Community Blogs

There is a great little post on this morning's IEBlog that talks about the (relatively) new Consolas font and how to enable it for use in a command prompt! Here's an excerpt from the post... Bryn Spears on the Internet Explorer team gave me the following simple instructions to turn on Consolas in the CMD Window: reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Console\TrueTypeFont" /v 00 /d Consolas logoff Note: In Windows Vista, you need to run the reg command from an elevated command prompt. When you log back in, Consolas will be an option in the “Command Prompt” Properties.  (n.b., Bryn tells me it actually shows up before you relog, but it won’t work.) You can install Consolas...

In the application development, we will normally adopt the following technologies: Windows Form & WPF Web Service & WCF BPEL & WWF Oracle & SQL Server Smart Client Software Factory ORM NHibernate Castle ActiveRecord Subsonic Third-party Controls Developer.Express.DXPerience Infragistics.TestAdvantage Crystal Reports Janus WinForms Controls Suite Syncfusion Essential Studio ComponentOne Studio Read More...

While my team and I doing our daily work. One of our new team members asked that he needs the user to select a value from drop-down list and this value should be converted to a nullable integer value. The small issue he faces that he need to parse the value selected in one line of code and make sure that if the user does not select a value the default value will be parsed to null and do not cause a problem -in each drop-down there is a "[Select]" item with empty string value - I wondered a int .Parse function returns null when the parsed value is null but throws "Input string was not in a correct format" exception when try to parse an empty string. And when use int .TryParse it will result with 0 value when parsing operation...

LINQ provides a standard way for developers to query data in diverse locations, ranging from in memory objects, XML data, or relational data living in an Oracle Database.Lets take a look at a scenario where we use Linq to objects to query a directory on the local drive for files that match a given extension, and show the results in a Datagrid control. Here is the plan of action for the application Create a function to return a list of all the files in a directory. We will call this method GetFiles, it will take one string parameter representing the base search directory, and will return a strongly typed list of FileInfo Objects. Use Linq to Objects to filter the returned list for files that matches a user-specified file extension. Bind the resukts...

Welcome to this here strange blog! I’ll be honest: I had a strong urge to post goatse or swap.avi as my first contribution and see what happens, but common sense won and my career at asp.net does not end in a disaster…yet. Now that I fessed up about me being a complete clown, I think it is only fair if I write something about what will be featured on these pages. Being a .NET person, I’ll write mostly about the new features and concepts that are available in .NET 3.5, but I’ll also deal with things related to .NET software development in general. I have grandiose plans to publish a lot of (hopefully) insightful articles that will help people with their work. What's in it for me, you ask? Well, it is not me being infititely kind and generous...

You can't solve a problem with the same kind of thinking that created it. — Albert Einstein (1879-1955) Yesterday I spent a lot of time trying to get a speed radar to work on my .NET application. Every test was giving us diferent results. We made hundreds of tests, but every time we thought we found the problem, then the results of the test changed again. So If you're working with USB to Serial ports using some devices (like a Decatur speed radar in my case), and you're getting some difficulties, there are some things that you can do to isolate the problem FIRST OF ALL: Test the application on a computer that has a serial port, and connect the device directly without the USB to SERIAL adapter. If the problem is sitll in there, well, you should...

Microsoft released some awesome posters for a while ago: Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 - Commonly Used Types and Namespaces 2007 Office System Document: Developer Posters Windows Server 2008 Component Posters Read More...

Have some fun at the end of 2007. Visit http://www.SantaSal.com/?rid=13778 , register and grab your free gifts straight away Do you want to learn Community Server, Why are you waiting. Buy my user friendly book today http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1847190871 http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1847190871/...( read more ) Read More...

After Jesse Liberty was introduced to C# back in 2000, it took him less than a day to decide to switch his career. He set aside programming in and writing about C++ for an exclusive focus on C# and .NET, saying, "I won't go back and you can't make me." The key feature that was so attractive in 2000 was garbage collection. With .NET 2.0, there came a much enhanced development environment, generics, and a number of other features that greatly expanded what could be done and the ease of development...( read more ) Read More...

What makes a successful and happy programmer? "It would be easy to say that some are born to program and some are not," muses Judith Bishop , author of C# 3.0 Design Patterns (O'Reilly, US $39.99). "Yet even the best programmers will sit for hours or even days poring over a single screen of code, knowing it is not quite right and struggling to make it better." According to Bishop, the secret to being happy and successful comes down to two primary tools: a good programming language and design patterns...( read more ) Read More...