Of course, stupid us should be using a different password for every site, as if we don’t have enough to remember, particularly when they enforce silly rules about the passwords.

If any of my data gets leaked or breached, I shall be suing them for any ensuing loses.

If could be a matter of deleting the account instead of changing the password, this will help with any future breaches to their security and I won’t have to read the inane ramblings about changing your password.

I would be worried, but for the fact that the government is notoriously bad at anything to do with IT.  I mean, look at all the botched NHS projects, national id cards etc.

This looks like another waste of tax payers money and what do they think they’ll achieve with this?  Knowledge is money as they say, and I can only think they’ll try to monetise this somehow.

I also doubt they have the expertise to pull this off, so they’ll no doubt outsource this to one of their crony third-party tech companies that have hardly shown great skills in the past.

Lets now wait for all the false arrests, police, politicians et al abusing the system and the whole thing being scrapped a few years down the line.

I am, of course, talking about the evil that is inheritance. Time after time, this has tripped up many a seasoned developer, including myself.

I changed my attitude to inheritance about 6 years ago and opted for the much more convenient and flexible route of composition. I guess being a former C++ developer, inheritance had been drummed into me and there was nothing else in the world. As software projects became larger, the more complex object models became and the promise of reuse became a distant memory.

It was then that I thought that this had to change. Instead of building all the functionality into the object models themselves, we should be building specific classes that do the work for us. To work across our object model and update it as it sees fit.

This then came into its own with dependency injection and being able to inject different behaviours instead of having to build more and more complex object models. Reuse was back with a vengeance and so was my fervour.

Anyone still singing the virtues of inheritance….your wrong, so wrong! Mind you, maybe you’re happy being meek.

Normally I merrily derive from INotifyPropertyChanged (or some suitable base class), call the PropertyChanged event and let the whole thing just work. The same is true of a dependency object.

If the WPF binding mechanism discovers that it’s not one of these objects, it sticks its own listeners onto the object to deal with the changes. Unfortunately, these are never removed, as it doesn’t have a clear understanding of the lifetime of the object. This can cause memory leaks.

You live and learn…

In demonstrations, they’ve shown it switching between word documents, depending on which one your looking at.

Now, we reckon couple that with voice control and you could have a pretty nifty setup. Especially for the disabled.

We could probably envisage a time when this is measuring other internals of the body, like temperature, blood pressure, how long you’ve been awake, the list could go on.

This smart little pill uses the stomach’s acid to create a voltage and so power itself.

All this information could then be relayed back to your favourite smartphone, giving instant access to you health check, as well as uploading it for historical information for your doctor.

Hmmm, I feel an app coming on

First of all, I’ve just set up some very basic ViewModels:

This ones for each item (Tab) in the TabControl:

public class ItemViewModel : ViewModelBase
    {
        private string name;

        public ItemViewModel(string tabName)
        {
            TabName = tabName;
        }

        public string TabName
        {
            get;
            private set;
        }

        public string Name
        {
            get
            {
                return name;
            }

            set
            {
                if (name != value)
                {
                    name = value;
                    OnPropertyChanged("Name");
                }
            }
        }
    }

And this one is the main view model that contains the items:

    public class MainViewModel : ViewModelBase
    {
        private ObservableCollection<ItemViewModel> items = new ObservableCollection<ItemViewModel>();

        public ObservableCollection<ItemViewModel> Items
        {
            get
            {
                return items;
            }
        }
    }

Here you can see an ObservableCollection of the items exposed. This is what will be bound to our TabControl via its ItemsSource property. This will look like the XAML below.

        <TabControl
            ItemsSource="{Binding Items}">
            <TabControl.ItemTemplate>
                <DataTemplate>
                    <TextBlock Text="{Binding TabName}"/>
                </DataTemplate>
            </TabControl.ItemTemplate>
            <TabControl.ContentTemplate>
                <DataTemplate>
                    <views:ItemView/>
                </DataTemplate>
            </TabControl.ContentTemplate>
        </TabControl>

Here, the ItemTemplate is what’s used to display in the header of each tab and we’ve bound this to the TabName property from the ItemViewModel.

The ContentTemplate specifies the view that will be used. The ItemView instance will automatically inherit the ItemViewModel as its DataContext. Therefore all binding inside that view will be based on an ItemViewModel.

We set the DataContext on the MainWindow to the MainViewModel and add some items like so:

            var mainViewModel = new MainViewModel();
            mainViewModel.Items.Add(new ItemViewModel("Tab 1"));
            mainViewModel.Items.Add(new ItemViewModel("Tab 2"));

            this.DataContext = mainViewModel;

Hopefully that was fairly straight forward to follow and you can download the entire solution from here.

It’s rumoured that they will be releasing Augmented Reality glasses by the end of the year.

They’ll be using a 3G/4G data connection to retrieve information about their surroundings through GPS and several other sensors to display on the image in front of you.

Costing is reckoned to be around the price of a smart phone, but whether that’s the top-end or low-end remains to be seen. Probably the top-end with a statement like that.

So, get ready for the new must have accessory and don those glasses like they geeks you know we are!!!

My only question is why? For a start it’s going to be a whopping £229. That’s beyond Xbox 360 and PS3 territory. Then, who is is really aimed at? Well, these guys reckon the hardcore gaming community. Hmmm, aren’t they already playing on their consoles and PCs?

And then, Sony being Sony, they’re going to release games on a (nother) proprietary format card. Presumably to stop those naughty hardcore games from copying them. When will Sony learn that all their DRM efforts are ultimately damaging their business?

Well, at least there’s going to be lots of games to choose from. Er….no. It looks like it’s going to be release with a huge 30 game repository.

So, all in all, I’d stick with your consoles, PCs, smartphones, DS, iPod touches or any other myriad of devices you can play games on.

Good luck Sony and…

Hasta la vista Vita.

Windows 8 Logo

Well, it looks like this is the new Windows 8 logo. Looks a bit bland, looks a bit like the Shetland Island’s flag. Maybe they’re feeling a bit left out in the in cold.

Ok, so they’re continuing with the Metro UI concept of keep it simple, but are they dumbing down too much?

I mean, take a look at Apple’s stuff, all nice and curvy, shadows in the right places, the kind of stuff people crave after.

It clearly means to resemble the tile screen that is the landing page of both the new Windows desktop and the Windows Phone 7, but then make it in line with that properly and a little more colourful or with some subtle shadows.

Makes us feel cool and not all done up in a business suit and tie!!!