Ashutosh Nilkanth's .NET Blog

Srinivasa Sivakumar has listed more than 500 sample chapters (in HTML/PDF format) on his resource site, from various books related to .NET. A great resource!

Some guys at work and others online, have been asking me for some suggestions on a free .NET web host. Free hosting may be a good way to play around and learn .NET (ASP.NET in particular) but by no means is it suitable and reliable for live production-level applications. Although I strongly recommend a (paid) basic shared hosting plan for any meaningful development but I just did a bit of lookup and came-up with the following list of free .NET web hosts:

I find the .NET Framework Class Browser very convinient. It has saved me a lot of time on a daily basis looking for namespaces, classes and interfaces. I remember the commonly used namespaces and their respective classes but information on rarely used namespaces and their classes is just a click away with this web site. Nice quick reference material!

One of the development teams at my office recently used the XML Resume Library for a document management project in ASP.NET. Although it was a pilot project for a HR consultancy but the guys here seem to be appreciating the usefulness of the library. Earlier, we were planning to develop our own custom solution to document management but apparently the time-to-delivery was cut-short by days from using the existing library. The XML Resume Library is an XML and XSL based system for marking up, adding metadata to, and formatting resumes and curricula vitae.

Lately, I haven't been able to access the Yahoo Groups (groups.yahoo.com) from back here in India. There are tons of .NET-related groups which I browse once in a while to respond to queries, get answers to my own questions and share custom code snippets. Unfortunately, following an order by the Government of India, Indian ISP's have blocked access to Yahoo Groups due to some political and anti-national content. However, I figured out a quick “hack” to still access Yahoo Groups by accessing any one of the localized gateways like groups.yahoo.co.uk or groups.yahoo.com.au.

Following an e-mail from a friend, I browsed the information on the F# compiler (a Microsoft Research project). Seems pretty cool but not something I would like to get a taste of right-away. There's already too much - more relevant (atleast for me) to soak. But its good to see that the .NET-based development context is expanding and programmers from “unmanaged” code domains can easily try-out or maybe even migrate to .NET with the help of available resources like this one.

Learn how to use NUnit and some related tools for successfully support testing a Data Access Layer for ASP.NET applications. Test driven development (TDD) has grown in popularity recently, especially with the growth of the Extreme Programming (XP) methodology. NUnit is a unit testing tool built for .NET, which follows in a long line of similar xUnit testing tools built for other platforms. It provides an easy-to-use framework for writing and running unit tests for your .NET applications.