There have been several news articles (and tweets!) recently on the subject of “ring camera hacks”; all of which Google has decided to bring to my attention as I recently did some research (before buying) the ring alarm system. This means that Google feels the need to tell me about every random “news” site that copies and pastes an article about Ring!

As the tweet above might tell you, Ring has not been hacked (or at least they have not owned up to a hack). At the start of this article, I put the word news in quotes; and I did that on purpose. Most of the websites which have been posting articles about “the hack” can hardly be described as news outlets, they just use sensationalist headings as click-bait to drive advertising revenue. Unfortunately, because these websites get a lot of traffic they also get shared a lot on social media; many of their readers are not experts so take the statements as factual. The problem with inaccurate or fake news is well beyond the subject of this blog post so I shall leave it there, needless to say, it is not always the fault of the reader!

For those who want to read the details; this BBC article is a little nearer to the truth, and is less sensationalist!

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It is often the small things which make a difference in an application; or at least in the end users opinion of the application. In this case, it is as small as a single space, just a bit of padding, room to breath!
Although this article talks about FontAwesome the functionality used is nothing to do with it; it just becomes a bit more evident when using a web-based icon library such as FontAwesome.

The icon in the above screenshot is a standard FontAwesome icon with no special treatment; it is a little to close to the text for my liking, it cluttered (it can also confuse a screen reader). However, the icon in the next screenshot is ever so slightly further away, but the code is the same.

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It is an error that every developer is more than used to seeing; the application failed because a SQL database permission was missing. It is also a simple error to fix; just grant the permission (after following your firms strict audit processes, obviously!). The problem is knowing that it happened; if the application is ‘out there with the users’ you might not have a useful error message displayed, or the true error may lay several layers deep in your application stack. There is a quick and dirty solution to your problem!

Detecting SQL Permission Errors with SQL Server Profiler

SQL Server Profiler is a tool often installed along with SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), or you can find it on the SQL Server itself. It allows you to ‘watch’ the queries that are occurring on your SQL Server; by default, it shows all traffic (queries, connections, errors, etc) and can be very noisy. You can, however, place filters on its datasets to only obtain information important to you; such as error 229 “Permission Denied”.

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Following on from my previous articles about ‘Passing multiple parameters to an ICommand in WPF’ and ‘Speeding up large WPF ComboBoxes’ the application stack I am currently working on has provided another article on a WPF subject!

The ability to show or hide UI elements based on criteria related to other elements is nothing new; only showing an ‘Other Details’ text box when a drop-down value of ‘Other’ is selected is the bread and butter of many end-user applications. There are a number of ways of doing this in the WPF/XAML/MVVM world, the default is often the use of a property on the ViewModel relating to the visibility (or enabled state) of the UI element in question, and this is how I have been implementing it until now!

The most recent set of screens I have been working on are a lot more complicated than other parts of the application (lots of business logic fields which depend on the values of other fields). Adding lots and lots of ‘IsEnabled’ or ‘IsVisible’ properties (along with their backing fields, and INotifyProperyChanged code) seemed very messy to me, and I felt there must be a better solution. I already use an IValueConverter to convert simple boolean values (FirstNameIsVisible for example) into WPF Visibility values, so I thought I could take that one step further and perform comparisons.

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