requires one. Of course value converters can be generalized an re-used. In this article I will show you the source code of my library of generic custom value converters and I will demonstrate in which scenarios you can use them. more
2008-07-17 - Article, .NET, WPF, Silverlight |
| Photo blog : Contest for Living Statues |
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Last weekend my hometown Lommel organized the European Contest for Living Statues. More than 45 beautiful living statues were invited and during 2 days they demonstrated their skills. Hereby a few close-up photos of some of these artists. more
2008-06-22 - Photos, Lommel, living statues |
| Using the Google Maps HTTP geocoding service in .NET |
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This article will demonstrate how to use the Google Maps HTTP geocoding service and how to handle REST services and XML in general. The Google Maps service can be used to retrieve the latitude, longitude and a lot of other geographical data from a given address. more
2008-06-20 - Article, .NET, GIS/Geocoding |
| New macro photos |
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New macro photos (flowers, dragonflies, butterflies, sea urchins, ...) which I have made the past year have been added to the photo album with the macro pictures. more
2008-06-07 - Photos, macro |
| UI automation with the WPF UIAutomation framework |
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WPF UIAutomation is a framework from Microsoft to automate Windows applications. In this article I will demonstrate a lot of features (invoking button clicks, focusing controls, entering data, sending keystrokes, subscribing to events, ...) and compare it with the open-source project White. more
2008-06-06 - Article, .NET, UI Automation, WPF, WinForms |
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Stefan Cruysberghs
