Kevin Isom

Firebug rocks. Nothing, I mean nothing beats it for debug web pages. But what do you do for problems specific to IE (most notably IE 6) Here are a list of tools I use to help cause telling the user to get a real browser is not a solution

Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar

This toolbar provides some of the features of firebug.

XRAY

Is a bookmarklet that let's you see information about elements on a page.

Companion.JS

An javascript debugger for IE

This may not be free in the future. Debug Bar from the same guy is also a very useful tool, but it's not free for professional use but probably worth the 59 euro if you do a lot of work with IE.

And finally something while not useful for debugging but damn useful in its own right is the Inline Search for IE.

Hope this helps somebody out.

There I said it.

I'm a C# guy. Now about 4 years when I started with .Net I started writing in VB.Net but I quickly decided to move C#. This, despite having spent the 3+ years prior working in ASP Classic. After a little bit of C# I quickly adopted the typical C# snobbish opinion of VB. For no good reason mind you, just cause it was different.

My how things change.

I've joined a VB team and instead of trying to make the team change to C# I figured I'd just get back to VB. Also we do a lot of work with XML so it got me looking into the VB 9.0 XML features and I found that you can do things like this:

   1:  Imports <xmlns:ns="http://contacts">

   2:   

   3:  Dim contact1 As XElement = _

   4:      <contact>

   5:        <name>Joe Bloggs</name>

   6:        <phone type="home">09-555-0144</phone>

   7:        <phone type="mobile">021-555-0145</phone>

   8:      </contact>

Okay, nifty and all, but what do you do from there...How about this?

   1:  Dim phoneTypes As XElement = _

   2:    <phoneTypes>

   3:        <%= From phone In contacts...<phone> _

   4:            Select <type><%= phone.@type %></type> _

   5:        %>

   6:    </phoneTypes>

And that will give you the following XML

<phoneTypes>
    <type>home</type>
    <type>mobile</type>
</phoneTypes>

That's rather cool and really useful with some of the stuff I'll be working on.

Check out the Overview of LINQ to XML in Visual Basic for more details

Now, I still want to say I'm a C# guy, but I think the snickering at the mention of VB stops now. 

I like the NUnit 2.4 Constraint based syntax. So In my new role I am having to implement Unit Testing so I decided on going with NUnit to begin with despite my preference for MbUnit. But once I got started writing my tests, I discover Is is a keyword in VB (I'm more of a C# person, but hey I'm no language bigot). I kinda freak out a little. Did I do something wrong? Forget to add something? Google a bit and still no joy. Then I remember the code examples installed with NUnit and have a look and what do you know? Is is now Iz in VB. Not exactly as clear as Is but you gotta do what you gotta do. So now in VB a Unit Test looks like this

   1:  Imports NUnit.Framework

   2:  Imports NUnit.Framework.SyntaxHelpers

   3:  <TestFixture()> _

   4:  Public Class MyVIsualBasicSampleTests

   5:   

   6:      <Test()> _

   7:      Public Sub TestBlankForSyntax()

   8:          Assert.That(something.IsSomething(), Iz.False)

   9:      End Sub

  10:   

  11:      <Test()> _

  12:      Public Sub AnotherSampleTestForSomethingElse()

  13:          Assert.That(something.IsSomethingElse(), Iz.True)

  14:      End Sub

  15:   

  16:  End Class

And there you go.

So, I'm working on a Web Application Project in Visual Studio 2008 and I realize I don't have a strongly typed Profile object...So I Google around and find that this a Problem in Visual Studio 2005 and that Microsoft didn't fix the problem in VS 2008. Needless to say I was a little unimpressed. But I also found the Web Profile Builder at the MSDN Code Gallery. I followed the instructions here and was away running.