.NET
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.NET
Last night, I gave my talk on Code Generation and CodeSmith, and I think it went fairly well. I promised I would post the templates I created as well as my slides, which you can get here. The slides are relatively useless. as there's not much details about what I talked about, but there are notes in the powerpoint, so you can get an idea of what I said.There's also a text file in the zip which contains the command lines I used to do batch generation and the "Keep" region example. Here's a listing...
On Tuesday, I agreed to fill in for a colleague and speak at the next West Michigan .NET User Group meeting, which happens to be next Tuesday (October 10th). It's short notice, but I'm sure I'll have time to throw together a pretty decent presentation on code generation and more specifically, CodeSmith. I thought someone had already done something on CodeSmith, but looking back, it appears that's not the case - a couple of years ago, there was a talk about useful tools, where CodeSmith was mentioned,...
I've been helping a client upgrade from Visual SourceSafe to Team System over the past couple of weeks, and one of our requirements is to ensure that we still have an automated build process. Well, TFS does not have an automated build system out of the box, and finding something has been a challenge. Until now! On Friday, Notion Solutions released TeamCI, a free CI tool that works with Team System. I got it installed today, but haven't had much of a chance to work with it. Hopefully, it will work...
This week, the lead developer on a major open source project, NDoc, resigned. His reasons are valid, if not disappointing (not in him, in the community of NDoc users), but that's not the point. Coming on the heels of this announcement is the announcement about the pending availability of Sandcastle.What's Sandcastle? Well, the preliminary announcement is a little light on details, but there's a few tidbits that give you a clue that it could be a replacement for the now defunct NDoc: Produces MSDN-like...
SSW has a list of 41 rules that they've put out there that can be used as guidelines for running successful projects. I perused the list, and for the most part, they're spot on.One item I hadn't seen was number 5 - about synching up development vs. production web.config settings. SSW uses an approach based on machine name - so if you have a key for WebServiceUrl, you'd have DevLaptop_WebServiceUrl for your local machine, and DevServer_WebServiceUrl as the key for your dev server. I've never done...
Dave Donaldson prodded me this morning to get off my butt and post an update to my previous multi-sorting comparer, and I'm going to do that now. Man, Dave, get off my back!Ok. He didn't prod. He asked if I'd updated it to support Generics, which I had. If you look at the previous one, not a lot has changed, so let's just highlight the changes. First, instead of using an ArrayList to store the internal sorting classes, I'm using a Generics (it really wouldn't be a good upgrade if I didn't use generics...
And I'll be there! It's at the Watermark Country Club at 6:00 PM. It should be a very good meeting, with Sahil Malik speaking about ADO.NET and John Cripe (of NuSoft) talking about SQL Server 2005.If you're there, say hi. I'll be wearing a black NationalCityHomeLoans.com shirt.Technorati Tags: grdotnet | Sahil+Malik | ADO.NET...
I've harped on Visual Studio 2005's website projects quite a bit lately, and I'm going to move to the web application model now that it's been officially released. But, I did want to talk about one last issue I've seen, because it's a doozy.Some background: We have three projects that we're building and deploying. One is at the root of the website, and the other are sub applications (virtual directories) under the root. Of the two sub applications, one was set to compile all of the code into one...
Mike Swanson is reporting that about 50 sessions from Mix06 will be available online for free - for everyone. Microsoft did the same thing for PDC '05, so I was hoping this was going to happen. Expect to see it in three to four weeks.I spoke with Brian, who was there, and he told me this was the best conference he's ever been to - and he's been to a few Tech Eds and PDCs. I'm looking forward to downloading a few of these.Technorati Tags: Mix06...
TheServerSide.NET has an older article that's a nice introduction article to Nant, which, if you've read this blog for a while, you'll know I swear by. If you're not familiar with Nant, go read the article. It'll give you a good feel for what you can do with it.But that's not the point of this post. I've posted enough about Nant introduction articles. I'm still looking for the killer Nant article - one that gets into details of how to do some fairly complicated things with it, but this one does have...
We made a decision on a project I've been on for over a year now to upgrade to ASP.NET 2.0. This is my first major upgrade project, and to be honest, it was fairly smooth. Now that we're on .NET 2.0, we have a few issues, but we'll get to that. First, the upgrade process. We upgraded two projects that shared a library. We ran a test ahead of time, and did it disconnected from source control, and ran into one immediate issue: the first project upgraded just fine, but as soon as we tried to open the...
Ever since I started writing web apps, I've realized that there's a huge need to be able to write solid Javascript. Even when ASP.NET launched, there was still a huge need to know Javascript - despite the claims you heard. I'm hearing a lot of the same claims now that ASP.NET 2.0 is out - not quite as much, but they're still there, despite the proliferation of AJAX. Obviously, the need for Javascript is not going away.Well, given that Javascript seems to be such a touchy language, and is dependant...
Version 0.6 of thinktecture's WSCF tool has been released, and it now supports .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005! Very nice.If you're unfamiliar with WSCF, you should be. It stands for Web Services Contract-First, and allows you to build your web services by first defining the contract that the server and client will agree to. Now, I'm not a complete contract-first guy, but I do like the tool because the client proxy class generation is much better than the default proxy generated by Visual Studio...
Dave Donaldson, the maker of the wonderful site CodeKeep, has released an add-in for Visual Studio 2005. Since I am doing all of my development in .NET 2.0, I hadn't been using CodeKeep as much as I could have been, but having the add-in again will be helpful.Oh yeah. If you're using CodeKeep, why are most of the code snippets private? Isn't the point to be able to share? And if you're not using CodeKeep, why not?Technorati Tags: CodeKeep | VS2005 | Utlities...
I have a gripe about web projects in Visual Studio 2005, and it's already come up to bite me in the butt a few times. The idea that every file in the folder is part of the site never really sat well with me, but I couldn't put my finger on why. But, after using it with a development team, I now know why. When I delete a file, it's removed from my local site, and from source control, which, by the way, is awesome! But here's the problem: when one of the other developers checks in, it picks up that...
As I've posted about previously, I'm working through the process updating our server control for Tourney Logic. Well, we made a pretty big design decision. Since the bracket is much easier to configure, we've decided to add databinding - we only have one main collection now, and it's only one level deep, so it makes perfect sense for us to do that. Before, we had two collections, and one was two levels deep, so while databinding was possible, it wasn't really viable to do so. Having made the decision,...
As a server control developer, I was very interested in listening to the latest DotNetRocks show. Overall, it was a great show, and while a lot of it was review, there were a few good nuggets in there, as well as some validation that I'm doing things The Right Way. If you're never developed a server control, it's a great introduction to them - why you'd do it and how you'd do it. Anyway, one thing that I've never really thought about was the different types of server controls. Miguel says there's...
I've been lax on blogging lately, and I have a back log of things that I wanted to get out there. I don't want to put up a post about each, mainly because there isn't enough for that, but I do want to get some of this out there, so here it goes.First, James Avery was looking for a data modeling tool that's cheap, and he found one even better. DBDesigner 4 - which is free! He says there's a SQL plugin available, but I couldn't find it. Anyone know where it is?Next, Sachin Narute has a series of posts...
Steve M. over on Brain.Save() has a nice little post about JSON, which stands for JavaScript Object Notation. I've heard the term JSON, but never realized what it was or how it can be used. Most of the time it's used in conjunction with AJAX, which makes sense because (especially in .NET) you're dealing with objects when you work with data. Being able to still deal with objects in Javascript is very helpful. Even without AJAX, being able to easily create dynamic objects in Javascript is pretty cool....
A while back I found the release notes for RC2, but no formal announcement about it's release - but I did speculate it would be a few days. It took a little longer, but it has been released. From the updated release notes, it looks like a lot of the work went into stabilization and CCTray. Both make sense - with release candidates, it's not about new functionality. It's about fixing what's there. The CCTray is an exception - it was completely rewritten, so changes are probably happening based on...
Nope. I haven't gone religious on you (yet)! But Brian posted today about the launch of Zondervan Bible Search, which is a very cool application that I had a small part in. It's a pretty simple yet elegant site at first:It's cool because of the technology behind it. Zondervan has a very powerful desktop application called Pradis that gives users the ability to browse, search, and read the bible in many different flavors. It's something we (back in our Sagestone days) helped develop (we, as in Sagestone,...
As I've mentioned before, I'm a big fan of CodeKeep. I'm subscribed to a few of the feeds to see the new snippets come across, and today this one did. It's in Spanish, which is cool, but I have no idea what it does!Still, it's cool to see it being used. This really does have some potential
Scott Guthrie has a series of greats post about Web Projects in VS 2005, including a lot of details about how much better it is than VS 2003 offers. I'd expand more on it, but Scott does an awesome job by himself, so just go read them for yourself.These are posts that Scott aluded to a while ago, and his follow ups are very informative, and relieve (I think) a lot of the fears that are out there about the new project-less web projects in .NET 2.0. Warning: These posts are long! If you don't have...
Over the past few weeks, I've been struggling with a few small issues I have with my home-grown blogging client, dubbed the Rosscode Blogger (creative, huh?). It still did it's main job, but it wasn't fitting into my new blogging habits. First, what is it, for those who've never read any of my posts about it. When I blog, I sometimes publish to more than one blog at a time. Every post ends up on Rosscode.com. Technical posts end up on GeeksWithBlogs, work related content goes to my NuSoft blog, and...
I had a conversation in my comments with Eric Hammersley a while back about the difference between VMWare and Virtual PC, and which would be a better choice. I'm using Virtual PC, but I have a license for VMWare. I've put off trying VMWare mainly for two reasons. First, I don't want to spend the time to create a new VMWare image. It took me a while to get my base image set up the way I want it, and I still tweak it every now and then. The second reason is that I've been using the images, which mean...
Back in June, I blogged about AJAX.NET going open source. Well, apparently there were some issues with getting it opened up.I'm not sure what the issues were, but it's finally up, and you can access it here
A while ago, I blogged about wanting to find a way to share code snippets for a team. Ben Carey (who used to work at Sagestone, before we became NuSoft), read it, talked to Dave Donaldson, and Dave contacted me to help him test CodeKeep. I didn't do as much as I would have hoped to help him out, but it's now public.You can read Dave's announcement or just go to the website. So far, I've only added three snippets (all public). It's a very cool idea, and Dave plans to add to it as it goes. One of the...
Well, I've been harping on an idea for a while now, and instead of waiting for others to get on board, I decided to see what I could do myself. I started making the code, and to get a quick and dirty version up and running, it was actually pretty simple. Here's the high level logic of my initial run:1. Get an OPML file.2. Load each feed for that OPML file.3. Parse the content of each item in each feed and pull out each URL.4. For each URL, keep track of the domain. If the domain isn't in the list,...
Via Ed Bott, Dwight Silverman wants to know what's on your start menu.No, not what programs you have installed. He wants to know what your top 6 programs are that you use - you know, in Windows XP, the left side of the start menu, where it has an MRU program list.I'm game. Here's my two lists. The first one is on my base machine - where I don't do any development. Here's my list:1. Excel - This is unfair. I recently had a small project working on an excel sheet. No need for a dedicated VPC just to...
Apparently I'm not the only one who's hearing the buzz around the new web projects in Visual Studio 2005. Scott Guthrie is too. And he's on vacation in Mexico!Anyway, he has a great post explaining a few things. Both of the issues I listed earlier (references and excluding files) are handled in post-beta builds, something I wasn't aware of. Here's another example of Microsoft listening to what the developers want.Seriously though, with a guy like Scott running the ASP.NET team, you knew there had...
I monitor the updates and additions to the CruiseControl.NET product documentation, and today there's been a plethora of action. The first was an interesting page addition that showed up in my aggregator - a nant task to run MsBuild scripts. That definitely piqued my interest, and as the day went on, I eventually saw that CruiseControl.NET 1.0 RC1 was released today. There's a few new features, but the two that stand out to me are (obviously) the MsBuild tasks, and that CCTray has been rewritten...
This is why I usually don't start posting until I'm caught up on my blog reading. I just posted tonight about one of the problems with the new project-less web projects in VS.NET 2005 - you can't easily manage updates to binary references (or, for that matter, references to other projects in the same solution). Well, I just read a post from Paul Wilson stating that this has been fixed in post-beta 2. Now, when you add references, you'll get a "refresh" file, which will give VS.NET a list of references...
Steve Rubel started it. He's posted his list of 10 indispensable blogs - the ones he would take on a desert island with him.Then, he created a Technorati tag so everyone can participate.Side note: adding tags for Technorati is pretty simple! Just add a link to (for examle) http://technorati.com/tag/1... with a rel="tag" in the link. Nice!Ok. Back on topic. My ten blogs I can't live without. That's tough, but here's my list. If I read your blog and don't list you, please don't be offended. Getting...
There's been a lot of talk about ASP.NET 2.0's model of project-less web sites (including from Jeffrey Palermo on the latest DotNetRocks show), and whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. The consensus seems to be that it's bad.I'm still not sure. I haven't dug in enough, but I can think of some pitfalls already. How do you manage references and know to re-copy them if they've been updated? How can you exclude a file from a web site without deleting it? With a project file this is easy.On the...
Well, today was finally the day to take the plunge. Performance of my laptop was WAY down, and it was time to start fresh. It actually didn't turn out to too bad. I had two things going for me: First, we have ghost images for our laptops, and that got me quite a base - Windows XP SP2, Office 2003 all patched up, Visual Studio .NET 2003, SQL Server, etc. That was loaded in 20 minutes. Second, I don't use my base box for most of my development - I've switched to using VPC. So, there wasn't much else...
Well, Jason Salas called me out repeatedly on Digital Pontifications, his podcast, and I finally answered Saturday night. He's included it in the August 1st episode. It's at about the 20 minute mark if you're interested, although it'd be worth it to listen to the whole show. For that matter, subscribe to the show. It's well worth it
On August 9th, it looks like Rocky will be in Grand Rapids at the West Michigan .NET User Group. I've never met him, but I've read a few of his articles (even commented on his writings here and here). He'll be talking about creating distributed object-oriented applications in .NET. It should be a good talk. If you're in the West Michigan area, check it out. Here are the details:The Waterworks Pub in the Waterworks Building - downtown Grand RapidsAugust 9th, 6 P.M. You can always go to the West Michigan...
Last week, I finally had a chance to get into the mapper in BizTalk. I've done minor things with it to this point - dragging fields from one side to the other, using the simple functoids to concatenate strings, but nothing complex.I was a little nervous to try something hard. I was warned by Jim (you need to blog more, Jim!), one of our BizTalk experts at NuSoft that the mapper was dangerous. He said don't use the mapper - use Xpath. I'm guessing anyone familiar with XML and XSL and XSLT and BizTalk...
I've been doing some Biztalk development lately, and for the most part, it's pretty straightforward. Granted, what I'm doing isn't all that complicated, so I know I'm not hitting some of the complexities of Biztalk - that, and I'm not responsible for the transformations that need to take place.Given that, there are a few things that frustrate me about Biztalk, and I ran into one of them today. Of course, the only reason I ran into this was because I messed up in my initial planning. You see, we originally...
Well, maybe not everything, but FTPOnline has a listing of a ton of articles about ASP.NET. There's even quite a bit about ASP.NET 2.0, which is cool.Now, I just need to find a few days with nothing else to do and read all of them
I'm trying to find an easy way for our team to share code, and the best way to gain adoption of something is to make it easy. Well, most of us spend all day in Visual Studio.NET, so why not find something that can be used in the IDE?I found CodeShare. It's a VS.NET add-in that allows you to add and retrieve code snippets from a central repository. It looks pretty cool, and I'm looking for a server to install it on so I can test it out. If it works as advertised, then I'll start talking to the "higher...
News.com had the story Monday night, and by 11:30 Tuesday morning, Scott Guthrie had a great article describing in much more detail what they're building.I've been a little down on AJAX, but I'm starting to come around. One of the downsides I posted about AJAX was cross browser support, but I also said a framework development company, such as Microsoft, could alleviate that problem.The other reasons still stand - back and forward buttons, bookmarks, etc., but those are mostly related to how you use...
Somehow I missed this when it first came through the aggregator, but I got it on an update. Anyway, AJAX.Net is now open source and hosted at Sourceforge.The CMS project I'm pseudo-involved in is using this, and, although I haven't been involved in the implementation of AJAX.NET, we got it up and running in a day - very nice
I installed WSS as part of my Biztalk ramp-up - Biztalk uses it for some of it's services, such as BAS. Anyway, it took me a few days before I realized how much WSS messes with the rest of your sites. It locks down ASP.NET development to the point of unusability (yes, I know that's not a word, but it should be!). You can't debug your apps, and once you turn that back on, you can't use session. Until you turn that on too! Oh - and before you do all that, you have to tell WSS that the virtual directory...
I've been using VPC as my primary development environment for a couple of months now, and I've found my first annoyance. I thought I had a solution, but it didn't work out as I'd hoped.First, the problem. I work on multiple clients, and often, I want to look at code that I wrote for one client to use it as a sample for another client - more often than not lately, it's with build files and how to do something I've done before. I can't really run two VPC's at the same time efficiently - I dedicate...
Ben Carey has a question about frameworks, and is seeking feedback about how we keep our frameworks clutter-free.I've worked on a couple of frameworks, and I've seen both the good and the bad in them. The bad usually results when the framework isn't tightly controlled. What I mean by that is that everyone has the opportunity to modify the framework, even if they don't have an understanding of what the framework is for. You see, this is a concept that not everyone grasps. Developing a reusable framework...
Ok. I'm new to BizTalk Server, but I think I got this right. Please let me know if I didn't. I have an existing application that uses an object. I want to take this object, allow BizTalk to accept messages of that type, and map them to another message type that can then be sent out to a third party verification system. Sounds like a pretty typical scenario to me.It took me a while to figure it out though. First, I added a reference in BizTalk to my business object class. Then I created ports that...
Well, now that I'm back from Tech Ed, it's time to look back through my notes and start writing down my thoughts on what I did and what I saw. I'm starting that right now, but I wanted to get some things out there first. While the technical content at Tech Ed is awesome, I'm debating if the content was better than the people you get to meet and interact with. I'm not sure. I think I've made a few contacts that could potentially be life long relationships. That's more important than the technology...
I got a chance to talk with the GotDotNet team about the future of Workspaces as well as the whole GotDotNet platform. And I got a free shirt. I think I mentioned that before!It was surprising to see how apologetic they were for the software, even though they didn't write it. They called it a prototype in production, and when you look at how slow it currently is, that's probably pretty accurate. None of them are happy about the performance, but it does seem to be getting better.Not many know this,...