Contents tagged with .NET
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Why you need to learn async in .NET
I had an opportunity to teach a quick class yesterday about what’s new in .NET 4.0. One of the topics was the TPL (Task Parallel Library) and how it can make async programming easier. I also stressed that this is the direction Microsoft is going with for C# 5.0 and learning the TPL will greatly benefit their understanding of the new async stuff. We had a little time left over and I was able to show some code that uses the Async CTP to accomplish some stuff, but it wasn’t a simple demo that you could jump in to and understand so I thought I’d thrown one together and put it in a blog post.
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2012 Begins
It has become tradition for the past few years that my first blog post of the new year is to thank Microsoft for being recognized as an MVP. This year is no different. Once again, I’m honored to be recognized by Microsoft for my contributions to the community. After visiting Redmond for the past 4 years, I’m going to be skipping the Summit this year. I’ve got a client project that I really want to focus on and don’t want to push it out another week.
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Using WPF Converters to Affect Multiple Properties
I’m working on my first WPF application. I’ve done a ton of reading on WPF and it’s helped me in my understandings of how WPF works. So far, I’m really liking the data binding flexibility WPF gives you. That, along with a very testable MVVM-based architecture, has made the experience a fun one!
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HOWTO: Change which “.testsettings” file Visual Stuido 2010 uses
I’m blogging this mainly for historical reasons. I just spent over 30 minutes trying to figure this out. Well, the first 10 or 15 minutes was getting code coverage enabled in Visual Studio 2010. There’s plenty of coverage on that topic since it’s not as intuitive as it could be. I’ll let Google handle that one.
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Clarification on Updating DefaultLocation in an MSI
Back in February, I did a blog post on how to change the default location for an Application installed via an MSI. Thanks to a comment from Joe Marcelino, it wasn’t clear where to find the “DefaultLocation” field to change that. Here’s a quick how-to on finding the field.
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Automapper: Handling NULL members
A question about null members came up on the Automapper mailing list. While the problem wasn’t with Automapper, investigating the issue led to an interesting feature in Automapper.
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Changing the Default Install Location of an MSI
A few months ago, I had to tweak an MSI installer. It was installing into a specific directory (named the same as the application) underneath Program Files. Since the location of Program Files can change from machine to machine, the MSI has a special token you can use for Program Files (as well as for the application name). So the current value for “DefaultLocation” of the Application Folder was:
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Using Lambdas for return values in Rhino.Mocks
In a recent StackOverflow question, someone showed some sample code they’d like to be able to use. The particular syntax they used isn’t supported by Rhino.Mocks, but it was an interesting idea that I thought could be easily implemented with an extension method.
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Xml Serialization and the [Obsolete] Attribute
I learned something new today: Starting with .NET 3.5, the XmlSerializer no longer serializes properties that are marked with the Obsolete attribute. I can’t say that I really agree with this. Marking something Obsolete is supposed to be something for a developer to deal with in source code. Once an object is serialized to XML, it becomes data. I think using the Obsolete attribute as both a compiler flag as well as controlling XML serialization is a bad idea.
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Welcome 2011
About this time last year, I wrote a blog post about how January of 2010 was almost over and I hadn’t done a single blog post. Ugh… History repeats itself.