DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by GreekTheNick

DotNetKicks to be Open Sourced

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 21:16:01 GMT

As the community on DotNetKicks.com has grown in size over the past year, I have received received many offers of help with adding features and many requests for the source code. Due to other top secret commitments, I have recently not had as much time as I would have liked to continue the development of DotNetKicks.com. A discussion on DotNetKicks last week re-highlighted the issue of feature stagnation (the community is continuing to grow just fine). We are in the business of solving problems, and the best solution here is to open source the project. I had planned to release some code this past weekend, but some of the current dependencies include code that I don't wish to release. I am currently refactoring the dependencies, and I will be able to release some code very soon. Please shout it from the roof tops, we need all the contributers we can get.

Another version of DotNetKicks?

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 19:46:02 GMT

DOTENET is just launched, it's almost the same as DotNetKicks.com! Which one do you like more?

Plasma ASP.NET Automation Project on CodePlex

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 19:01:01 GMT

Plasma is an in-process web server emulator that can be used for automation and unit testing of ASP.NET applications. Ok, so what can you do with it? Basically Plasma allows you to easily test or automate ASP.NET pages and applications in a performant manner, since everything occurs in-memory, so there is not network level overhead. Many of the web test scenarios available as part of Visual Studio Team Suite : Tester SKU are possible with this framework and therefore available to NUnit users (examples - testing that a page has a given value on it after a postback, testing that a page returns within a given time threshold, etc.).

ASP.NET Wish List

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 13:46:01 GMT

A list of wish list items for the ASP.NET team.

Identicon Handler for .NET on CodePlex

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 20:31:02 GMT

Identicons are a unique way to anonymously represent an IP Address graphically. Now there's an open source implementation for .NET on CodeProject.

Do you know the difference between & and && ?

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 13:46:01 GMT

Did you know that & is not just for bitwise operations? You can actually use it in your standard conditionals, but there's a slight difference in how it behaves. This article will show you what that difference is.

Code Review: Standing on the shoulders of smart people

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 09:16:01 GMT

A different way to think about a code review.

Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo's Blog - Getting Started Learning Some New Develo

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 14:31:02 GMT

Ways to improve yourself as a developer.

Why does MS compete with the community?

Sun, 18 Mar 2007 20:30:59 GMT

Does Microsoft compete with it's own community?

RssBuildsPublisher for CruiseControl.NET

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 14:31:01 GMT

A robust Rss Publisher for CruiseControl.NET has been built and available for download on CodePlex.

Understanding Viewstate

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 15:16:01 GMT

Ever wanted to really understand viewstate and how you can reduce its cost and idiosyncracies. Hopefully, this is the last viewstate article yhou will ever need.

Castle MonoRail & ActiveRecord - First Impressions

Sun, 18 Mar 2007 22:01:01 GMT

I've spent quite a few hours over the past few days playing with the amazing Castle Project (long overdue for me), mostly MonoRail and ActiveRecord. All I can say is WOW!

C#: Give your object a Default Property

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 10:46:01 GMT

I've seen/used objects within the .NET Framework that have default properties (ie: SqlDataReader, System.Collections.Generic.List). Now how exactly do I give my own custom object type a default property?

Sample form using listview

Sat, 17 Mar 2007 16:48:46 GMT

Sample form using listview

Get view state off __VIEWSTATE!

Sun, 18 Mar 2007 11:31:01 GMT

ASP.NET saves transient control data across postbacks in a hidden field, which can severely affect response times. This article explores the ways to keep view state on the server.

HOWTO: Build a Store Locator in ASP.NET (Full solution included)

Sun, 18 Mar 2007 10:01:01 GMT

Building a store locator is far from simple and can become quite complex, real quick. I've put together a simple example that will enable you to add store locator functionality to your ASP.NET website in no time.

Increase Productivity With Search Driven Development

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 11:31:01 GMT

Search Driven Development is the de-facto software methodology in use almost universally. How to bring it into the IDE.

NHibernate vs. LINQ to Entities

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 15:16:01 GMT

Having just come from a heated in-person discussion on the subject, I'd thought I'd toss my views on the subject into the ring. Also (toward the bottom) a couple resources for grokking the LINQ to Entities vision.

Gain Control Of Your Control State

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 12:16:01 GMT

A Primer on the less well known cousin to ViewState, the Control State. Contains an interesting demo of the two types of state persistence side by side.

Who Needs a Database? How I Built a Fully Functioning Website Without

Sun, 18 Mar 2007 19:01:01 GMT

A tutorial about implementing an interactive site with no database backend using flat files, caching and ASP.NET 2.0

Implementing baked-in Ruby syntactic sugar via LINQ

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 13:01:01 GMT

The flexibility and power of LINQ and extension methods in .NET 3.0 make it easy to emulate some of the baked-in functions of the Ruby language. Here's a short example of how to implement my fav Ruby method: to_s! using System.Linq; public static class RubyShizzle { public static string to_s(this object source) { return source.ToString(); } }

Deconstructing LINQ to SQL (Part 1)

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 13:46:01 GMT

This article describes how LINQ is implemented in CLR types. Second part is here: http://mtaulty.com/CommunityServer/blogs/mike_taultys_blog/archive/2007/03/16/9159.aspx

Using SQL Server in unit test with TS

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 16:01:01 GMT

DevPrime offers an excellent article for creating a SQL Server CE database (from a full SQL Server instance) for use with Unit Tests.

J# - Taken out of its misery

Sat, 17 Mar 2007 01:01:03 GMT

Few have caught Microsoft's announcement with regards to the fate of Visual J#

Corporate Agile Software Development

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 16:46:01 GMT

The most important aspect of introducing agile practices is to make sure to include everyone. By everyone I mean every stake holder. Usually in a large corporation you have business analyst who act as advocates for the customers in the field. Then you have systems analysts who act as proxies between the development team and the business analyst. Then you finally have the development team who actually builds the system. When introducing agile you have to make certain not to exclude or take away from given responsibilities that have been there long before you came along.