Archives
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ProFont - nice font for VS.NET
Old news from Joel on Software that I finally got around to playing with:
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MSDN ISV Deal - $375
Microsoft has a developer special on their Empower Program. 5 MSDN Universal subscriptions for only $375. You'll get copies of most of their software with it. [Techbargains.com]
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Shared Source Spelunking
I've stumbled across Doxygen documentation on Rotor (a.k.a. SSCLI) on several searches for obscure .NET FCL methods, and it's really interesting. Sure it's different than the Windows .NET Framework redistributable, but I'd bet it's pretty close in most cases, and even if not it illustrates what's functionally going on since this is coded to the same spec. Looking at code that implements the .NET CLI classes tells me much more about them than documentation usually does.
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'System.Uri.NonPathPart' is inaccessible due to its protection level
'System.Uri.NonPathPart' is inaccessible due to its protection level
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Using T-SQL to generate ASP.NET code
No rocket science here, but this query has saved me a lot of time. I've got it saved as a tql file in “Microsoft SQL Server\80\Tools\Templates\SQL Query Analyzer\” so I can hit 'Alt+F N' and pick it from the templates.
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Sun's Project Looking Glass vs. MS TaskGallery
Sun's Project Looking Glass (video) is in the news - the story made the front page on google news, and it's on the front page of the sun site. The video's got quite a bit of eye-candy, but doesn't really seem to offer much in terms of usability. Flipping windows around and typing notes on the back might be nice, I guess. The rest looked great in a demo, but that's it.
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IE Addins - FullSource and ieHttpHeaders
Saw a link to this handy tool today on the ieHttpHeaders page: FullSource is an IE addin which displays the HTML after client side javascript gets done with it. Simple install, adds right click “Full Source” option:
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RunAware (Citrix) demo of FrontPage
MS is advertising a demo of FrontPage on Slashdot banners (which seems brave, but I'd be more than a little surprised if it causes *nix zealots to dash off to store.microsoft.com). Anyhow, the demo is using RunAware, and it's a pretty cool way to run a demo - you actually get to use the app without downloading anything (well, except for a java client applet which hosts a remote MetaFrame session). They've also got Visio and Project 2002 up there.
I think it's a great way to try out software - you can use the whole, uncrippled application, and you don't have a big download or demo app to uninstall. I think they should throw VisualStudio up there as well.
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ASP.NET Popup Calendar / Wizard Recommendations?
Any recommendations on a calendar popup server control? I'd like something along the lines of the ones on the front page of Expedia. I'd looked at Peter Blum's Date Package, but it breaks Rob McLaws' 8th Rule - Must Be Self Contained. I've been using a simple Javascript solution like these, but they don't fit in well with the .NET paradigm. Perhaps if we could get Andy down to 9 hours sleep per week?
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[ot] - Our MSDN is boring
We need some help from MSDN Japan.
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.ToString() vs. Convert.ToString()
Simple tip that's saved me some time:
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Util - BgInfo
BgInfo (Background Info) is a cool, free tool from the good folks at SysInternals that shows computer info on the desktop:
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XAML Emulator?
Wouldn't an Avalon / XAML emulator be great? Kinda like the PocketPC emulator that's part of the MS Embeded Visual Toolkit. Then those of us who didn't get to PDC, don't have Longhorn, but would love to start working with XAML could at least start getting acquainted with it.
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ASP.NET New Web Project System
As a full time ASP.NET developer, this is one of my favorite Whidbey features: ASP.NET offers support for File System and FTP projects, and much smoother Local IIS integration. That's going to save me tons of time and aggravation.
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Fix and Continue...
C-based language developers don't want Edit and Continue, right?
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Repeater ItemCommand Won't Fire without ViewState
There's something fishy going on between Repeater ItemCommands and ViewState. I had some asp:LinkButton controls in a HeaderTemplate that just wouldn't fire... until I enabled ViewState for the Repeater control. Once I knew that it had something to do with ViewState, I was able to see that others have run into this.
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VS Macro won't run to EOF - RegEx Find / Replace to the rescue
I needed to generate insert scripts using values from an Excel file - one per row, hundreds of rows. I exported to CSV, opened in VS.NET, and got ready to run a macro to pop some SQL before and after each line in the CSV. I recorded my macro and went looking for the “Run to end of file” menu item... not there! The only ways to repeat a macro for each line in a file is to hit CTRL-SHIFT-P hundreds of times or to edit the Macro manually and make it loop (which for some reason runs more slowly than typing each letter in with one finger).
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AppSettings - External Config File
We've been using this for several months to distinguish between Dev / QA / Prod settings - it's worked very well. This makes it easy to keep config files in source control - there's one folder (config) with dev.config, qa.config, production.config, and any others as needed. The folder is maintained in source control so it's versioned, labeled, etc. Web.config is different from server to server (refers to a different config file depending on environment), but doesn't contain any settings.
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Keeping Required Field Validators quiet when using a Summary
If you've got RFV's in a datagrid (or on other special occasions) you may want their error messages to only show up on the Validator Summary. If you don't have any text set for a validator, it displays the entire error message.
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IUI / Web Clients vs. "Rich Clients"
If you haven't read about Microsoft's Inductive User Interface (IUI) initiative, check this out.
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[ot] Galloway.Items.Add(new Galloway("Esther"));
Baby and mother doing great.
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Automated error handling in .NET
VB/Rig was a popular add on to Visual Basic which automated the insertion of error handling into VB code. I've worked with other add-ins for VB that did similar things, but haven't seen anything similar for .NET - c# specifically. I realize this wrapping code in Try / Catch / Finally blocks is more complex than just throwing an error handler at the end of every sub and function, but with the amount of free addins and macros people have been cranking out I'd bet one exists...
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Mount Fuji Book Report
I recently finished How Would You Move Mount Fuji? - a book about the puzzle interviews ("Why are manhole covers round?") that Microsoft has made famous. I very much enjoyed it. If you're one of the folks that hasn't read it, this short book report is for you:
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Cross Browser DHTML libraries
I've used DynAPI in the past: http://dynapi.sourceforge.net/
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Fix for: 'Server Application Unavailable' Error after Applying Security Update for IE
Some of my co-workers have been hit by this - Windows Critical Updates cause ASP.NET to return a “Server Application Unavailable“ error on every request. Affects on only .NET 1.0 framework on XP.
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Splitting DotNetRocks MP3 files
If you too like to listen to DNR in MP3 format but would like the files split into smaller files, this may help you. My car cd player can play MP3's, but if I switch CD's (or even tracks) part way through, I have to hold down the fast forward button for 10 minutes to get back to where I was at. I had a cool freeware program that did it, but when DNR switched to VBR format the freeware program choked. Here's the solution I found:
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It all comes down to the motivation
One of the things that irritates me is the fact that most universities teach software engineering the DOD-way...
Wow. I've been thinking about this post since I read it a few days ago. I work for a big financial company, and I deal with this constantly - every spec, no matter how simple the subject matter, is ridiculed and written off if it's under 100 pages... but no one really reads it. Business Analysts with no real understanding of the data or systems hash how things will work before they get the technical folks involved, only to find out that they've specified an impossible solution. Don't get me wrong, I love my job, but it's definitely not the most efficient environment for building high quality software... -
Scheduling a WebService
How to schedule a webservice method call (using MS Task Scheduler)? The only way I could find was to create a VBS file that calls the WS, and schedule that:
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XML - InsertSingleNode?
It's easy to get data out from an XML doc given a path (doc.SelectSingleNode(@"/customer/address/zip"), but what about building an XML doc bit by bit? What about InsertSingleNode? There are plenty of times where programatically building an XML doc at the object level doesn't make sense or isn't possible, and plenty of cases where there isn't an object to be serialized (say, on projects I'm stepping into late in the game, or where the XML document format is dynamic).
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Quicktime (and RealPlayer) Alternative
Quicktime bugs the heck out of me - not because it's Apple, but because it pops up a nag screen every time it runs, takes over file associations, and doesn't play well with others.
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Tracing Feature - Wrapping
The NT Event Log "Wrapping" feature is really handy - it would be great if the Trace log had that.
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More VS.NET wishes
Here are some of my wishes for VS.NET:
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And if you have one of those, you may need one of these...
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Tip - Find / Replace with RegEx Capture Groups
Find / replace with regular expression capture groups can be very powerful.
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More votes for CodeSmith
With the new version of CodeSmith being released I thought I would explain why it is that we chose to use CodeSmith over the many other code generators available.
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SQL Buddy - Query Analyzer with Intellisense
C# Open source version of SQL Query Analyzer with code completion - http://sqlbuddy.sourceforge.net. If you type in a table name and hit ctrl-space, it has a dropdown with the columns, etc. It's version .68a so they're still adding features, but it's pretty solid.
The guys that are developing this said they welcome criticism and suggestions, so fire away if you have any. My dream feature - save all open query windows to a temp file. I hate rebooting with 12 open windows in QA... Seems like they could be easily dumped into a temp XML file with the connection and SQL text.
Hopefully Yukon will give us this kind of fun built into VS.