Nullable types are exactly what data readers needed. Dealing with database nulls in previous versions of .NET was laborious, to say the least. However, just having the nullable types doesn’t solve all of your problems. The classes presented here go a long way towards that goal, though. From the introduction: .NET 2.0 introduced nullable types into the CLR which, for the first time, provided the ability for value types to be assigned a null value. However, ADO.NET 2.0 did not introduce any new...

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Composite Customer Server Controls are one of the greatest things in ASP.NET. Once you figure out all the intricacies. I always screw up rendering or viewstate or something and have to go look at some sample code. Well, here’s your sample code

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Kim Hauser has written a nice little article on how to use Eval in .NET to compile/evaluate C# code at runtime.

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P/Invoke is another area (actually all of COM and .NET Interoperability) that can be a real PITA if you don’t know what you’re doing. Cohen Oren lays it out here

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If you’ve ever done anything with this, you’ve discovered that there’s about a half-dozen different ways in .NET to start a thread, and another dozen ways to manage the threads you’ve started. This article gives some good advice on best practices

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Good article on using AJAX/Atlas to create a SOAP Client

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Jamie keeps doing more and more with this application. Check his latest out

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Want to learn how to incorporate Google Maps into your ASP.NET app

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GREYCSTORATION is a free “denoiser” for images. From what I’ve heard, it’s better than many of it’s competitors that cost $$$, and you can’t beat it’s price. From the website: GREYCSTORATION is an image regularization algorithm which processes an image by locally removing small variations of pixel intensities while preserving significant global image features, such as sharp edges and corners. The most direct application of image regularization is denoising....

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Neowin and others are reporting that there will be no Vista Beta 2, and that MS is just going to release more CTP (Community Technology Preview) builds instead. In my mind, the entire plan for Vista has been a comedy of errors, and this is just the latest fiasco. If this is Allchin’s idea of how things should be run, then it’s a good thing for MS that he’s retiring. I don’t install CTP’s on my machine. Particularly of OS’s, but I didn’t even install CTP’s...

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It’s officially called Office 2007 now. Here’s a good article from someone at MS on some of the new features. Some of these things are things I might be tempted to say if I were a beta tester and permitted to talk about it

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Wintellect has released the official version of Power Collections for .NET 2.0. I hadn’t noticed, but apparently there’s been some debate over the license restrictions as shown in the comments to Brad Abrams’ blog entry on it

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I’m way behind on mentioning this, but many projects can benefit from this type of continuous integration. Dave Hayden does his usual excellent job of laying it out

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Jim Griesmer has written a nice series on getting the most out of the VS 2005 Debugger

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Scott Guthrie wrote a nice blog entry on VS 2005 Intellisense in web.config files and what makes it go away and how to bring it back

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Rocky Lhotka says he’ll be releasing this beta at VSLive next week in San Francisco. It sounds like we’ll see many improvements in the business objects (using generics), and other features. Personally, I just want collections that are smarter about realizing when they’re dirty

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After I mentioned yesterday that there was a new version of Test Driven.NET for the latest release of NUnit, Jamie Cansdale announced a Test Driven.NET 2.0 Beta that includes support for Visual Studio Test Tools. Awesome

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MagicAjax.NET is an open-source framework designed to make it easier and more intuitive for developers to integrate AJAX technology into their web pages, without replacing the ASP.NET controls and/or writing tons of javascript code. MagicAjax initially appeared as a CodeProject article. Now it is hosted on Sourceforge and you can find the latest release here. ...

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Good use of generics in creating a Tree Class in C#

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This is a great CodeProject article on an import/export engine for fixed length or delimited files or streams

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Scott Guthrie has a good piece on what’s upcoming in the world of ASP.NET 2.0

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The new command shell from Microsoft has entered beta 3. That’s the good news. The bad news. You may be in trouble if you installed beta 2. Why? Because to install beta 3, you must first uninstall beta 2. However, the beta 2 uninstall requires having .NET 2.0 Beta 2 installed. You probably don’t have that anymore. So, here’s the process to follow if you’re in that boat (according to Peter Provost). Uninstall .NET 2.0 RTM Install .NET 2.0 Beta 2 (see below) Uninstall Monad...

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Nicole Calinoiu has written a good piece on impersonation and finalizers. Her main point is that you need to be aware the fact that the GC isn’t going to be running your finalizers under the impersonated context. This could lead to SecurityExceptions during garbage collection

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…to start thinking about VB 9. You can download the January CTP (with LINQ support) here

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Jamie Cansdale has released a new version of Test Driven .NET that is built against the latest official release of NUnit. Read about it here. If you’re using NUnit, you need to be using Test Driven .NET

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Yesterday, Microsoft released the January 2006 CTP’s of “Sparkle” and “Acrylic”. These are two of the three parts to the “Expression” suites Microsoft will be releasing later this year in an effort to take on Adobe’s dominance in the designer space. “Sparkle” is designed to take on Flash, while Acrylic is supposed to be competitive with Photoshop. The third piece is currently called “Quartz” and lives in the Web Design space....

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Nikhil Kothari has written an excellent 5–part series on MSDN for authoring data source controls. Part 1: The BasicsPart 2: ParametersPart 3: Asynchronous Data AccessPart 4: CachingPart 5: Design Time Functionality Well worth a read. UPDATE: Corrected links...

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Peter Kellner has written a very good two part article for MSDN on Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Member/Role Management with IIS (part 1, part 2)

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Ok, so this happened a month ago. Anyway, the tool is for converting your NUnit projects to use Visual Studio 2005 Team System tests. You’ll need the latest Guidance Automation Extensions as well. This works with the RTM version of Visual Studio 2005

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Microsoft has released a SQL Server 2005 System Views Map. This is a PDF that shows “the key system views included in SQL Server 2005, and the relationships between them.”

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If you’re interested in what future MS apps are going to look like, or just love to be on the bleeding edge, you may want to sign up for the MS Office “12” Beta program. Also, if you received the Technical Beta due to conference participation or some other means, you may want to check this out as well. Receiving the Technical Beta doesn’t guarantee you membership in the “beta program”, and you might find yourself going back to Office XP when your current beta expires....

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Ok, this is completely pointless, but are you interested in knowing how “interesting” your IP address is? If you are, then try this out. However, you might have to try later, because they’ve been Slashdotted. For what it's worth, here's how the site defines "interesting": When you go to www.ipspotting.com, the website looks up your IP address then runs a series of mathematic, coincidental, pattern finding, psychometric and just plain silly tests on it. The results of these tests...

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Jesse Liberty is offering a free online study course in his forum on Delphi. Read about it here

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Developerland has a very good two part article (Part I and Part 0) on writing a Word Add-In in C#

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Tom Hollander blogs on the DAAB in Enterprise Library for .NET 2.0.

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I’ve mentioned in the past that I prefer to receive my RSS feeds in my e-mail. Many disagree with me. I’ve mentioned some tools in the past designed to pump your feeds into Outlook for you, and allegedly Outlook 12 will have the same feature. However, Squeet is not e-mail client specific. It lets you subscribe to feeds and it converts them to e-mail for you. I haven’t tried it out because I’m happy with the solution I have, but it’s still something worth a look if you’re...

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The website has this to say about it (scroll down to the English version if necessary): “ViewStateAnalyzer is a tool for ASP.NET 2.0 developers. It's an Internet Explorer toolband that allows you to analyze local ASP.NET pages.By pressing the "Analyze" button, you will retrieve page controls graph and for each element you can check the handled event, read the viewstate saved by the control and HTML rendered, easily focusing it into IE.” Hat Tip to Scott Guthrie...

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Mike Gunderloy wonders if It’s Time To Replace Your User Interface? Certainly, from what we’ve seen publicly, Office 12 is a radical new approach for Windows UI’s. If you’re using the “current” model, your code is about to look very dated. Does the new model work, and is it something we’ll see more of? My guess to the second question is “yes”, and based on what we saw at the PDC, the answer to the first question is very much “yes”....

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This isn’t about to be a replacement for Infragistic’s NetAdvantage, but still worth a look. Especially since it costs a lot less than NetAdvantage. TriStateTreeview in VB.NET - The Code Project - VB.NET

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I’ve been a Zinio user for over 2 years now. What’s Zinio? Simply put, it’s e-magazines. The product has really come of age. You get an exact digital copy of the printed publication and it’s downloaded to your computer automagically. I love it because I can keep back issues of my favorite technical rags without having a pile of periodicals on my desk. They’re essentially PDF documents, so they’re searchable, zoomable, etc. Hyperlinks and “Continued on…”...

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Stumbled across this today. GoodContacts helps you manage all your important contacts by automatically updating contact information and sending update requests to your contacts. Surprisingly works with both Outlook and Outlook Express

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Tired of Adobe Acrobat Reader getting bigger and bigger and slower and slower with every release? Foxit Reader may be for you. Hat tip to Roy Osherove

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Enterprise Library 2.0 has been released by the Microsoft Patterns and Practices Group ( Download here ) I suppose this is good news. As I’ve indicated, I’m not a big fan of the EntLib, but 2.0 shows some improvement over the 1.x releases. If you’re unsure what the EntLib is, please check out the p&p group at Microsoft. There is some great stuff coming out of that group these days and it bears watching...

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I got a little few snarky comments last October, and due to that and to some extra requests for my time, I decided to take a break. However, I think I’ll pick things back up now. If you don’t like my blog, or don’t like what I have to say or how I say it, I have a simple answer for you. Don’t read it. Ciao

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