Although I've been a Mac user for a couple of years, I recently switched over fulltime to a Mac as my primary development machine at work. There are a lot of things I can get away with on a personal machine that I can't on a work machine (e.g., walking away from my laptop with the screen unlocked).I was shocked how long it took for me to piece all of ......

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For those of you that missed it, Rob Conery offered a challenge a couple nights ago to build an API for Tekpub. In response to this, a few different developers took the opportunity to propose their solution to the requirements. One of those developers, John Sheehan, offered his solution entitled, Don’t build the best REST API, build the best HTTP API ......

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If you've ever needed to convert a Nullable<T> type to its default, non-nullable value when its nullable value is null, here's a handy extension method to help you out.

public static T NullableToValue<T>(this T? value) where T : struct { return value ?? default(T); }

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I attended MIX11 a couple of weeks ago and had the opportunity to meet up with Glen Block at one of the open source festival booths where he was demoing MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework). During his demonstration, he showed a very cool (in my opinion) feature of MEF that allows you to export a concrete class that may or may not implement some predefined ......

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For copying and pasting source from Visual Studio into my blog posts, I have found CopySourceAsHtml to be very helpful. For those that are not familiar with it, CopySourceAsHtml integrates nicely with Visual Studio by adding a context menu item, which allows you to easily copy source code from your source files. All of the HTML formatting is handled ......

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With .NET 4.0 right around the corner, I thought it would be cool to download Visual Studio 2010 beta 2 and start playing around with the next release of Entity Framework. The initial release of Entity Framework came with a great deal of criticism. To make matters worse, there was a large uproar when it was rumored that Microsoft would be abandoning ......

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When sending emails to users of your system, it’s important that clients be able to read your messages. Even with modern technology advancements, not all email clients support HTML –some users actually prefer text messages. For this reason, it is important that we deliver content that a standard email (non-HTML) client can read. One way of doing this ......

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C# 3.0 brought with it a plethora of great additions, such as LINQ, lambda expressions and anonymous types. With the inclusion of LINQ, Microsoft decided that it was often difficult to determine the return type from a LINQ expressions. As such, they opted to include the var keyword, which is used to implicitly define a type. The type is determined by ......

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If you're trying to impersonate a Windows identity in an Excel Services UDF, make sure to configure the Excel Service access mode to delegation, rather than the Trusted Subsystem model (default). This can be done with the following commands: stsadm -o set-ecssecurity -accessmodel delegation -ssp sspname stsadm -o execadmsvcjobs iisreset Failing to do ......

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This next post might be rather obvious to most of you, but I figured I wasn't the only one that didn't know how to do this. I was recently working with a new ASP.NET MVC project and got tired of typing out the fully qualified class names. This seems like something that would be rather common, but a quick Google search didn't turn up anything useful. ......

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