The Process class in .Net makes it easy to run command line tools from within a .Net program. Here is an implementation with a couple of twists: Environment variable expansion Optional asynchronous execution Transformation of output into an enumerable collection of objects The implementation takes the form of an object named CommandLineTool with the following constructors: public CommandLineTool(string command) : this(command, String.Empty, Environment.CurrentDirectory, _defaultTransform) { }public...

Remember when a program was termed a “GUI Application” - a program with a Graphical User Interface? It had features like menus that “dropped-down” (or “popped up”), scroll bars to reveal more of the virtual surface area, a pointing device (still called a cursor), and lots and lots of Drag & Drop. Thankfully, that moniker has mostly died. Now it is time another term to fall by the wayside – the Web Application. What is a Web Application? Just what is a web application, anyway. An application delivered...

Below are a few thoughts on the upcoming framework 4.0. I am not sure if the feature set is finalized, but I’ll comment on what I think are some of the more interesting features being planned for this release, as seen in the beta. Managed Extensibility Framework Plug-in architectures are a fairly common pattern for many scenarios, and I have seen quite a few over the years. MEF seems to be a nice combination of plug-in/IoC container/Dependency Injection framework. It’s use in Visual Studio 2010 should...