DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by .NetKicks

SelfSSL, finally a easy way to ssl enable IIS ! - Oddur Magnusson

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 07:09:29 GMT

A tool in IIS resource kit to create temporary SSL certificates

Welcome to the NHibernate community site!!

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:50:31 GMT

Finally a single place to look for NHibernate related stuff?! The challenge of NH Forge is provide a single centralized resource for all things related to NH offering a community blog, an easy to use WIKI, other related community-oriented tools.

TRAC AddIn for Visual Studio

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 17:14:57 GMT

this adds tools to Visual Studio to see tickets from the popular TRAC system

Easy way to improve your image gallery using jQuery

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 19:16:02 GMT

Let's say you are browsing a CSS gallery and you want to check out some new and beautiful website designs. And you are of course interested in some details - for example, which category design belongs to, what's the rating or whatsoever. This information could be rendered below thumbnail, but there are other, more attractive ways of displaying additional data. In this article we'll see how to improve image gallery with a simple trick.

Starting With jQuery - Validation Plug-in

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 03:14:49 GMT

This series of posts on using jQuery with no prior knowledge comes to its third iteration. Today's post focuses on an introduction to the Validation Plug-in. This plug-in extends jQuery by adding simple client-side validation to a given HTML form. In future entries we'll examine some of the challenges this plug-in has with traditional ASP.Net web form applications; however, for this post, we'll focus on just the basics.

FxCop for Ajax Code

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 18:31:03 GMT

FxCop is a great tool to help ensure consistency of .NET code and to help push quality upstream in the development process by reinforcing design guidelines and flagging some potential issues that can be detected through static analysis of your assemblies

Fluent NHibernate - Working with NHibernate without configuration file

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 05:46:10 GMT

"I believe that the most important reason why NHibernate is not more widely adopted by general DEV population is exactly the "Java XML configuration" PIA feeling you have while working with it. Great news for all of us from that group: NHibernate is possible to be used WITHOUT configuration files! "

Great Design Pattern Resources

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 09:31:02 GMT

Some common patterns include the Singleton, Facade, Adaptor and Decorator. There are many, many patterns and below are some great resources to learn about them.

NHibernate 2.0 is out

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 11:46:02 GMT

Directly from the blog of Ayende, NHibernate 2.0 is out!!

Lutz Reflector now owned by Red Gate

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:01:05 GMT

Lutz Reflector, the free .NET disassembler every developer developer should have, has been purchased by Red Gate software. Red Gate has stated they will continue to provide the tool for free.

Implementing a Repository and Specificaiton pattern using Linq

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 12:31:03 GMT

In my previous post I put down some thoughts on the Repository and Specification patterns and in the end said that with the introduction of Linq and the growing popularity of ORM frameworks and their support for Linq, it's time to look back at these two patterns and see how we can leverage Linq to simplify the patterns and make them infrastructure agnostic.

Learning Ruby via IronRuby and C# Part 7

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:16:02 GMT

In this post we talk about one of the best features of Ruby... duck typing. We show you what it is, and how it affects the way that you interact with objects in Ruby.

Free Visual Studio File Explorer Add-in

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 09:31:03 GMT

The Visual Studio File Explorer Add-in (sexy name we know, but hey, it's self documenting) is a free Tool Window add-in for VS 2008 that provides a Windows Explorer style file system view. It's particularly useful for performing routine file system tasks without the need to "context switch" away from Visual Studio, which can be time-consuming over the course of days and weeks. It is shell-enabled so extensions like TortoiseSVN work too.

Linq Expressions, The Specification Pattern and Repositories - Part 1

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 04:16:06 GMT

In this upcoming series of articles I break down the use of Linq Expressions to provide a flexible, queryable repoository interface. The key to the functionality is the expression parsing and deferred execution capacity of Linq. I chose Linq to NHibernate but any other Linq provider would require zero change to the specifications and only very minor changes to the repository implementation.

Microsoft Releases Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (SP1)

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:31:02 GMT

In this writing, I have tried to sum up some important links and points related to the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (SP1) release.

Log4PostSharp - logging with AOP

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:31:03 GMT

How to inject log4net logging code using PostSharp and Log4PostSharp. Shows you how to add logging to an application with a minimum of effort!

LINQ to SQL - Am I Hitting The Database?

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:16:09 GMT

Like most other developers who have been using LINQ for a while (and in this particular case, LINQ to SQL) - I've unknowingly made a few 'bad queries' that performed great at first, but eventually made some pages crawl. This post isn't necessarily about performance, but if you don't know how to answer that question ("am I hitting the database"), then you'll likely find yourself in a world of problems down the road when you're using LINQ to SQL.

NHibernate Best Practices with ASP.NET

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 08:01:52 GMT

"...Note that this article does not focus on using NHibernate but, instead, on integrating NHibernate into ASP.NET applications."

Learning Ruby via IronRuby and C# Part 4

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 19:16:03 GMT

Part 4 in a multi-part series on learning Ruby using IronRuby and C#. Justin continues his series using familiar C# code to explain Ruby programming concepts. In this post, he goes over additional functionality of loops and ranges.

nHibernate performance against stored procedures

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 14:01:15 GMT

A 5 part blogpost about the performance of a select statement done with ADO.Net using inline sql, and stored procedures (even some dynamic sql) and then nHibernate to get the same results. But this one has an alternate ending.

Some best practices for NHibernate by Ayende

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:01:11 GMT

A few hours ago I completed a code review of an application using NHibernate. This is not the first time I am doing such a thing, of course, and I noticed that there are quite a few areas where I tend to have comments in such code reviews. The following is based on several such code bases that I went through, and contains a partial list of things that you need to watch for.

Forgot that connection string?

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 04:16:03 GMT

Provides connection strings to many databases by many methods. An essential reference.

Arrange Act Assert and BDD specifications

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 05:46:11 GMT

With Rhino Mocks 3.5 just around the corner, I've started using it to create much more readable tests. One of the things that always bothered me with Expect.Call, constraints and the like was that it mixed in the Arrange with Assert. For those that haven't heard of AAA, it's a pattern for authoring unit tests: * Arrange - set up the unit under test * Act - exercise the unit under test, capturing any resulting state * Assert - verify the behavior through assertions As I moved towards BDD context/specification style tests, working with Rhino Mocks didn't fit the picture very well. But with the new AAA syntax of Rhino Mocks 3.5, I can very cleanly separate out the behavior I want to observe from the mechanics of setting up the test.

C#: Generate WebPage Thumbmail Screenshot Image

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:16:08 GMT

There are a few services out there that serve up screenshots of any webpage for you to display on your website. One popular one is Kwiboo; this is the one that DotNetKicks uses. For some time now I've wondered what the easiest way to do this in .NET was, and today I stumbled upon the undocumented WebBrowser.DrawToBitmap method that makes this extremely easy to do.

PostSharp 1.5 Adds Support for Silverlight, Compact Framework, & Mono

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:28:09 GMT

Gael Fraiteur introduced the first CTP of PostSharp 1.5, a new version of the popular aspect-oriented framework. This version adds support for Silverlight 2.0, the .NET Compact Framework 2.0, and Mono.