Tim Hibbard

648 Posts | 1752 Comments

Tim Hibbard CEO for EnGraph software

Jun 13

Version 1.7 of Christian Radio Locator available on the App Store

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The latest version of Christian Radio Locator is now available as an update on the App Store. As discussed, this version adds support for Driving Mode. Favorites are great, but a recent road trip showed just how annoying it can be to have all your favorites at the top of the screen. With that in mind, we added Driving Mode. Go to Settings, and toggle ......

Posted On Wednesday, June 12, 2013 10:08 AM

Nov 12

Podcast with AJI about iOS development coming from a .NET background

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I talked with Jeff and John from AJI Software the other day about developing for the iOS platform. We chatted about learning Xcode and Objective-C, provisioning devices and the app publishing process. We all have a .NET background and made lots of comparisons between the two platforms/ecosystems/fanbois. They even let me throw in a plug for Christian ......

Posted On Monday, November 12, 2012 6:50 AM .NET

Sep 12

Christian Radio Locator iPhone app

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For the last three months or so I've been working on an iPhone (and iPad) app in my spare time. It all started when I took the kids to Minneapolis and had a hard time finding radio stations to listen to on the trip. I looked in the App Store for an app that would use my GPS to show me Christian radio stations nearby, but there wasn't one. So I decided ......

Posted On Saturday, September 8, 2012 8:05 AM EnGraph , GPS

Apr 11

WPF TimeSpinner Control

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As I discussed in my last post, we created a TimeSpinner control based on the Extended WPF Toolkit’s ButtonSpinner. Now, the toolkit has a DateTimeUpDown control that will display a date or time and allow the user to click the spinners for each time part, but I needed a little more. I needed the raw text to be editable and I wanted the spinners to just ......

Posted On Thursday, April 14, 2011 10:16 AM .NET , Controls , WPF

Apr 11

Smarter DateTime.AddMinutes

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Our software will automatically generate pick up and drop off times based on distance of trip, how many other people are on the bus, how long it takes to drop them off, etc. We display these times in our custom TimeSpinner control based on WPF Extended Toolkit’s button spinner. Since the computer is generating the time, they are often not human-friendly. ......

Posted On Tuesday, April 12, 2011 8:26 AM EnGraph , .NET , WPF

Apr 11

WPF–Show Dialog with backdrop

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Sometimes it handy to force the user’s attention to a specific screen. We can do this with a dialog, but sometimes the user doesn’t know that window is on top. To draw the user’s eye to the window, I like to place a backdrop between the rest of the application and the dialog window. I use the following code to make that happen. 1: public bool? ShowDialogWithBackdrop(Window ......

Posted On Friday, April 8, 2011 9:17 AM .NET , WPF

Jun 10

Use Preprocessor Directives for better debugging

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The most common use for Preprocessor Directives is to intelligently group your code using the #region … #endregion tag (sidenote: Ctrl + M, M is a great keyboard shortcut to expand and contract your regions). Preprocessor Directives can also be used to tell the compiler which code should or should not be compiled based on the configuration environment. ......

Posted On Monday, June 21, 2010 1:08 PM .NET , Keyboard Shortcuts

Jun 10

Hibbard family is growing

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On Jan 16, 2011, we are expecting a new addition to our family. Ben is going to learn words like “share” and “don’t put that in the baby’s nose”. We expect he’ll do great ......

Posted On Sunday, June 20, 2010 9:43 PM

Jun 10

Get to No as fast as possible

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There is a sales technique where the strategy is to get the customer to say “No deal” as soon as possible. The idea being that by establishing terms that your customer is not comfortable with with, the sooner you can figure out what they will be willing to agree to. The same principal can be applied to code design. Instead of nested if…then statements, ......

Posted On Thursday, June 17, 2010 9:46 AM .NET

Jun 10

Use Extension Methods to find first and last day of the month

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A lot of reports work on data from last month. It is a nice touch to have these dates pre-populated for your users. Using extension methods, the code can look cleaner too. Extension Methods: public static class DateHelper { public static DateTime FirstOfTheMonth(this DateTime dt) { return new DateTime(dt.Year, dt.Month, 1); } public static DateTime ......

Posted On Tuesday, June 8, 2010 8:41 AM .NET

Jun 10

Declaring variables in SQL

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I would like to blog more about the problems I encounter on a daily basis. I find that taking 10 minutes or so to write a simple solution to my problems helps me retain that information. I always forget the specific syntax to declaring variables in T-SQL. declare @startdate datetime; declare @enddate datetime; set @startdate = '04/01/2010'; set @enddate ......

Posted On Monday, June 7, 2010 9:46 AM

Mar 10

Associating your MentionNotifier subscriptions with OAuth

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We recently added OAuth to MentionNotifier so that users can quickly view and edit their subscriptions without needed an additional login. This is enabled by default for new users, but existing users will need to do the following steps to associate their subscriptions with OAuth: 1) Go to http://software.engraph.com... 2) Click “Sign ......

Posted On Saturday, March 20, 2010 11:27 AM MentionNotifier

Jan 10

Auto Starting Virtual Server

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If you want to specify that a virtual server starts up automatically when the host server starts up: 1) On host server, browse to “C:\Users\Public\Documents” 2) Right click “Shared Virtual Machines”, select Properties 3) Browse to security tab, add yourself as having full control over this folder 4) Repeat steps 2-3 for “Shared Virtual Networks” 5) ......

Posted On Friday, January 22, 2010 11:14 AM

Dec 09

EnGraph is hiring – ASP.NET, Kansas City

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EnGraph is looking for an ASP.NET developer to join our team. We are a small company in Lenexa, KS that creates .NET applications for Paratransit agencies. A good candidate would be very comfortable with ASP.NET, Forms Authentication and JavaScript. A huge bonus would be knowledge of IIS, Google Maps API, AJAXPro, ActiveReports, WPF and SQL. We are ......

Posted On Wednesday, December 30, 2009 1:07 PM EnGraph

Oct 09

My first race win

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Last weekend I ran the Shoreline Shuffle trail 5K. It was my first trail race and also my first first place finish. As a bonus, I also broke 20 minutes, which I didn’t think was possible for me on a trail run. I’ve posted a full race report (with way too many pics) on my running blog ......

Posted On Friday, October 2, 2009 2:11 PM Sports

Sep 09

Get notified via email of twitter mentions

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TwitApps was a great tool, it would email you when somebody @mentioned you on twitter. But, alas, they are shutting down and leaving what I think is a huge hole. So I built my own service that does the exact same thing. To use the service, visit MentionNotifier, and subscribe to your @mentions. To get notified of updates, follow @MentionNotifier or ......

Posted On Wednesday, September 23, 2009 11:44 AM .NET

Jul 09

Finally able to get rid of Outlook

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I use Gmail for my personal email, and as an archive for my EnGraph email, but haven’t been able to use it as my main email client as it appends a “On Behalf of” to messages sent from Gmail using a non-gmail address. Google has recently released an update to Gmail allowing you to use an SMTP server of your choosing, which removes the “On Behalf Of”. ......

Posted On Friday, July 31, 2009 4:49 PM MS Office

Jul 09

The last couple months of our life via twitter

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Pre-approval letter in hand, let the house shopping begin!10:10 AM Apr 28th Apparently it's impossible to look at a house without the realtor begging to be your buyer's agent. Back off people!1:36 PM Apr 30th Finally going live with software that I've been working on for 2+ years!3:59 PM Apr 30th First install and we run into a proxy brick wall...smooth4:43 ......

Posted On Friday, July 17, 2009 10:51 AM EnGraph , .NET , Sports , Goldstar , WPF

Mar 09

Let me google that for you

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This is a great tool for those circumstances where ordinary sarcasm isn’t quite enough to get the point across.

http://lmgtfy.com

In action: http://tinyurl.com/d2yyxl

Posted On Monday, March 23, 2009 11:01 PM

Feb 09

8GB RAM in laptop…mmmm

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Since my Dell D610 is three years old, I decided it was time for a new lappy. I finally decided on a E6400 from Dell. Finally a machine that can actually run Vista. Here is my score: So far I love it. I can have VS 2008 plus a couple virtual machines open and it doesn’t even blink. Technorati Tags: Dell,E6400 ......

Posted On Friday, February 27, 2009 3:00 PM

Feb 09

Stackoverflow

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I asked my first question on stackoverflow today. I want to make sure I’m unsubscribing from PropertyChanged events properly. Please head over and put in your two cents. Technorati Tags: PropertyChanged,.NET,StackO... ......

Posted On Friday, February 20, 2009 2:47 PM .NET , Goldstar

Jan 09

Simple class to parse Twitter with LINQ

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In ParaPlan 4.0, we use twitter to maintain a change log. I wanted to display this information to our users, so I wrote a little class that calls the RSS feed and uses LINQ to parse the data. All I need is the message and the date, so that is all it pulls out. Here is the class: public class Twitter { public string Message { get; set; } public DateTime ......

Posted On Monday, January 5, 2009 2:53 PM .NET , Goldstar , WPF

Jan 09

Benjamin Allan Hibbard

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On 12-20-2008, my wife Chelsea, gave birth to our beautiful baby boy Benjamin. It’s been a crazy exciting and busy couple of weeks so far. I’ve tried to respond to all the many people that have congratulated us on twitter and facebook, but if I forgot, thank you so much. All of your kind words and well wishes have been very appreciated!! Many more pictures ......

Posted On Friday, January 2, 2009 10:26 AM

Dec 08

WPF – Hide a listbox when it doesn’t have any items

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This code example will show how to hide a listbox from the user when it doesn’t have any items. It involves binding the Visibility of the listbox to the Items.Count of the listbox. We run the Items.Count through a converter that will return a Visibility.Visible object if the Item.Count is not zero. Here is the converter class: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; ......

Posted On Tuesday, December 9, 2008 3:48 PM .NET , WPF

Nov 08

Visual Studio Team System Unit Testing Keyboard Shortcuts

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I try to use keyboard shortcuts as much as possible. Here are some that are handy when unit testing with Visual Studio: Ctrl + R, A – Run all tests Ctrl + R, T – Run tests in context (based on if cursor is in function, class, or namespace) Ctrl + R, F – Runs all tests that are checked in Test Results – very handy because that window is impossible to ......

Posted On Tuesday, November 25, 2008 11:24 AM .NET , TFS , Keyboard Shortcuts