Silverlight generally tries to make programming easier, and most of the time does pretty well doing so. The drawback of this sometimes is that when you want to create a more complex, not so common scenario, you may run into issues that really are not obvious. Sometimes, hidden deep behind the scenes of a simple programming model, unexpected things may happen that can give you a lot of headache when you dare to wander from the path.

WCF in particular is such a case where really a lot of the complex details are concealed from you, and when you read about the following you'll probably be surprised by some of the mechanics that happen when you do a seemingly simple web service call. More...

This is not a post about a particular technical problem. It's about how I manage to get my work done. People actually ask me this question, and since I have put quite some thought into how to structure my day, I thought: "Why not share this with everybody else?" That is why you're reading this. Maybe it helps you too, or at least makes you think about the way you work, to improve your efficiency. Here we go.

Some History

A decade ago, a series of remarkable posts by Joel Spolsky fascinated me. He was writing about what he called "the zone", and from my perspective hit the nail on the head with every word he wrote. Until then, I had never thought about this phenomenon, let alone given it a name. Being in the zone is a state of full concentration, when you work most efficiently. Sometimes people are able to get sucked into this so deeply that they lose track of time and even forget to eat or leave work. When they finally realize that it's 3am, they have finished a tremendous amount of work and don't feel exhausted at all (of course they might be in the next morning or an hour later though). Every programmer who has experienced this will tell you that it's an incredible feeling of elation. More...

Sometimes, achieving simple things can be really hard. For example, when you want to know the screen resolution in a Silverlight out-of-browser application. In a full .NET application, this comes down to few lines of code, because there is a Screen class in the System.Windows.Forms namespace that provides all that information:

foreach (var screen in Screen.AllScreens)
{
    Rectangle bounds = screen.Bounds;
    Debug.WriteLine(bounds.Width + "x" + bounds.Height);
}

In Silverlight however, there is no such class. How do you get the screen resolution then? More...