Mark Smith

Get Free Typemock licenses – ASP.NET bundle launch

2009-05-18T21:25:00Z

Unit Testing ASP.NET? ASP.NET unit testing has never been this easy. Typemock is launching a new product for ASP.NET developers – the ASP.NET Bundle - and for the launch will be giving out FREE licenses to bloggers and their readers. The ASP.NET Bundle is the ultimate ASP.NET unit testing solution, and offers both Typemock Isolator , a unit test tool and Ivonna , the Isolator add-on for ASP.NET unit testing , for a bargain price. Typemock Isolator is a leading .NET unit testing tool (C# and VB.NET...(read more)

Windows 7 Public Beta - Download Link

2009-01-12T11:13:00Z

I've heard a few people saying they couldn't find the link to the public Windows 7 Beta link, so if you are one of these people, please visit the following page: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dd353205.aspx...(read more)

ASP.NET "Hacks" Series at LessThanDot

2008-07-07T08:18:00Z

At LessThanDot , we've decided to release a series of articles, tips and tricks which will be known as the "Hacks" series. The first installment was the popular SQL Server Programming Hacks and this week sees the release of the ASP.NET Hacks . These hacks have been split up into the following categories: 1 Applications 2 Caching 3 Controls 4 Database 5 Dates 6 Debugging 7 Email 8 Encryption 9 Files 10 Images 11 Javascript 12 Objects and Classes 13 Pages 14 Sessions 15 Strings 16 Validation 17 Visual...(read more)

SQL Server MVP - Denis Gobo

2008-07-01T21:13:00Z

I just wanted to say a big congratulations to a friend of mine, Denis Gobo , on becoming a SQL Server MVP . Denis has taught me many things over the last few years with regards to SQL Server and he continues to be a fountain of knowledge on the subject. If you don't already know Denis, I'd highly recommend subscribing to his blog and check out some of his posts and blog entries at LessThanDot . Congratulations Denis!...(read more)

Puzzle - Regular Pentagon

2008-06-16T17:14:00Z

First of all, thank you to everyone who took part in the Friday The Thirteenths puzzle at LessThanDot . We had some great entries from all types of different languages such as .NET, SQL Server, VB6, VBA, ASP, VBScript, Javascript, Java, Perl, Ruby and Python! It was a great response from everyone and it was a very nice introduction to our first weekly puzzle so once again thank you to all contributors. This week, the puzzle is entitled " Regular Pentagon " and the rules are: Given a grid co-ordinate...(read more)

Friday the Thirteenths

2008-06-09T14:11:00Z

We've decided to do a recurring feature at LessThanDot and have a "Programmer Puzzles" section with interesting puzzles published. This week the challenge has been set to "identify all friday the thirteenths for a given timeframe". You can use any programming language you like, just please let people know which one you have decided to use! LessThanDot - Friday the Thirteenths...(read more)

Microsoft Project - Velocity

2008-06-06T08:18:00Z

Microsoft have announce details of project "Velocity", a distributed caching mechanism for .NET. The Velocity team describe it as: "Velocity is intended to provide distributed caching (in memory) for all .NET applications – from enterprise scale to web-scale. We believe that there are many applications that need a distributed caching mechanism, and that there is, therefore, a need for distributed caching as a core part of the .NET platform. We expect to have more integrated support for this functionality...(read more)

SQL Server Programming Hacks

2008-06-02T20:49:00Z

Denis Gobo has just gathered a great selection of what he calls "a collection of frequently asked questions" and posted them in a new collection called SQL Server Programming Hacks . These include hacks from various categories such as: * 1 NULLS * 2 Dates * 3 Sorting, Limiting Ranking, Transposing and Pivoting * 4 Handy tricks * 5 Pitfalls * 6 Query Optimization * 7 Undocumented but handy * 8 Useful Admin stuff For The Developer Check out the full list here: http://wiki.lessthandot.com/index.php...(read more)

LessThanDot goes live!

2008-06-01T07:05:00Z

This morning saw the official launch of LessThanDot, a new IT Community. For more info on the site, please read my previous blog post on LessThanDot or come and visit us directly at LessThanDot . The IT Community of the 21st Century: http://www.lessthandot.com...(read more)

LessThanDot?

2008-05-21T08:40:00Z

What have I been up to? It's been a while since I last wrote a blog on here, so what have I been up to? Well, it's been a very busy time for me as along with the birth of our first child, I've been working on a few startup projects. One of these that I've been working on with some friends of mine is a new IT community site aimed at providing forums, wikis and blogs for the community to discuss ideas, share knowledge and learn from the experts. This project is named LessThanDot . What's The Difference...(read more)

LINQ

2008-01-25T12:57:00Z

I have mixed feelings about LINQ. I don't want it interfering with my database, and running queries against it so I think I'll be sticking to stored procedures for this type of access. However, there are also cases where I think it is very useful. Here's a blog post from my friend Christiaan Baes on an useful implementation of LINQ to order directories by creation date: http://blog.baesonline.com/2008/01/17/OrderingDirectoriesByCreationDateUsingLinq.aspx Edit: As Fabrice pointed out in one of the...(read more)

IE7 Bug

2008-01-11T16:21:00Z

Today I found a strange bug in IE7. If you have an unordered list, and you specifically give a height to each li element, the numbers reset themselves so each number ends up being "1"! Try this out! <! DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"> < html xmlns ="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> < head > < title > Test </ title > < style type ="text/css"> ol li { height : 40px ;} </ style > </ head > <...(read more)

IE8 passes Acid2 test!

2007-12-19T22:57:00Z

Whilst this may not be something deemed as particularly important by web users, web developers will be pleasantly surprised that the latest version of IE passes the Acid2 test: Read more... Is this a big milestone for IE and Microsoft? Should we expect this from their latest browsers? Please let me know your thoughts......(read more)

Convert HTML tables to a DataSet

2007-12-06T09:29:00Z

I've just had a requirement to extract some data from a web page and manipulate it before sending it off elsewhere. The data in the web page was all included inside <table> tags, so I wrote a few Regular Expressions to extract this data and place it in a DataSet object. Read More... If you have any comments on this method, or have any other methods you would recommend, please let me know....(read more)

Clear your cache

2007-11-16T10:32:00Z

I've just created a site management section for one of my sites, and one of the pages allows you to clear certain elements from the cache. I wanted an option to remove all cached objects but it doesn't appear to have a clear method. A way around this is just to create a dictionary enumerator to loop through the cache and clear objects one at a time e.g. Dim CacheEnum As IDictionaryEnumerator = Cache.GetEnumerator While (CacheEnum.MoveNext) Cache.Remove(CacheEnum.Key.ToString) End While...(read more)