Engineering notes, organized to stay useful

Full-document snapshots are a valid undo/redo boundary—until a large, shared object graph makes every small edit pay for the whole document. Transactional copy-on-write history narrows that work, but introduces a real management cost.

• .NET
• Undo/Redo
• Object Graphs
• Copy-on-Write
• Transactions
• Performance

Three unrelated UI commands failed on one Windows machine but nowhere else. The shared dependency was not geometry or business logic; it was WPF color conversion while decoding PNG images.

• WPF
• .NET
• BitmapImage
• ICC Profiles
• Windows
• Reliability

An access violation inside a native CAD kernel is not an ordinary application error. The reliable boundary is a disposable process with an explicit protocol, timeout, and domain-aware fallback policy.

• .NET
• Native Interop
• Process Isolation
• Named Pipes
• CAD
• Reliability

A WPF 3D workflow jumped from roughly 1 GB to as much as 20 GB on one Intel Arc machine. Comparing driver versions and building a distributable repro identified the real layer at fault.

• Intel Arc
• WPF
• .NET
• Graphics
• Memory
• Debugging

In a polymorphic editor, paste is not just deserialization. New identities must be allocated, internal references remapped, external references validated, and related geometry moved together.

• .NET
• Clipboard
• Object Graphs
• Serialization
• Testing

After removing the administrator requirement, project-open and protocol activation flows had to reach the running instance reliably. A mutex plus named pipe was not enough on its own.

• WPF
• .NET
• Named Pipes
• Desktop
• Single Instance

The real problem was not the SMTP error itself. It was release clients depending on mail configuration baked into the shipped application.

• SMTP
• API
• WPF
• .NET
• Release Engineering

How to generate AI render variations while treating imported CAD geometry, proportions, camera framing, and layout as fixed design constraints.

• CAD
• AI Rendering
• Fixed Geometry
• .NET
• OpenAI
• Gemini

A short practical pattern for storing template content, loading the selected template at startup, and keeping template save and load flows simple.

• Protobuf
• Serialization
• .NET
• Desktop
• Templates