Introducing the Highway Framework

Today I’m pleased to announce a combined effort of myself and Devlin Liles which we are calling The Highway Framework, “The fastest and smoothest way to great architecture”. For this initial release we’ve focused on data access architecture with Entity Framework, a topic we’ve recently written a book about, but you can expect further greatness from us on other topics in the future. As you most likely know, Devlin and I are both consultants with Improving Enterprises and this is framework definitely distills alot of learning from our various clients and from other Improving consultants. We invite you to read on, check out the source code on github, our API Documentation, review the website, and tells us what you think. All that said, let’s tell you about Highway.Data.

Write Less Code - Theme Detection on Windows Phone 7

I spent alot of time tonight trying to find an elegant solution to the problem of detecting the light or dark theme from Windows Phone 7 and changing images based on those options. I was people that were doing a ToString in the Foreground Brush, or writing custom methods for every image in their code-behind, and all of that felt … dirty. Finally I came across this solution on StackOverflow which is not the “accepted” answer, but is the highest voted answer. It was good enough to get me to post the answer here as well, so I can remember it, and hopefully some of you who might be working to hard can find a more elegant solution.

Pylon Solver for Windows Phone 7