Community Blogs

As you may remember from the past, back in November 2007 and when I was working on my Professional Visual Studio Extensibility title, I eventually found authors of Professional Visual Studio 2008 book and was invited to their blog. As I stated at that time, our books are complementary and that was a good idea to join together. Even though our activity on Professional Visual Studio blog has fallen down recently but we hope that we can return with new posts very soon. Professional Visual Studio 2008 was supposed to be ready in mid-2008 and it was time to see it available in July! Today I checked Amazon and noticed that this title is finally available in stock and this means that book has been released! A short while after joining to Nick and Dave...

If you're looking to navigate through the current file in Visual Studio, the typical approach is ctrl-F, which is the shortcut for Find and brings up a dialog like the one at right to locate instance of a string. Bertrand just let me know about another shortcut, ctrl-I, which does Incremental Search. The nice thing about this is that it's faster (there is a measurable delay before ctrl-F loads) and doesn't pop up a window that gets in the way of seeing your code. After pressing ctrl-i, as you type the cursor will move to the next string that matches what you've typed. Finding additional instances of the string is simply a matter of hitting F3. Read More...

Something I always keep in my laptop bag is a Liberator power splitter. All this does is split one power outlet into two, with a little bit of extension cord thrown in for added convenience. You can find a wide variety of such things here . Always Enough Power For You So, what's the big deal about having one of these? Well, you could throw a whole power strip in your bag, but that's more bulk and weight. If you don't mind that, then go for it. Assuming you don't want to carry that, though, the benefit of a Y-splitter is that if you walk into a room (or conference session, where power outlets are always in short supply at geek conferences) you can simply unplug somebody's laptop (ask first), and then plug in the Y-splitter...

First of all, this is an interesting change in Microsoft naming convention for its products. Previously they were using Community Technology Preview (CTP) for the early product versions but recently they’ve switched to simple Preview name which is better and more understandable. After ASP.NET MVC Previews, now it’s ASP.NET AJAX’s turn to come in with its Previews. As Bertrand Le Roy has written on his blog, ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 Preview 1 is out and public and you can download it from ASP.NET workspace on CodePlex. This is a new step toward ASP.NET AJAX roadmap and seems to be a good step. Here are a few new features included in the ASP.NET AJAX: Client-side template rendering Declarative instantiation of behaviors and controls DataView control Markup...

One of main downsides of managing a whole project individually is that it’s a little hard to have the best management strategy. When it comes to a service and dealing with clients this duplicates your difficulties to some extent because you need to satisfy your clients with different requirements and opinions. Waegis is an online service that has its own business and for this business it should act in a way that users like the overall results. In the past ten (or more) days of Waegis existence and in the past three months of its private existence I received different feedback from testers, users and buddies about the service. A common part of feedback was related to some management strategies and another common part was related to some user...

Last month I wrote a couple of blog posts about building a task scheduler system for ASP.NET ( part 1 and part 2 ). Following to those posts and reader feedback I was convinced to extend that idea as an open source project. Here Dave Burke , my dear friend and one of the most respectful men on the community, was the main person who collaborated with me on the topic. Even though turning that basic sample of that post series to a general framework seemed very straightforward and easy but I finally decided to start an open source project called Abidar on CodePlex and licensed under The MIT License. I wrote a blog post announcing this project and described its purpose and goals shortly ( Abidar is the name of a beautiful mountain near Sanandaj,...

As Scott and Phil already have pointed out, ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 is finally up on CodePlex and you can get your hands on the installer, source code and documentation files on its workspace . It’s been quite a while since the official release of Preview 3 and MVC fans and followers have been waiting for this new version and it finally came out earlier today. This Monday Scott Guthrie wrote the first part of a descriptive post series about the new version and talked about some changes and new features applied to ASP.NET MVC. I have some projects planned around ASP.NET MVC and hopefully will start them shortly. I think that this new release moves ASP.NET MVC to a more stable state and lets me start and manage those projects easier. Unfortunately...

I know that my blog is spamified recently but I promise to end it here after this post but before that, let me write about a good Community Server tip that can be very effective in some circumstances. Actually I owe this tip to Thomas Freudenberg who was kind enough to test my Community Server spam rules for Waegis and send me some important feedback. One of his feedback was about the use of StatusCriteria property that can be very effective in the case of some spam rules like Waegis. He already has written about this tip on his blog and I’m just repeating his words to spread it. Thomas is one of the very cool developers that I’ve been lucky to work with in the past 2-3 years on some open source projects. It’s always a good experience to do...

After almost two weeks of less activity on this blog let me get back to regular blogging with a few posts primarily about technical stuff. A short while ago I wrote a blog post to update my older guide about writing a Community Server spam rule for version 2008. Everything works with that method except the part where you need to retrieve your setting values from the rule. Here there was a problem that made me busy for a while in Alpha days of Waegis and finally couldn’t find the reason. After doing some debugging and tracing I believed that it can’t retrieve setting values but had no idea about the reason. Finally I contacted Telligent developers and they were kind enough to follow up with the issue with me. Here Wyatt Preul recommended me to...

I'm a big fan of JungleDisk , a $20 utility that makes using Amazon's S3 storage solution easy and backups cheap. I'm also a big fan of Red Gate's tools, and in particular SQL Backup, which makes backing up SQL Server databases much easier and compresses them down to almost nothing . I've been manually backing up my one server that isn't hosted with ORCS Web (who take care of such things for me quite well for the servers there) for way too long. And it has only been backed up to a separate drive in the same box, so there wasn't any offsite backup happening. Circumstances finally conspired to drive me to prioritize getting off-site backups set up. You see, not long ago (end of May) the building next door to my office...