DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by Lord

Free CodeRush Xpress for C# and Visual Basic inside Visual Studio 2008

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:00:01 GMT

Mark Miller writes about all the features available in the free edition of CodeRush

Dimecasts.NET plugin for PLEX

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 20:22:52 GMT

A plugin for viewing dimecasts in Plex media center

Exploring how to use Global Variables and ViewData (Strongly typed and

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 15:15:03 GMT

Taking a look at how to utilized both global variables and local variables. We will also take a look at how to create and use both strongly typed viewdata and weakly typed view data.

Should We Return Null From Our Methods?

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 18:15:06 GMT

I read a interesting article recently about the potential perils of Null Check Hell. The author's suggestion? Stop allowing any of your methods to return nulls, ever . No nulls returned, no null checks necessary. Problem solved, right?

Learning how to add IntelliSense for the Spark View Engine

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:45:05 GMT

Learning how to add IntelliSense for the Spark View Engine inside Visual Studio

NHibernate - Beware of inadvisably applied caching strategies

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 06:09:30 GMT

One of the usual approaches for performance problems with most applications is to just throw caching on the problem until it goes away. NHibernate supports a very sophisticated caching mechanism, but, by default, it is disabled. Not only that, but there are multiple levels of opt ins that you have to explicitly state before you can benefit from caching. The answer is quite simple, caching is an incredibly sensitive topic, involving such things as data freshness, target size, repetitive requests, etc. Each and every time I have seen caching used as a hammer, it ended up in tears, with a lot of micro management of the cache and quite a bit of frustration.

IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit (ScottGu)

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 10:45:05 GMT

"Today we are shipping the first beta of a new free tool - the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit - that makes it easy to perform SEO analysis on your site and identify and fix issues within it."

Better Unit Tests with Test.Assert() for NUnit/VSTT/SUTF

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 05:39:32 GMT

Have you ever stopped to wonder whether the API's for the .NET unit testing frameworks should still be so similar to those of JUnit? Nowadays C# and VB.NET are capable of some very powerful code transformations. Despite the fact that .NET developers are conditioned to think of API's and programming languages as separate the reality is not so simple. The capabilities of programming languages tend to influence the design of API's. The question is this: Can we use the advanced features of .NET programming languages to create better unit testing API's?

Spark Macro for Uploadify, Take One-B

Sat, 23 May 2009 16:04:37 GMT

Matt recently wrote in ASP.NET MVC HtmlHelper for Uploadify, Take One about a fairly common problem in the shades of gray where html and code concerns overlap. It's a game of trying to get the least of both evils mixed in with the other. Matt makes a particularly insightful remark in a comment, "what I dislike is how the balance of language in the helpers tends to shift from C# to JavaScript or HTML." I'd agree with that. On the one hand you're trying to avoid excessive code in your template, but in doing so you're dragging markup into your code. It's actually a great example of a primary use-case for a macro in the Spark language, which lets you declare a helper method in the template language.

Survey: Ajax usage among .NET developers in 2009

Fri, 22 May 2009 18:04:40 GMT

Take the survey to see how the adoption of Ajax among .NET developers changed since the survey held in 2007

ASP.NET MVC - Poll Result, jQuery UI MVC Component Demo and More Fe...

Thu, 21 May 2009 05:06:48 GMT

Few days back I ran a Poll to gather the feedback on ASP.NET MVC View Components that I am planning to build building. Though it is certainly not possible to get everyone's vote of the ASP.NET MVC Community, but I think the result has enough votes to represents the whole community:

ASP.NET MVC Domain Routing

Wed, 20 May 2009 20:09:52 GMT

Ever since the release of ASP.NET MVC and its routing engine (System.Web.Routing), Microsoft has been trying to convince us that you have full control over your URL and routing. This is true to a certain extent: as long as it's related to your application path, everything works out nicely. If you need to take care of data tokens in your (sub)domain, you're screwed by default.

Introduction to AutoMapper

Wed, 20 May 2009 00:16:11 GMT

take a look at how we can simplify our entity mapping by using AutoMapper. AutoMapper uses a fluent configuration API to define an object-object mapping strategy. AutoMapper uses a convention-based matching algorithm to match up source to destination values. Currently, AutoMapper is geared towards model projection scenarios to flatten complex object models to DTOs and other simple objects, whose design is better suited for serialization, communication, messaging, or simply an anti-corruption layer between the domain and application layer.

NHibernate Cascades: the different between all, all-delete-orphans and

Mon, 18 May 2009 22:48:46 GMT

NHibernate Cascades: Entities has assoications to other objects, this may be an assoication to a single item (many-to-one) or an assoication to a collection (one-to-many, many-to-any). At any rate, you are able to tell NHibernate to automatically traverse an entity's assoications, and act according to the cascade option. For instnace, adding an unsaved entity to a collection with save-update cascade will cause it to be saved along with its parent object, without any need for explicit instructions on our side.

Kona 3: Learning Behavior Driven Development (BDD)

Fri, 15 May 2009 22:46:26 GMT

Holy cow! Another *DD - man I really must have an IV with that Alt.NET Punch just coursing like a train in my veins! I ask for your patience with this one - cause I think BDD is a really good tool to know - whether you use it or not - knowing the workings of it will allow you to have some intelligent conversation the next time you're in Austin :).

ASP.NET MVC HtmlHelper for Uploadify, Take One

Thu, 14 May 2009 04:05:20 GMT

I'd love some feedback on this approach to wrapping the jQuery Uploadify plug-in in an HtmlHelper extension. This approach aims to minimize the tag soup that many HtmlHelper extensions contain.

IE6 not supported in SharePoint 2010; IE6 support expires July 2010

Tue, 12 May 2009 04:57:56 GMT

Quotes from the article: "...Due to this focus Internet Explorer 6 will not be a supported browser for SharePoint Server 2010." Q: Is Internet Explorer 6 officially supported by Microsoft? A: Official Microsoft Product Support for Internet Explorer 6 will expire in July 2010. You can find additional information on Microsoft's Support Lifecycle Policy including specific dates, product information and support offerings here: http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifepolicy.

Dynamic Data Preview 4 Released

Fri, 08 May 2009 14:50:23 GMT

The preview releases of Dynamic Data contain much of the new feature sets that will be available when we release .NET 4. The cool thing is you can start using a lot of the new features against .NET 3.5 SP1 now using these releases. When we look back and see how people view Dynamic Data we regret that people immediately think of it as scaffolding of data. This is something that it does do, and I think it does a pretty good job at it. But Dynamic Data is a lot more then that, providing a new templating mechanism called Field Templates which allow the default markup for many of our built in data controls to be more easily customized.

ASP.NET MVC - Poll Time - Kazi Manzur Rashid's Blog

Fri, 08 May 2009 01:46:02 GMT

Justin Etheredge recently wrote about the RAD support that he would like to see in ASP.NET MVC and I do agree with him very much (as a side note, I highly recommend his blog you should subscribe). I am also planning to create some reusable UI components for ASP.NET MVC and I need your feedback prior starting it.

More ASP.NET MVC Best Practices

Wed, 06 May 2009 21:16:02 GMT

In this post, I'll share some of the best practices and guidelines which I have come across while developing ASP.NET MVC web applications. I will not cover all best practices that are available, instead add some specific things that have not been mentioned in any blog post out there. Existing best practices can be found on Kazi Manzur Rashid's blog and Simone Chiaretta's blog.

How to test your multi-threaded code (part 1 of 3)?

Thu, 07 May 2009 01:01:04 GMT

CHESS is the answer. At least this is what we have best right now.

A Software Craftsman's Bookshelf

Wed, 06 May 2009 19:46:04 GMT

Every now and then I get the question about what books I recommend on the topic of programming and software development. As I try to practice the DRY (Don't repeat yourself) principle while writing code, I'll also intend to do it in real life. And by answering this question in form of a blog post, I'll be able to redirect future questioners here.

WPF NotifyIcon Released

Mon, 11 May 2009 06:16:04 GMT

This is an implementation of a NotifyIcon (system tray icon) for the WPF platform. It does not just rely on the corresponding WinForms component, but is a purely independent control which leverages several features of the WPF framework in order to display rich tooltips, popups, context menus, and balloon messages.

Castle Windsor 2.0 RTM Released!

Tue, 05 May 2009 13:46:04 GMT

Some would say that it is about time, I would agree. Windsor might not be the OSS project in pre release state for the longest time (I think that the honor belong to Hurd), but it spent enough time at that state to at least deserve a honorary mention. f you will look, you won't find Windsor 1.0, only release candidates for 1.0. As I believe I mentioned, Windsor has been production ready for a long time, and for the full release we decided to skip the 1.0 designator, which doesn't really fit, and go directly to 2.0

ASP.NET MVC Tip: Turn on compile-time View Checking

Mon, 04 May 2009 22:01:05 GMT

I like the compiler to catch as many errors as possible before I start debugging or release my application. This also applies to code nuggets in ASP.NET MVC views, especially since these are not unit-testable. This article shows how to enable compile-time View checking for ASP.NET MVC projects.