ASP.NET

The Most Useful .NET Utility Classes Developers Tend To Reinvent Rather Than Reuse

Jannik Anker — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 20:30:14 GMT

- a great little list from Phil Haack (and be sure to read comments as well)...

Visual Studio 2005 PowerToys

Jannik Anker — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 14:40:00 GMT

"Microsoft has just dropped a set of Visual Studio 2005 PowerToys. Here's what you get:

Source Code Outliner : The Source Outliner tool is a Visual Studio extension that provides a tree view of your source code's types and members and lets you quickly navigate to them inside the editor.
Visual C++ Code Snippets:The Visual C++ Code Snippets tool lets you insert snippets in your code by using a pop-up menu that contains programming keywords. VB.NET and C# languages have this functionality in Visual Studio 2005.
Indexed Find : The Indexed Find tool is a Visual Studio extension that uses the Microsoft Indexing Service to provide improved Search capabilities to the integrated development environment (IDE). It sends the results of a search to the Output Window.
Super Diff Utility: The Super Diff Find tool is a Visual Studio extension that compares text files. It uses color coding and graphics to show the difference between the files in deleted text (red), changed text (blue), inserted text (green).
Event Toaster Utility: The Event Toaster tool is a Visual Studio extension that notifies users about specific events within the Visual Studio IDE."

Oh, and you can get them here.

W3C - Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0

Jannik Anker — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 13:31:00 GMT

Quote from http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/CR-mobile-bp-20060627/:

Abstract
This document specifies Best Practices for delivering Web content to mobile devices. The principal objective is to improve the user experience of the Web when accessed from such devices.

The recommendations refer to delivered content and not to the processes by which it is created, nor to the devices or user agents to which it is delivered.

It is primarily directed at creators, maintainers and operators of Web sites. Readers of this document are expected to be familiar with the creation of Web sites, and to have a general familiarity with the technologies involved, such as Web servers and HTTP. Readers are not expected to have a background in mobile-specific technologies.

The Dark Side of being a Guru (I'm not, but I'd like to be - in spite of the Dark Side ;-)

Jannik Anker — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 19:01:00 GMT

Back in August I mentioned an article from the MSDN Magazine: "Becoming a Guru". I liked it.

Now, the same magazine features an article on The Dark Side of Being a Guru which has a few comments about how real-life guruing (?) can be like:

"I receive a ton of e-mail saying, 'I have a software problem. Please help soon, as I have urgent business to conduct.'" - Dino Esposito, columnist

Hehe... If you look at this the right (optimistic) way, it must be cool to receive mails like this - knowing that so many people think you have the answer for everything - but the downside is that the same people expect you to have the answer for everything. And that you are always available for private lessons.

Ultimately, the satisfaction you get from helping so many people (although not through private lessons) beats the dissatisfaction of not having time to help the (relatively) few - otherwise Gurus wouldn't be Gurus, right?

Yes! VS.NET 2005 is available for (MSDN) download!

Jannik Anker — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 13:18:00 GMT

Via Andrew Connell...

The newest versions of Visual Studio.NET and SQL Server (2005) are now available for download, if you are an MSDN subscriber! If you are not, you'll have to wait till the official release on November 7th. Download size: 2760 MB... Yawn... ;-)

Some MSDN articles I'm going to read (sometime soon)

Jannik Anker — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 00:52:00 GMT

I got waaay behind on reading my "MSDN Just Published" feed. So after browsing through the > 100 articles mentioned (yes, I "filtered" them via headlines first), I found a few that sounded relevant and interesting. I'll throw them at you randomly:

Common ASP.NET 2.0 Conversion Issues and Solutions
Windows Vista - get the Beta
Coding4Fun - Some Assembly Required: Is that you? Writing Better Software for Cool USB Hardware
Coding4Fun - In the Box: Giving Computers a Voice
MSDN TV: Intelligent Applications Powered by SQL Server 2005 Data Mining
.NET Framework Developer Center: Implement a Microsoft Word-like Object Model for Your .NET Framework Application
.NET Matters: Stream Decorator, Single-Instance Apps -- MSDN Magazine, September 2005
Performance of ASP.NET Web Services, Enterprise Services, and .NET Remoting
Concurrency: What Every Dev Must Know About Multithreaded Apps

And finally, an article I have to read, study and get to know like the palm of my hand:
Editor's Note: Becoming a Guru

Give Your Everyday Custom Collections a Design-Time Makeover

Jannik Anker — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 06:51:00 GMT

Paul Ballard has written an excellent article for the latest MSDN Magazine (August 2005) about custom collections. I am currently in the midst of a project that uses custom collections a lot, so naturally I have a healthy interest in the subject ;-) I have to admit that I haven't read it in full yet, just browsed through it.

Pauls suggested implementation of interfaces etc. is great as inspiration - I've done most of it like he does, but I may have missed a few nice details (like implementing IEditableObject - I didn't even know it existed!). So without actually going back to the drawing board, some things may end up being implemented differently from today, based on the suggestions and eye openers in this article.

My project is using Framework 1.1 and Pauls code is based on Framework 2.0, so I'll have to see what can and cannot be done within my solution :-/

The article and source code is available here:
Data Binding: Give Your Everyday Custom Collections a Design-Time Makeover -- MSDN Magazine, August 2005

ASP.NET Home: On the Way to Mastering ASP.NET: Introducing Custom Entity Classes

Jannik Anker — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 06:01:00 GMT

ASP.NET Home: On the Way to Mastering ASP.NET: Introducing Custom Entity Classes

This article provides a superb "entrance point" for anyone who wishes to know more about really utilizing the OO capabilities of the .NET framework. Learn how to create "wrappers" for your database interaction, thereby creating some kind of Data Access Layer between SQL and GUI.

You can even use your own (newly created) classes when binding to standard .NET controls like the DataGrid.

Great article...

CodeTranslator: Free Code Translation From VB.NET <-> C#

Jannik Anker — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 03:41:00 GMT

Weird. Thought I had already blogged about this genious tool: CodeTranslator: Free Code Translation From VB.NET <-> C# offers a) acceptable translation, b) an option to colorize output - c) as you write!.

Only very few bugs remain, including some parenthesis missing at the end for instance .ToString(). That's pretty easy to live with...

Can't seem to find the post I may or may not have created on this earlier, so I'm giving it another try. (bump? ;-)

RegExLib.com Regular Expression Cheat Sheet (.NET Framework)

Jannik Anker — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 04:33:00 GMT

Stumbled across this excellent thing: RegExLib.com Regular Expression Cheat Sheet (.NET Framework)

I've never really felt a 100 per cent "safe" when creating RegExp patterns (maybe 80 per cent, okay?)... This makes life much easier when creating a new pattern from scratch (and saves a s...load of debugging time).