DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by Mintman

Surviving a Zombie Apocalypse - Behavior Driven Development Part II

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 20:04:53 GMT

part 2 of the behavior driven development tutorial

Another Use for C# Using

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 22:16:02 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

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:46:03 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?

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 17:40:05 GMT

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

Creating a company library

Mon, 12 May 2008 20:36:38 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 08:46:02 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

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 17:46:02 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 00:20:37 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."

Douchebaggery

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 13:31:02 GMT

To imply that programmers using Windows "don't care enough about their tools to get the best"? I have a pretty thick skin based on the psychic scars of the thousands of petty internet religious wars I've participated in, and this one even ruffles my feathers a little. I

LINQ Gymnastics: Creating A Predictive Query With LINQ

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:31:10 GMT

The Code I wrote about this before, but the best way to approach a difficult query is to cut it up into pieces. It really helps in this case, since what we're doing is statistical and therefore may seem simple, but isn't really. So let's break it out: * We need to know all the Orders that our Product was part of * We need all of the Products that were part of those Orders, omitting the one we just bought * We need to roll these up by the SUM of the quantity of the products bought, and order them in descending order * We need to take the top 5 of this SUM, and query the Products table for the related Products

From CRUD to Domain-Driven Fluency

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 14:16:02 GMT

Udi shares some of his Domain-Driven Design wisdom.

Bruce Schneier Facts

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 23:22:55 GMT

If you're a fan of security you have to be familiar with Bruce Schneier and his excellent blog. What I didn't know is that he also has a collection of facts like Chuck Norris! Just how cool is that???

The DotNetKicks Effect - Enjoy While it Lasts

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 18:46:05 GMT

DotNetKicks is great source of .NET related information but is it going to survive the shortcomings of "digg" concept?

Put Down the XmlNode and Step Away From the StringBuilder

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 16:31:02 GMT

Demonstrates the easiest way of generating and parsing Xml available in the .net framework. No more XmlNodes and no more CleanStringForXml custom utility functions.

Why Microsoft Will Win, and Dominate the Web.

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 16:31:02 GMT

Is Silverlight a Flash killer? No. Is it intended to be? Nope. It's much more than that. Will you still see flash animations on sites? Absolutely. But, will you see real applications on the web, built in "AJAX"/Flash? Nope, they will be built using Silverlight. Dare I say, you might someday see Flash running on top of Silverlight! Why not?

Stories, requirements, and language

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:35:40 GMT

How does the development team and the customer come to a common understanding about what needs to get done? Simple things like word choices can become barriers.

Chaining Linq Queries

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 22:31:02 GMT

A discussion of how you would create Linq queries with optional parts and then takes that one step further to show how to create your own Linq extension methods to "build up" your Linq queries.

ASP.Net MVC Framework - Using Forms Authentication

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 17:16:02 GMT

This post is about using Forms Authentication with the MVC Framework. I only want to let you know that this is a simple and fast "hack" only to show a simple solution to get it work. I decided to use the Membership feature for the validation of user name and password.

First Causes in Software Development: How do I decide what is good?

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 05:16:02 GMT

Just another essential one from Jeremy (like every other posts on his blog). In this particular post, Jeremy describes what he finds valuable in writing software. Heck, I'm learning a ton from his blog.

Linq to SQL DataContext Lifetime Management

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 14:16:02 GMT

The DataContext is the central object that holds LINQ to SQL together. This post talks about a few different approaches you can use to hang on to your DataContext in the course of a request, to pass between layers or to manage on a per thread/request level.

Stretching Out...

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 02:58:58 GMT

Thoughts on the benefits of expanding your skills by learning a new every year.

DnDns - A .NET DNS Client Library (Resolver)

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 15:46:02 GMT

A DNS protocol library written completely in managed code. Supports common DNS records types like A, CNAME, MX, SRV, and more.

8 Web Design Mistakes That Developers Make

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:31:02 GMT

An excellent website takes a particularly savvy blend of both great design and great code. Because of this, you often find designers having to figure out code and developers trying their hand at design. Speaking as a developer who spent his university years studying among other developers, I can safely say that programmers are not designers.

Expression Tree Basics

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 21:01:09 GMT

Newcomers to LINQ often find expression trees difficult to grasp. In this post I hope to show that the subject is not quite as difficult as it might appear at first. Any reader who has an intermediate level understanding of LINQ should find the material in this post easy to grasp. An expression tree provides a method of translating executable code into data. This can be very valuable if you want to modify or transform code before executing it. In particular, it can be useful if you want to transform C# code such as a LINQ query expression into code that operates on another process, such as a SQL database. But I'm getting ahead of myself. By the end of this post you will find it easy to understand why it is helpful to translate code into data. First I need to provide a little background. Let's start by seeing the relatively simple syntax for creating an expression tree.

Jeremy hearts C# 3.0

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 10:55:20 GMT

Never let it be said that I can't say something nice about a Microsoft product. I'm not enthusiastic about VS2008 itself until ReSharper 4.0 is here and stable, but the new language features rock! I haven't even touched any of the LINQ dialects yet, but all those little features that Anders and co added to support LINQ are already making my life easier.