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There are 78 entries for the tag .net
Virtual Brown Bag Recap
I haven't posted a recap lately, because the Virtual Brown Bag recordings weren't being uploaded for a while. That was fixed two weeks ago, so I had a lot of meetings to catch up on. Here's an all-you-can-eat brown bag buffet… March 3 Guest presenter Jim Christopher - creator of StudioShell, a deeply integrated PowerShell host available inside of Visual Studio 2010 and 2008. StudioShell exposes many of Visual Studio’s extensibility points in a simple and consistent way, and it makes the Visual Studio ......
Posted On Saturday, April 16, 2011 7:29 PM | Comments (0)
Virtual Brown Bag Recap: NuGet, PoshCode, Code Templates
"Virtual Brown Bag" anagrams: Roving Tuba Brawl Lawn Bug Vibrator Rubbing Two Larva Vulgar Rabbi Town A Vibrant Grub Owl Blurting a Bar Vow At this week's Roving Tuba Brawl Virtual Brown Bag meeting: Claudio Lassala asked "What does your work environment look like?" He and several others shared pictures. George Mauer talked about NuGet, .NET's answer to Ruby Gems, and PoshCode, a PowerShell code repository Claudio showed how he uses CodeRush templates to quickly generate unit test code Alan Stevens ......
Posted On Saturday, December 4, 2010 8:50 AM | Comments (0)
Better keyword than "await" - How about "async"?
My late contribution to a debate that was raging almost a month ago now… Regarding the upcoming C# 5 asynchronous programming improvements, Eric Lippert blogged about how Microsoft is aware that the "async" and "await" keywords, as shown below, imply the opposite of what they really mean:async void ArchiveDocuments(List<Ur... urls) { Task archive = null; for (int i = 0; i < urls.Count; ++i) { var document = await FetchAsync(urls[i]); if (archive != null) await archive; archive = ArchiveAsync(document); ......
Posted On Thursday, November 25, 2010 6:59 AM | Comments (1)
Virtual Brown Bag Recap: Rhino Mocks, Hg-Git
At this week's Virtual Brown Bag meeting: Claudio alerted us to his blog post "You Have Been Deleted!", expounding on our DDD/CQRS discussion from a couple of weeks ago Mark talked about / demoed Rhino Mocks George told us about an Hg (Mercurial) / Git syntax comparison cheatsheet, and the Hg-Git plugin Mark hipped us to iconizer.net For detailed notes, links, and the video recording, go to the VBB wiki page: https://sites.google.com/si... I'm trying out a new style for ......
Posted On Friday, November 19, 2010 5:21 AM | Comments (1)
How to pronounce "IE"
The gentleman below demonstrates the correct pronunciation… ......
Posted On Saturday, November 13, 2010 9:36 AM | Comments (0)
Virtual Brown Bag Recap: 42goals, Evernote, MVVM, More Cuke
At today's Virtual Brown Bag meeting: Claudio introduced us to goal-tracking site 42goals.com …and shared tips for getting started with Evernote We talked about MVVM 101 JB continued his discussion of Cucumber For detailed notes, links, and the video recording, go to the VBB wiki page: https://sites.google.com/si... Happy Veteran's Day ......
Posted On Thursday, November 11, 2010 1:23 PM | Comments (0)
Visual Studio tips for working with whitespace
As George Costanza might say, this is a post about nothing. …or what looks like nothing, anyway. I’m talking about “whitespace” (spaces, tabs, line feeds, etc.). I probably spend more time than I should obsessing over the appearance of my code, including whether statements are more readable with or without line breaks. For example, I might decide that instead of this: …I want to format the statement like this: (The term “whitespace” is a bit weird with a dark color scheme. You can think of it as ......
Posted On Wednesday, November 10, 2010 1:35 PM | Comments (1)
Virtual Brown Bag: DDD/CQRS
At this week's Virtual Brown Bag meeting, Claudio Lassala started out by pointing us to a post on his blog expanding on last week's Liskov Substitution Principle discussion, then talked about two useful tools/sites: CutePDF and ExtensionMethod.net. The top vote getter on the VBB site's "suggest a topic" page is DDD, so the remainder of the meeting was spent discussing Dorks, Dungeons and Dragons Domain Driven Design. The DDD discussion quickly turned to the topic of Command Query Responsibility Separation ......
Posted On Saturday, November 6, 2010 9:33 AM | Comments (0)
Virtual Brown Bag: Rails Rumble, SOLID, Cucumber
Recapping the most recent Virtual Brown Bag meetings: 10/21: Rails Rumble: George Mauer talked about his team's participation in the Rumble, and talked about jsFiddle and Google Chrome developer tools Links and video recording: https://sites.google.com/si... 10/28: Claudio talked about taking a break from speaking SOLID discussion: The Liskov Substitution and Interface Segregation principles Why doesn't IEnumerable have a .ForEach method? Cucumber, SpecFlow and Cuke4Nuke ......
Posted On Friday, October 29, 2010 8:10 PM | Comments (1)
St. Louis ALT.NET Meetup - Wednesday, October 20
The first-ever meeting of the St. Louis ALT.NET group will be held Wednesday night at 7PM at the offices of Professional Employment Group at 999 Executive Parkway (Suite 100) in Creve Coeur (South of Olive off of Mason Road - Here's a map). The topic will be "Introduction to NHibernate", presented by Nicholas Cloud: setting up NHibernate for data access configuring NHibernate building and mapping domain objects to a SQL Server datastore querying the domain model for data The ALT.NET community is ......
Posted On Tuesday, October 19, 2010 6:28 PM | Comments (1)
Virtual Brown Bag: MV Envy, Exceptional Sass
This week's Virtual Brown Bag topics: Houston TechFest Recap - You can download slides from Claudio, JB & George's presentations MV Envy: What are these MVx patterns all about? What are the differences between MVC, MVP and MVVM? The latest episode in JB's continuing saga of building the new Virtual Brown Bag site (http://www.virtualbrownbag... using Ruby on Rails. This week he talked about adding a registration/login feature, and using Sass (Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets) and Exceptional ......
Posted On Saturday, October 16, 2010 10:54 AM | Comments (0)
Virtual Brown Bag: Readable Web, Advanced LINQ
There was a bonus second Virtual Brown Bag meeting this week - The boys from Texas had a lunch meeting at the Houston TechFest, and shared it via LiveMeeting. This week's topics: Tools for "a more readable web": InstaPaper and "Readability" Favorite things learned at VBB meetings George Mauer discussed some advanced LINQ methods: SelectMany and Aggregate Links and video recordings: Thursday's meeting: https://sites.google.com/si... Saturday's meeting: https://sites.google.com/si... ......
Posted On Saturday, October 9, 2010 1:59 PM | Comments (0)
Virtual Brown Bag: Pomodoro and Rails
At this week's Virtual Brown Bag meeting: Claudio talked about the Pomodoro Technique JB continued his ramping up with Rails series by showing how to create a model, controller, and views This Rails thing looks pretty cool, but it I think they stole some ideas from Microsoft's invention of the MVC pattern. ;) Links and video recording: https://sites.google.com/si... ......
Posted On Saturday, September 18, 2010 10:21 AM | Comments (0)
My "appearance" on .NET Rocks!
I fulfilled a lifelong dream (or an 8-year long dream anyway), when I appeared (if you can "appear" on a podcast) on the latest .NET Rocks! episode: http://www.dotnetrocks.com/... Original co-host Mark Dunn was the guest. When Mark was on the show, he used to start off each episode by describing how excited he was to be there, saying things like "I'm hiked up like a prom dress in June!". The latest published episode was recorded during the .NET Rocks! live weekend in June, when ......
Posted On Monday, September 6, 2010 1:27 PM | Comments (0)
Got my custom geekswithblogs.net shirt!
Thanks to the "Staff of Geeks" for putting together the "30 posts in 60 days" contest! Here's a picture of me in my hometown with my spiffy new shirt (and "zoomed in" views to the right, so you can see the detail): …and the "code-behind" side of the shirt: ......
Posted On Sunday, September 5, 2010 3:22 PM | Comments (1)
Careful with those comment images, Subtext
I don't know how the images used for comments are generated, and assume it's semi-random, but I would prefer not to have swastikas on my blog ......
Posted On Thursday, August 26, 2010 6:20 AM | Comments (1)
LightSwitch is a golf cart?
I was listening to the latest episode of the CodeCast podcast this morning, featuring Microsoft's Jay Schmelzer talking about Visual Studio LightSwitch. Host Ken Levy made an interesting analogy for the future choice whether to use LightSwitch or Visual Studio: "Have you ever been to Palm Springs? It's an interesting place because a lot of times you'll see people in golf carts driving around - not just on the golf course - on the street. If someone needs to go from Palm Springs to LA, they need a ......
Posted On Saturday, August 21, 2010 11:16 PM | Comments (7)
The MoSCoW Method
You can learn a lot in 140 characters (if you follow the right people). @skimedic(Phil Japikse), tweeting from the Cincinnati Day of Agile this morning, mentioned MOSCOW. I was unfamiliar with that mnemonic, so I had to look it up on Wikipedia. It's a requirement prioritization technique, and the letters stand for: M - MUST have this. S - SHOULD have this if at all possible. C - COULD have this if it does not affect anything else. W - WON'T have this time but WOULD like in the future Speaking of ......
Posted On Saturday, August 14, 2010 11:16 AM | Comments (0)
C# in Depth, Second Edition
Technorati Tags: .NET,C#,Jon Skeet I'm really looking forward to the second edition of Jon Skeet's C# in Depth book, which should be printed in September. I took advantage of this "SkeetTweet" from yesterday: 45% off C# in Depth 2nd edition (http://manning.com/skeet2) - use coupon msa1145 at checkout. Valid until August 17th. …to pre-order the printed book, plus "Manning Early Access Program" access to PDFs of chapters from the work-in-progress, plus a PDF copy of the complete first edition, all ......
Posted On Saturday, August 14, 2010 10:04 AM | Comments (0)
INotifyPropertyChanged with less code using Expressions
Technorati Tags: .NET,INotifyPropertyChanged... Parts 1 & 2 of this unintended trilogy: INotifyPropertyChanged with less typing using a Code Snippet INotifyPropertyChanged with less code using generics & reflection My previous post elicited a couple of good comments. Matt noted that my use of reflection to get the property name could be a problem in due to inlining in Release mode: http://stackoverflow.com/qu... http://www.hanselman.com/bl... ......
Posted On Monday, August 2, 2010 8:17 PM | Comments (2)
INotifyPropertyChanged with less code using generics & reflection
Technorati Tags: .NET,INotifyPropertyChanged... In my last post, I talked about using a Visual Studio code snippet for properties in classes implementing INotifyPropertyChanged: The code snippet lets me create the properties faster, but it's still a lot of repetitive "setter" code for each. What if I moved the "has the value changed?" and backing field update logic out of the property setters and replace my NotifyPropertyChanged method with this CheckForPropertyChange method?: protected bool CheckForPropertyChange<T... ......
Posted On Tuesday, July 27, 2010 8:44 AM | Comments (4)
INotifyPropertyChanged with less typing using a Code Snippet
Technorati Tags: .NET,INotifyPropertyChanged... Kevin Grossnicklaus gave a nice presentation on M-V-VM User Interface Patterns in Silverlight and WPF at last night's St. Louis .NET User Group meeting. A key part of MVVM is implementation of the INotifyPropertyChanged interface to let views know that bound properties have changed. Here's a simplified version of a model class from the MSDN INotifyPropertyChanged documentation: public class DemoCustomer : INotifyPropertyChanged { private Guid _id ......
Posted On Tuesday, July 27, 2010 7:48 AM | Comments (3)
mvcConf recap: (M)egacool (V)irtual (C)onference
Technorati Tags: ASP.NET MVC,mvcconf I took the day off work today to "attend" mvcConf: the Virtual ASP.NET MVC Conference, and had a great time. Thanks to all of the presenters and organizers of the conference. It was a huge success, and I'm sure that like me, most of the attendees hope there will be another soon. It was amazing how smoothly everything went. There were only one session cancellation and very few technical difficulties (I experienced none, but people in the chat rooms reported a few ......
Posted On Thursday, July 22, 2010 10:13 PM | Comments (0)
Digital Lens: See how your app or site looks to the visually impaired
Technorati Tags: Digital Lens,accessibility Oded Elyada, a developer in the Microsoft's Israel Innovation Labs has created "Digital Lens", "a tool that helps designers, developers and testers check if their application or website is accessible to visually impaired users." It's a downloadable tool for Windows 7 that adds a tray icon with a menu of the most common vision impairments that can be simulated: If you select one, it filters your Windows display so you'll see what people with those impairments ......
Posted On Friday, July 16, 2010 10:41 PM | Comments (0)
Reflector: Disassembling an entire assembly
Technorati Tags: .net,reflector This is mainly for future self… I don't need to do it often, and always waste time looking around for an add-in before I find the simple answer. Just right-click the assembly, then click "Export…": You'll be prompted for the folder to save to: ......
Posted On Friday, July 16, 2010 7:16 PM | Comments (1)
jQuery UI autocomplete / IE6 fix with bgiframe plug-in
Technorati Tags: jQuery,JavaScript I'm using the jQuery UI Autocomplete plug-in on my current intranet project, and am impressed with how powerful and easy to use it is. It works great on my development PC with Internet Explorer 8, and I was very pleased with myself. …until I tested on one of our "thin client" machines, and my beautiful autocomplete dropdown looked like Swiss cheese: The browser on the thin-client is, you guessed it - everybody's favorite browser - IE6. IE6 has z-index issues that ......
Posted On Monday, July 12, 2010 9:21 PM | Comments (4)
Questions about geekswithblogs.net
First off, thanks to Jeff & John for creating geekswithblogs.net, and to whomever else I might not know about who maintains it, and to all of the other bloggers for everything I've learned from them the past several years. I've been blogging like a madman lately to earn a geekswithblogs.net T-shirt (Oh please, please let it have a picture of a CareBear!), and have three questions for my fellow geeks: 1) Is there a way to configure your blog to get email notification when someone comments on a ......
Posted On Saturday, July 10, 2010 11:52 AM | Comments (1)
Two online events: "mvcConf" and the "jQuery Online Conference"
Technorati Tags: jQuery,ASP.NET,ASP.NET MVC,conferences I was excited yesterday to learn of two upcoming virtual online conferences about topics in which I'm very interested. The first one I heard about was mvcConf, the Virtual ASP.NET MVC Conference - Thursday, July 22. From the website: mvcConf is a virtual conference focused on one thing. Writing awesome applications on top of the ASP.Net MVC framework. The event will be free to attend, and your brain will explode from taking in so much hard core ......
Posted On Friday, July 9, 2010 6:07 AM | Comments (0)
New Sandcastle Builds
Technorati Tags: Sandcastle,.NET Photo credit: cynwulf I'm of the opinion that in-line comments are often a "code smell", but if you're developing a framework or class library that you want others to use, .NET XML comments on public classes and members used to generate documentation can be very useful. The tool for building that documentation is Sandcastle. According to its CodePlex site, "Sandcastle produces accurate, MSDN style, comprehensive documentation by reflecting over the source assemblies ......
Posted On Thursday, July 8, 2010 10:56 PM | Comments (0)
Implementing a custom ASP.NET MVC authorization filter
Technorati Tags: .NET,ASP.NET,ASP.NET MVC I'm rewriting a "classic ASP" (that term always makes me laugh - Just 'cause it's old don't make it "classic") application in ASP.NET MVC 2. There's an existing user authorization table in the database, so I want to keep using that for authorization determination. I created a custom class inheriting from FilterAttribute and implementing IAuthorizationFilter: 1: public class DuffAuthorizeAttribute : FilterAttribute, IAuthorizationFilter 2: { 3: public DuffAuthorizeAttribute(params ......
Posted On Thursday, July 8, 2010 9:54 PM | Comments (6)
Are you a "Hanselfan"? Help Hanselman fight diabetes
Technorati Tags: Scott Hanselman,diabetes Scott Hanselman is on a mission to raise $50,000 dollars for the ADA Diabetes Walk 2010. $30,000 has been raised so far. He needs our help to raise the remaining $20,000. Are you a "Hanselfan"? If you: have been entertained and educated by the Hanselminutes podcast have a well-thumbed copy of "Professional ASP.NET" on your desk (heck, you could use the dang thing for a desk, it's so huge) ==> or have read one of Scott's other books have learned about a ......
Posted On Thursday, July 8, 2010 8:24 PM | Comments (2)
What's a nice class like TextFieldParser doing in a namespace like Microsoft.VisualBasic?
Technorati Tags: .NET I see a lot of discussions on Stack Overflow about how to process CSV (comma-separated values) or other delimited files. The answerers usually suggest solutions involving regular expressions, but there's a simple solution built into the .NET framework: Microsoft.VisualBasic.FileI... I don't know why it's hidden in the Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace hierarchy - there's nothing VB-specific about it. It's easy to use: 1: using (var myCsvFile = new TextFieldParser(myFilePath) ......
Posted On Wednesday, July 7, 2010 8:07 PM | Comments (5)
Extending MvcContrib grid with custom DataAnnotationsModelMetadataProvider
Technorati Tags: .NET,ASP.NET,ASP.NET MVC,MvcContrib,localization In a prior post, I blogged about creating a custom class inheriting from System.Web.Mvc.DataAnnotati... to provide localized display names for my models. I was disappointed to find that the MvcContrib grid doesn't use the metadata provider for column names - it just splits "Pascal-case" property names into words (e.g. "FromDate" to "From Date") if a name hasn't been explicitly assigned. public string DisplayName ......
Posted On Tuesday, July 6, 2010 9:44 PM | Comments (5)
Convention-based Registration Extension for the Microsoft Unity IOC Container
Technorati Tags: .NET,ASP.NET,ASP.NET MVC,Microsoft Unity In my current ASP.NET MVC project, I'm focused on testability and programming to interfaces rather than concrete implementations, so I have a ton of interfaces. I'm using the Microsoft Unity IOC Container, so my dependency injection initialization code looked like this: 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Reflection; 4: using Duff.Localization; 5: using Duff.Database; 6: using Microsoft.Practices.Unity; 7: ......
Posted On Sunday, July 4, 2010 10:59 PM | Comments (0)
How much faster are static vs. instance methods?
Technorati Tags: .NET If you use Resharper, you've probably seen it recommend that you make private methods static if they don't use any instance data or methods. FxCop also has a rule (CA1822) about this: "Methods which do not access instance data or call instance methods can be marked as static. After doing so, the compiler will emit non-virtual call sites to these members which will prevent a check at runtime for each call that insures the current object pointer is non-null. This can result in ......
Posted On Saturday, July 3, 2010 5:44 PM | Comments (0)
Dots.do.not.matter@gmail.com
I wish I had known about this before I went to TechEd two years ago - I'm still getting email from vendors who scanned my badge there… Gmail ignores periods in user names and doesn't care about capitalization. (This is not true of Google Apps - It does care about dots.) If your email address is homerjsimpson@gmail.com, all of these variations will be delivered to your Inbox: homerjsimpson@gmail.com hom.er.j.sim.ps.on@gmail.com HOMERJSIMPSON@gmail.com Homer.J.Simpson@gmail.com You can create a filter ......
Posted On Tuesday, June 29, 2010 7:38 PM | Comments (2)
St. Louis Day of .NET - August 20-21 2010
Technorati Tags: .NET,St. Louis That's right - The St. Louis Day of .NET is a two-day event! That's how we do things in "the Lou". Over 500 developers attended last year's event, and we're expecting to break that record this year. I've been to DevLink and the Heartland Developer's Conference, and I thought that the 2009 St. Louis Day of .NET was at least as good as those events. Nearly 100 national and regional speakers have submitted sessions, and the organizers are currently posting announced sessions ......
Posted On Monday, June 28, 2010 9:24 PM | Comments (0)
Happy 10th Birthday, CODE magazine
Technorati Tags: CodeCast,CODE magazine I really enjoyed listening to the June 18th episode of the "CodeCast" podcast: http://www.code-magazine.co... Ken Levy, Markus Egger and Rod Paddock reminisced about the 10 years that have passed since Markus and Rick Strahl came up with the wild idea of branching out from the software business to magazine publishing. CODE has by far been the most useful magazine for me during the past 10 years ......
Posted On Saturday, June 26, 2010 6:12 PM | Comments (0)
The Big Boy MVC Series
Technorati Tags: ASP.NET,ASP.NET MVC I wish I had discovered this before part 19. I've got some catching up to do… Evan Nagle's working / blogging / joking / cartooning his way through building an ASP.NET MVC 2 web site in what looks like the .NET world's answer to Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby: http://www.weirdlover.com/2... Looks like a bit more entertaining ride than NerdDinner or the Music Store ......
Posted On Tuesday, June 22, 2010 8:34 PM | Comments (0)
Norweigan Developers Conference Videos
Videos of presentations from NDC 2010 are now available at: http://streaming.ndc2010.no... It looks like there are about 48 available. I'm particularly looking forward to: Mads Torgersen: "C# Quo Vadis?" (followed by a discussion on the future of C# with Mads, Eric Lippert, Gafter and Jon Skeet) Roy Osherove: "Beautiful Teams & Leaders" Greg Young: "5 reasons why projects using DDD fail" Jon Skeet: "If I Ruled the World - C# 5.0 According to Jon" Eric Evans: "What I've learned About DDD Since ......
Posted On Tuesday, June 22, 2010 7:35 PM | Comments (0)
Kansas City Developer Conference Recap
Technorati Tags: .NET,Kansas City Thanks to the KC development community for a great free event. The Johnson County Community College provided very nice facilities. I’m the sort of guy who would willingly drive 4+ hours each way for a free XL (or “developer medium”, as Richard Campbell calls it) T-shirt, but got a lot more than that out of the event. Here's a recap of the sessions I attended: Why Kanban? speaker: Troy Tuttle Troy is a “pragmatic agilist” at AdventureTech (not AdventureWorks – I was ......
Posted On Saturday, June 19, 2010 3:26 PM | Comments (0)
Which ASP.NET MVC Grid?
Technorati Tags: ASP.NET,ASP.NET MVC,MvcContrib I started looking at the MvcContrib grid earlier this week, and it looks promising. At the Kansas City Developer’s Conference today, Javier Lozano showed a demo using JqGrid. When I asked Javier about JqGrid, he said I might want to look at Telerik’s ASP.NET MVC Extensions Grid. Any recommendations would be welcome. (If you can give me a grid comparing the capabilities of each, that would be great ;) ......
Posted On Saturday, June 19, 2010 12:39 PM | Comments (2)
An Alphabet of Eponymous Aphorisms, Programming Paradigms, Software Sayings, Annoying Alliteration
Malcolm Anderson blogged about “Einstein’s Razor” yesterday, which reminded me of my favorite software development “law”, the name of which I can never remember. It took much Wikipedia-ing to find it (Hofstadter’s Law – see below), but along the way I compiled the following list: Amara’s Law: We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. Brook’s Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. Clarke’s Third Law: Any ......
Posted On Friday, June 18, 2010 9:50 AM | Comments (1)
Kansas City Developer's Conference
Technorati Tags: .NET,Kansas City I just found about about / registered for Saturday’s Kansas City Developer’s Conference, and am going to make the drive over from the right side of the state (Hey, no offense, KC – I’m just looking at a map, and St. Louis is on the right side, Kansas City’s on the left). (I’m sure the event’s been mentioned on geekswithblogs several times, but I’m on a “staycation” this week, getting cabin fever, and noticed @leebrandt’s tweet today.) I’m looking forward to some ......
Posted On Thursday, June 17, 2010 11:09 AM | Comments (1)
Microsoft Tag Tagged Me
I got EXTREMELY lucky last week and won an HP Mini 311 notebook from a Microsoft Tag Twitter contest. I did my required tweet to enter last Tuesday, and one hour later received notification that I had won the weekly drawing. Apparently you can tweet up to 500 times (I pity the followers of those who do that), so it was really lucky that I won, and I sympathize with those who had been really trying. If you would like to try your luck, there are seven weekly prizes left, and you can find out about ......
Posted On Wednesday, June 16, 2010 9:54 AM | Comments (0)
ASP.NET MVC localization DisplayNameAttribute alternatives: a better way
Technorati Tags: ASP.NET,ASP.NET MVC,localization In my last post, I talked bout creating a custom class inheriting from System.ComponentModel.Displ... to retrieve display names from resource files: [LocalizedDisplayName("Reme... public bool RememberMe { get; set; } That’s a lot of work to put an attribute on all of my model properties though. It would be nice if I could intercept the ASP.NET MVC code that analyzes the model metadata to retrieve display names to make it automatically ......
Posted On Monday, June 14, 2010 6:04 PM | Comments (6)
ASP.NET MVC localization DisplayNameAttribute alternatives: a good way
Technorati Tags: ASP.NET,ASP.NET MVC,localization The ASP.NET MVC HTML helper methods like .LabelFor and .EditorFor use model metadata to autogenerate labels for model properties. By default it uses the property name for the label text, but if that’s not appropriate, you can use a DisplayName attribute to specify the desired label text: [DisplayName("Remember me?")] public bool RememberMe { get; set; } I’m working on a multi-language web site, so the labels need to be localized. I tried pointing ......
Posted On Monday, June 14, 2010 5:26 PM | Comments (1)
45% off Apple and Microsoft dev books from Manning through June 17

I’m really enjoying “ASP.NET MVC 2 In Action” – Think I’ll pop for “JQuery in Action” now:

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Posted On Wednesday, June 9, 2010 7:06 PM | Comments (0)
Hello, T4MVC – Goodbye, ASP.NET MVC “magic strings”
Technorati Tags: ASP.NET,ASP.NET MVC,T4MVC I’m working on my first ASP.NET MVC project, and I really, really like MVC. I hate all of the “magic strings”, though: <div id="logindisplay"> <% Html.RenderPartial("LogOnUs... %> </div> <div id="menucontainer"> <ul id="menu"> <li><%=Html.Action... Dinner", "Index", "Dinners")%></li> <li><%=Html.Action... Dinner", "Create", "Dinners")%></li> <li><%=Html.Action... ......
Posted On Sunday, June 6, 2010 7:47 AM | Comments (4)
ASP.NET Localization: Enabling resource expressions with an external resource assembly
Technorati Tags: .NET,ASP.NET,localization I have several related projects that need the same localized text, so my global resources files are in a shared assembly that’s referenced by each of those projects. It took an embarrassingly long time to figure out how to have my .resx files generate “public” properties instead of “internal” so I could have a shared resources assembly (apparently it was pretty tricky pre-VS2008, and my “googling” bogged me down some out-of-date instructions). It’s easy ......
Posted On Saturday, June 5, 2010 5:15 PM | Comments (3)
“ASP.NET MVC 2 in Action” Ebook is complete
I just got email notification that ASP.NET MVC2 in Action is complete. I had signed up for the Manning Early Access Program (MEAP), which allowed me to reserve a hardcopy of the book, a PDF of the completed chapters, and the PDF of the entire version 1 (ASP.NET MVC in Action) book all for $49.99. I’m working on my first MVC application, and it’s been a big help so far. Congratulations to Jeffrey Palermo, Ben Scheirman, Jimmy Bogard, Eric Hexter, and Matthew Hinze for completing what looks like a ......
Posted On Tuesday, June 1, 2010 6:32 PM | Comments (0)
WatiN screenshot saver
Technorati Tags: .NET,WatiN,testing In addition to my automated unit, system and integration tests for ASP.NET projects, I like to give my customers something pretty that they can look at and visually see that the web site is behaving properly. I use the Gallio test runner to produce a pretty HTML report, and WatiN (Web Application Testing In .NET) to test the UI and create screenshots. I have a couple of issues with WatiN’s “CaptureWebPageToFile” method, though: It blew up the first (and only) time ......
Posted On Monday, May 31, 2010 12:18 PM | Comments (6)
Visual Studio Gallery has a spam problem
C’mon Visual Studio Gallery. Can’t you prevent stuff like this?: ......
Posted On Sunday, January 3, 2010 11:49 AM | Comments (1)
Use UpdateSourceTrigger=PropertyChanged for immediate updates of bound XAML controls
My XAML learning project is inspired by Leon Bambrick’s “World’s Simplest Code Generator” (http://secretgeek.net/wscg... It’s a 3-pane window where you type or paste data into the top pane, enter a formatting pattern in the middle pane, and it displays the formatted results in the bottom pane: (Yes, I know about auto-implemented properties, Visual Studio snippets, and T4. The property-generating scenario above is just for example purposes.) The TextBox controls are bound to properties of my ViewModel, ......
Posted On Saturday, December 12, 2009 8:15 AM | Comments (0)
Coders For Charities St. Louis
I had a great time this weekend at the first St. Louis Coders 4 Charities weekend. Over 60 people showed up to create or revamp web sites, applications and networks for nine local charities: Our team ported three United Way web sites to DotNetNuke: http://www.211missouri.org/, http://www.211southwestilli... and http://www.100neediestcases... (Those are the “prevamp” sites – The revamp sites look about the same, but will be much easier for “normal people” to administer.) There was plenty ......
Posted On Sunday, October 18, 2009 8:49 PM | Comments (0)
“Classic ASP” Debug Include File
Last month, I had the “opportunity” (as we’ve been trained to say) to do some maintenance on a “Classic ASP” site. I’d forgotten how painful that can be, but it was made a bit easier by dusting off an old tool from the dark ages. It’s an “include” file for debugging based on a Visual Basic Programmer’s Journal article by Jonathan Goodyear from way back in February, 2001: http://support.microsoft.co... It automatically dumps out cookie, form, query string, session and application variable ......
Posted On Tuesday, October 6, 2009 7:25 PM | Comments (4)
Woohoo! I won something stupid!
Beware of geeks bearing gifts... I just got notification that I won one of the monthly "stupid prizes for smart people" from Community Credit. Thanks to David Silverlight for founding this great program. I'm sure productivity in my office will soar once I install my new Desktop Swing Ball: I've only started blogging regularly recently, and am working on overcoming my natural shyness to try to volunteer to help out more with the St. Louis .NET community. I hope that sometime in the near future, I'll ......
Posted On Thursday, October 1, 2009 1:29 PM | Comments (0)
St. Louis .NET User Group – Muljadi Budiman: “What's new in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 Framework”
Muljadi Budiman was the top-rated speaker at the recent St. Louis Day of .NET event, and it’s easy to see why. His presentations are energetic, humorous, and packed with useful information. At tonight’s St. Louis .NET User Group meeting, he zipped through an overview of Visual Studio 2010 and 4.0 features of C#, VB, WPF, the CLR and the DLR in a little over 90 minutes. Highlights included: VS2010: multi-monitor support Call Hierarchy visualizer “Navigate To” improvements “Consume-First Development” ......
Posted On Monday, September 28, 2009 8:40 PM | Comments (2)
Phil Japikse & Hope Mongers: Giving the Gift of Technology
I just finished listening to a great .NET Rocks interview with Phil Japikse, where he talked about his experiences working on Hope Mongers, a volunteer-run asp.net-based website that brings charity projects together with donators. “Chief Monger” Sam Henry says: Whether helping orphans on the other side of the planet or families just around the corner, so much authentic living, learning and feeling flows from the intense human connection that happens when you know you are changing someone’s life. ......
Posted On Sunday, September 27, 2009 5:14 PM | Comments (0)
Getting Serious About JavaScript
Like many ASP.NET developers, I’ve gotten by for years knowing just enough JavaScript to get by. I’ve spent many frustrating hours cursing the language, when the problem was not really JavaScript (although it has more than its share of weirdness), but my assumption that I knew how it worked, just because it looks like C#. Now, thanks in large part to jQuery, I actually enjoy client-side programming. jQuery makes things so much easier (replacing dozens of lines of code that I painstakingly figured ......
Posted On Monday, September 21, 2009 9:32 PM | Comments (0)
The origin of the names "IronPython" and "IronRuby"
I wondered a while ago where the "Iron" names came from. According to a NxtGenUG interview with Michael Foord, John Lam says that IRON can be reverse-engineered to stand for "It Runs On .Net", which is cool, but I finally found the real story in an interview on the "Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft" site, in which IronPython creator Jim Hugunin says: I'll give you the story, but I'll give you the short version 'cause it's not very good. At the time, I had a consulting company called ......
Posted On Saturday, June 14, 2008 9:08 AM | Comments (3)
.NET Rocks! - 423 hours and counting...
Congratulations to Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell on the upcoming 350th episode of .NET Rocks! I can't tell you how many hours of education & enjoyment DNR has provided me over the years. ...Well, actually, I can... I discovered the show around episode 10 or so, quickly caught up with the previous shows, and haven't missed one since. I added up the show runtimes, and the total is approximately 423 hours, or almost 18 days! A lot of people listen to DNR on their commute, and there's enough ......
Posted On Thursday, June 12, 2008 1:16 PM | Comments (0)
Tech·Ed: What to Expect
I found Scott Dorman's "Tech·Ed For Novices" post very helpful when planning for Tech·Ed Developers, and wanted to add some tips of my own before I forget what I learned last week. I hope you find them useful if you're going to IT Pros week, or if you're googling next year about planning for Tech·Ed 2009: Interactive Theater: Get There Early Scott advised to get there early for Interactive Theater sessions because they fill up quickly. They fill up very quickly. I arrived at 1:30 for a 1:45 Ron Jacobs ......
Posted On Sunday, June 8, 2008 8:34 AM | Comments (2)
"Pimp My IDE": 101 Visual Studio tips, tricks, and add-ins
Here are the links from my May 12, 2008 presentation at the St. Louis C# User Group: 1. VS 2008 Product Comparison http://shrinkster.com/XH1 VS2008 2. Change startup options http://shrinkster.com/XYD VS2005 VS2008 3. Change home page http://shrinkster.com/XYD VS2005 VS2008 4. LINQPad http://shrinkster.com/XGZ VS2008 5. Importing/Exporting Settings http://shrinkster.com/XZJ VS2003 VS2005 VS2008 6. Consolas font on Windows XP http://shrinkster.com/XQ7 VS2003 VS2005 VS2008 7. Tab groups (code editor ......
Posted On Monday, May 12, 2008 2:40 PM | Comments (3)
PowerShell Cheat Sheet
Inspired by Brian Button's presentation at the St. Louis .NET User Group and Scott Hanselman's dnrTV! episode, I'm starting to look into PowerShell. Scott Dorman had a link to a free introductory PowerShell e-book a while ago. I haven't actually read the e-book yet, but when I printed it, I noticed a nice PowerShell Cheat Sheet at the end of the book, which looks like it might be very useful ......
Posted On Monday, November 5, 2007 9:24 AM | Comments (0)
System.Web.UI.Control "FindControl" method using Generics
I'm currently supporting an ASP.NET project that has a lot of code like this using the System.Web.UI.Control.FindC... method to get data from child controls - in this example, from DataListItems belonging to a DataList control: foreach (DataListItem item in employeeDataList.Items) { if (item.ItemType == ListItemType.Item || item.ItemType == ListItemType.AlternatingItem) { if (((HtmlInputCheckBox)item.F... { string positionId = ((Label)item.FindControl("P... ......
Posted On Tuesday, July 17, 2007 11:18 PM | Comments (0)
How Right-Thinking Americans Should Pronounce "Agile"
On the anniversary of our nation's independence I call upon my U.S. citizens to throw off the shackles of our British oppressors and pronounce the word "agile" like true Americans: The pretentious un-American "goofus" pronunciation: aj-ahyl The right-thinking American "gallant" pronunciation: aj-uhl Listening to the .NET Rocks Team System panel discussion from Tech Ed last week, I was dismayed to hear that only one of the six panelists pronounced "agile" like an American. I'm not sure which one it ......
Posted On Wednesday, July 4, 2007 10:41 AM | Comments (6)
Free "Mini-Refactor!" From Developer Express
When a free download of Refactor!™ for ASP.NET 2.2 was announced in May by Developer Express, I bookmarked it for future reference because I wasn't working on an ASP project at the time. When I took another look, I realized that the download includes 19 C#/VB code refactorings that work in any project, ASP.NET or not. They work in Visual Studio 2003, VS2005, and "Orcas". Included are Refactor! versions (with much nicer user interfaces) of four of the seven built-in VS2005 C# refactorings: Rename ......
Posted On Wednesday, July 4, 2007 8:51 AM | Comments (0)
CoolCommands for Visual Studio 2005
Technorati tags: .net, freetools While gathering information about Visual Studio add-ins for a potential local user group presentation, I came across Gaston Milano's "CoolCommands". As far as I can tell, the latest version of the CoolCommands installer can be downloaded here:http://download.deklar... It adds a lot of useful tools to Visual Studio, but there's no help or "read-me" file documenting them, and I couldn't find a consolidated overview on Gaston's site, ......
Posted On Sunday, March 4, 2007 3:12 PM | Comments (6)
10-Time World Champions!
I'm old enough to remember the Cardinals winning the World Series in '82, but I don't remember where or with whom I watched it. I don't think I'll ever forget where I was they won the '06 Series, though. I was flying back to St. Louis from the Heartland Developer's Conference in Omaha, and was very disappointed that I wouldn't be able to watch what could be the championship-clinching game. About half an hour before landing at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport (blast American for moving their hub out ......
Posted On Saturday, October 28, 2006 10:15 AM | Comments (0)
Heartland Developers Conference 2006
I'm back home (to St. Louis, home of the world champion Cardinals!) from the Heartland Developers Conference in Omaha. The presentations that were most valuable to me were: "Power Programming with Attributes" - Dave Donaldson "Looking Ahead at C# 3.0" - Andrew Troelsen "Great Library of Common ASP.NET 2.0 Functions and Techniques" - Robert Boedigheimer "Reliable Applications with System.Transactions" - Robert Hurlbut I met Robert Hurlbut on the walk from the hotel to the convention center, and he ......
Posted On Saturday, October 28, 2006 7:43 AM | Comments (1)
devLINK 2006 - The Tennessee .NET community rocks!
Many thanks to the organizers and sponsors of the devLINK conference, held in Nashville last Friday. It was well worth the 5 hour drive from St. Louis: big name speakers like Markus Egger, Ken Getz, Billy Hollis, Bill Vaughn, Mark Miller, Eric Sink and Wally McClure great prizes great food - breakfast, lunch and dinner (I've never heard of a conference where they fed you after all of the sessions had ended!) It was all FREE My only complaint was that there were too many good sessions going on at ......
Posted On Wednesday, October 18, 2006 7:27 AM | Comments (0)
Polymorphic Podcast - Miguel Castro
Craig Shoemaker's Polymorphic Podcast has a nice two-part interview with fellow “geek with blog” Miguel Castro about “Architecting for Extensibility”. You can hear the interview here. If you're not familiar with Craig's podcast, check it out. It's a while between shows sometimes (hey, we can't expect everyone to be Carl Franklin), but they're always worthwhile. Craig is also co-author of a new book: Beginning Ajax With ASP.NET ......
Posted On Thursday, September 14, 2006 5:17 AM | Comments (0)
A Valentine's greeting to that special someone ...er... thing
My valentine will always be my dear and loving wife, but there's another partner who brings joy into my life. Before you came along, with charms that often IEnumerate, I'd type a name, and then a "dot", then sit and wait...and wait...and wait... The screen remained as empty as my heart before you, love, but now, my dearest angel, you drop down from heav'n above suggesting members, properties, and methods with such great sense that we, like longtime lovers, finish one another's statements. Though ......
Posted On Monday, February 13, 2006 9:29 AM | Comments (0)
o/" When you with upon a thtar... o/"
D'Arcy from Winnipeg wishes C# had a “with” statement. Me, too. I've moved from VB6 to C# and am glad of it, but I really miss the old VB With/EndWith. It's great for "chatty" interfaces, expecially the ability to nest With's to update "grandchild" properties: With myCustomer .FirstName = "Phillip" .LastName = "Fry" .MiddleInitial = "J" .Age = 1024 With .Address .AddressLine1 = "3000 Farnsworth Avenue" .City = "New New York City" .State = "NY" .Zip = "101010001100011" .Country = "USA" ......
Posted On Tuesday, February 7, 2006 9:23 AM | Comments (0)
"They look like cartoon characters cursing"

"They look like cartoon characters cursing" - Mark Dunn, on regular expressions.

"I'm higher than a California condor on ecstasy!"

The man has a way with words. It's good to hear Mark Dunn on .NET Rocks again!

 

Posted On Wednesday, February 1, 2006 7:43 PM | Comments (0)
.NET 2.0 "ForEach" methods
I just stumbled across the new .ForEach methods in .NET 2.0 for Array and the new generic collection objects. Instead of: GeekWithBlog[] geeks = GetGeekArray(); foreach (GeekWithBlog geek in geeks) { RaiseSalary(geek); } } private void RaiseSalary(GeekWithBlog geek) { geek.Salary *= 2; } ... you can now code: GeekWithBlog[] geeks = GetGeekArray(); Array.ForEach(geeks, RaiseSalary); } private void RaiseSalary(GeekWithBlog geek) { geek.Salary *= 2; } Combined with anonymous methods, this could either ......
Posted On Wednesday, February 1, 2006 4:32 AM | Comments (1)
MSDN2 "hackable" URLS
Ram Shankar Yadav shared a handy tip the other day for finding documentation about .NET types on MSDN2. You can just browse to http://msdn2.microsoft.com/... (fully qualified type name). For example: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/... I've already used this several times, and am considering writing a Visual Studio add-in to automate it. Thanks, Ram ......
Posted On Wednesday, February 1, 2006 4:27 AM | Comments (2)
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