DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by Mintman

Opening a Command Prompt for the solution in Visual Studio

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 11:57:32 GMT

Ever find yourself needing to open a command prompt for the solution? Here's a step-by-step tutorial on how to be able to do it in a single key combination.

SubSonic 3.0: The SimpleRepository « Rob Conery

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 10:45:01 GMT

Rob is adding a very nice simple repository to SubSonic 3.0 that will give SubSonic top-notch POCO support and very slick migrations. Mapping files be damned!

Establishing team values

Mon, 18 May 2009 17:44:23 GMT

A shared identity and core set of values can only benefit a team. This is a brief explanation of how to establish some.

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 :).

When geek rockstars go wild

Thu, 14 May 2009 19:22:39 GMT

Saw this whilst on my way to Progressive .NET on Sunday. Don't break this guy's build!

New name for ALT.NET

Fri, 08 May 2009 20:20:22 GMT

I've always felt the name ALT.NET to be quite elitist, here I suggest an alternative.

Difference between AreEqual and AreSame

Wed, 06 May 2009 22:03:05 GMT

The difference between the two assertions are quite simple. Assert.AreSame checks that they are the exact same object, memory reference and all (in the case of .NET using ReferenceEquals). Assert.AreEqual checks that objectOne.Equals(objectTwo) will return true.

ELMAH: Error Logging Modules and Handlers for ASP.NET (and MVC too!)

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 22:01:11 GMT

ELMAH has been one of the most useful tools for ASP.NET developers to log errors on their web applications. Now Scott has a nice talk on how to use it even in your ASP.NET MVC applications. Cool!

6 Tools To Be An Effective Web Developer

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 19:01:02 GMT

There has always been and probably always will be feuds over what is the best platform but what I want to show you is that those arguments are mostly irrelevant. Regardless of what platform you choose to develop on there are most of the same tools available in one form or another. The common components, for me anyway, that help me produce high quality code faster and is easier to maintain are a good IDE, easy to use unit testing and mocking frameworks, an ORM, a MVC framework, and a good JavaScript library.

M is to DSL as Drag & Drop is to programming

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 02:31:15 GMT

I see M as a whole lot of effort trying to optimize something that is really not that interesting, complex or really very hard. I look at the M language, the way that you worked with, the tooling and the API and I would fully agree that it is a nice parser generator. What it is not, I have to say, is a DSL toolkit. It is just one, small, part of building a DSL. And, to be perfectly honest, M is the drag & drop of DSL.

Windows Mobile is short changing .NET Developers

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 22:01:04 GMT

The .NET platform is an incredibly powerful and productive toolset that stretches itself well on the client-side, the server-side and now with Silverlight as a web-client, though with one glaring exception - on a mobile device.

Test aided development

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 23:56:22 GMT

Conveying the benefits of unit tests, even without going the whole hog to test driven development.

Teaching, Symbology, and Intellectual Materialism - The Chasm is a Vac

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 07:14:10 GMT

The world is filled with people who don't understand advanced subjects, but who would like to learn. And the world is blessed with many knowledgeable people who can't understand why the things that they've discovered, learned, and elaborated are not being soaked up by everyone else.

Forget NAnt, try Rake

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 21:46:42 GMT

Rake is a much easier build language than NAnt. Give it a try!

Weekly roundup

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 21:45:23 GMT

My pick of the blogs I read from 27th January to 1st February.

"Quality Doesn't Matter That Much" -- Jeff and Joel

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 06:16:02 GMT

I was riding my exercise bike, listening to Stack Overflow #38 when I heard Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky say "Quality just doesn't matter that much." I nearly fell off my bike.

Strongly typed links for ASP.NET MVC using LINQ

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 05:01:49 GMT

An alternative to the ActionLink method which doesn't rely on strings and anonymous types.

Surviving a Zombie Apocalypse - Behavior Driven Development Part II

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 04:04:53 GMT

part 2 of the behavior driven development tutorial

Another Use for C# Using

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 06:16:02 GMT

If you are a C# developer you're familiar with the using directive. It appears at the top of every one of your class files informing the compiler what namespaces should be looked at while compiling this code page so that you don't have to fully qualify every object. (This isn't the interesting bit)

ASP.NET MVC: Strongly typing form methods with input values

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 01:46:03 GMT

Description of how you can use LINQ to implement a missing feature of the HtmlHelper class

Will code generation reduce the quality of my code?

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 01:40:05 GMT

Resharper and Code Rush are undeniably great tools, but can they reduce the quality of your code?

Creating a company library

Tue, 13 May 2008 04:36:38 GMT

I've recently been thinking about how I could encourage the development team I am part of to further their knowledge and therefore help the entire team to advance and produce better software.

Implementing Generic Caching

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:46:02 GMT

I develop for a large, high-availability website, with hundreds of thousands of daily users. As such, we need to cache a lot of data in our web-server memory (which is cheap) to save numerous hits to our main database cluster (which is very expensive). I would imagine the desire to improve performance by saving on database hits is common across many web applications - and caching frequently used data is often seen as one of the best ways to solve this problem.

Using aliases for better code readability

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 01:46:02 GMT

Here's a quick way to reduce overall code bloat while making your code even more readable.

Are .NET Developers the American Tourists of the Software Industry?

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 07:20:37 GMT

"I believe that the prevailing stereotype about .NET developers is that we wouldn't know a software best practice or sound computer science principle if it recursively bit us in the arse."