Well, Dave Ward tagged me in Michael Eaton’s software development meme that’s been going around. As far as blog-chain-letters go, this is a great one. It’s interesting to see how many diverse backgrounds lead us in the same direction. How old were you when you started programming? 13 (33 years ago as of this writing.) How did you get started in programming? In 1974, there were no personal computers. My school got a very basic "programmable" calculator. It was about 8 times this size of today's laptop computers, had the equivalent of 8 16Bit registers and a collection of math operations. This was my introduction to programming and I was hooked. Shortly after a business that my father was involved in purchased a NC programmable lathe...

A very common pattern for business focused applications is the "Composite Application Pattern".   Over the last few months our P&P team has been working with industry leaders and the product teams in Microsoft to develop an sample application and a framework for building composite applications in WPF.  If you are looking at building a WPF business focused application, you should really check this out.. all the documentation, source code and even unit tests are included! Check it out!  Composite Application Guidance for WPF Read More...

This has to be one of the coolest shell extensions that I have seen yet.  It is right up there with the Command Prompt Here one. This adds a addition to the right-click menu for a folder for “ASP.NET Web Server Here”. All the information, including...

I was literally in the middle of writing the post when I saw a message from Andrew Davey about how he had implemented the same idea ! Of course, his is way better, so I got to code via subtraction. That means subtracting out the crap I had written in a few minutes and dig into his code. There are no unique ideas, right? ;) Either way, it's fun when the same idea is being thought about simultaneously. Here's the general concept. A few weeks back I was talking with Avner Aharoni, a Language Program Manager, and he had been kicking around the idea of VB9's XML Literals making friendlier Views within ASP.NET MVC. I've blogged about VB9's rocking sweet XML support before . It lets you create XML like this. Note the lack of strings...

In this tip, I demonstrate how you can create unit tests for the routes in your ASP.NET MVC applications. I show how to test whether a URL is being mapped to the right controller, controller action, and action parameters. If you are being virtuous about...( read more ) Read More...

We just published our roadmap for ASP.NET Ajax . In this document we describe some of the proposed features that we are considering investing in future releases of ASP.NET AJAX, Visual Web Developer, and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. We really appreciate your feedback, so this document is intended as much for you to provide an input to our direction as well as to give some indication of what the teams are investing in. http://www.codeplex.com/aspnet/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=14924 Read More...

Yesterday, I wrote a quick and dirty ASP.NET HttpModule for displaying the time that a request takes to process. Note that by turning on trace output for a page , you can get timing information for that page. But as far as I understand, and I need to double check this, this only applies to the page lifecycle, which might not have all the information you want in the context of ASP.NET MVC. Not to mention, I just wanted to see a simple number at the end of the page and not have to wade through all that trace output. Also keep in mind that this number only applies to the time spent in the ASP.NET pipeline. It obviously doesn’t tell you the full time of the request from browser sending the request to the browser rendering the response. For that...

Thoughts on search for RIAs, along with pointers to my latest slides as well as MIX session on ensuring indexability (esp. for Silverlight and Ajax apps)... Read More...

I cannot stress this enough.  It is very important that you use the same architecture for the debugger as the process that you are trying to troubleshoot. Wrong version when capturing a dump If you use a 64-bit debugger to capture a dump of a32-bit...

Interested in learning something new about Silverlight almost every day? I will be posting “Tips of the Day” for Silverlight on my blog at http://silverlight.net/blogs/msnow/default.aspx . For example, over the past few days, I have added the following tips: Tip of the Day #10 - Dynamically loading and displaying images in Beta 2. Tip of the Day #11 - Transparency - How to make your Silverlight control transparent. Tip of the Day #12 - Full Implementation of a Silverlight Policy Server. Tip of the Day #13 - How to Get an Images Dimensions in Silverlight. Tip of the Day #14 - How to Right Click on a Silverlight Application. If you have any suggestions or requests don’t hesitate to ask. Thank you. Mike Snow SDET Lead  Visual Studio Web Tools...