DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by Rickasaurus

Start menu context annoyances

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 21:31:02 GMT

Dave discusses some options when it comes to a context menu add-on used for finding out what files have a lock on them by team members, etc.

Avoiding the Dangers of Ambiguously Defined Data-Types

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 22:16:11 GMT

When you are handed a string, integer, or any value type, can you know what it really represents? Can you define the range of appropriate behaviors for that data? Can you tell if it's formatted correctly? The problem is, in all of these cases, you can't...

Late Binding in C# using Dynamic Compilation

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 19:16:02 GMT

Steve goes through his approach to using reflection, making the code easier to read, making it easier to maintain, discusses the "middle-class multiple inheritance", and provides a zipped project of the AdapterCompiler.

F# at Code Camp 10 In Waltham, MA

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 17:01:14 GMT

Richard Minerich presented functional programming and concurrency in F# at Code Camp in Massachusetts

Embeddable C# Compiler

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 17:46:05 GMT

Manuel de Icaza created an embeddable C# compiler for Mono.

VSX Conference

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 18:31:13 GMT

Lou Franco's recollection of events at the VSX Conference last week. (Visual Studio eXtensibility)

Tidy Things Up

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:16:16 GMT

Ever wanted to have one assembly, but be able to manage your code in separate assemblies?

Some Managed/Unmanaged Exception Tricks

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 14:01:23 GMT

I just spent 5 days tracking down a Heisenbug. Historically, I've tracked down a lot of these but not because I create a lot of them, because I'm good at finding them. In this particular case, I had a set of unit tests that were failing on our build server but did not fail consistently on my machine. This is not a good sign to start with.

StackOverflow

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 16:16:04 GMT

StackOverflow - - is in public beta.

Source Control for .NET Developers, The open source approach

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 12:31:03 GMT

A brief and good tutorial for .NET developers to implement source control for their projects inside Visual Studio.

Read and Write compressed data to a binary file using ASP.NET

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 08:46:02 GMT

The BinaryReader and BinaryWriter in System.IO namespace read and write primitive types in binary, to a stream. The System.IO.Compression.GZipStream provides methods and properties to compress and decompress the stream. In this article, we will learn how to use compression techniques to compress the stream and write it to a binary file. We will then use the BinaryReader and the GZipStream class to decompress and read the file to display it on the webpage.

.NET Application Modeling Language (nAML) Specification and Tools

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:31:03 GMT

Understanding the architecture and code in software application plays as major factors while building good software products. This free e-book introduces a new visual modeling technique, termed as "nAML" (.NET Application Modeling Language) which overcomes the limitation of typical modeling languages by providing revolutionary way! Nothing much to say, just download it and you can get to know how POWERFUL it is!

How much should I expect my end-user to know?

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 16:16:12 GMT

From a software support perspective, the question is, how much should I expect my end-user to know? If someone asks me a basic question about our product, then I answer it without hesitation. But what if someone asks me a basic programming question? For example, how to create a for-loop?

How to set up your own free VSLab-based Matlab/Mathematica replacement

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 15:31:02 GMT

VSLab has just been updated with full support for Visual Studio 2008 Shell and the F# CTP release. It has been a rough couple of weeks for the VSLab team as F# CTP changed a number of things and they have been working hard to put together a compatible release. In this article I talk about a bit about what exactly VSLab is and walk you through creating a free VSLab installation.

Visual Studio Shell 2008: Bringing More .NET Languages into the Fold

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 04:16:03 GMT

Visual Studio Shell was released in January of 2007 without much fanfare. Even though it's free to download, at the time it was not very useful for most developers as few packages had yet been written for it. Now eight months have gone by and quite a few projects are sporting free Visual Studio interfaces. In this article I discuss Visual Studio Shell itself as well as several of the languages which are currently developing shells.

What if it's not in Environment.SpecialFolder?

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 21:31:02 GMT

The correct way to find the location of system folders not listed in Environment.SpecialFolder.

Changing Your Garbage Collector Settings on the Fly

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 17:01:12 GMT

.NET 3.5 and 2.0 SP1 jointly included a new feature which lets you programmatically manipulate the way your garbage collector acts. This can be done through changing the value of a new property of the System.Runtime.GCSettings class named LatencyMode. In this article I will walk you through this new property and the different effects of each of it's possible settings.

F# September 2008 CTP Released!

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:16:11 GMT

I'm very pleased to announce the availability of the F# September 2008 CTP Release, launched via the new MSDN F# Developer Center. This release represents an important step in the evolution of the F# language as we progress it towards a fully supported language for the .NET platform. A huge thank you to both the F# team and the community members who've helped us trial earlier versions of this release and given us so much excellent feedback.

More F# At Code Camp Hartford

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 01:16:02 GMT

Rick Minerich writes about CodeCamp in Hartford and his recent F# presentation with slides and code examples

Generic Fiddling

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 02:01:02 GMT

I spent an hour yesterday playing with generics to get my chops up a little better. After reading Krzystof Cwalina's post on the layout of the generic collections, I came up with this little gem:

Multilingual OCR

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:46:06 GMT

The challenges of accommodating multilingual OCR engines - and what does "multilingual" really mean anyway when it comes to technical implementation?

Managed C++ and IDisposable

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:01:10 GMT

Quick fix for IDisposable compiler error

Debugging Code in the GAC - the best thing since sliced bread

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 18:31:08 GMT

"[...] I read a lot and one thing that caught my eye was that any assembly that is to be used as an add-in needs to be signed and installed in the GAC. This is troublesome as I always assumed that debugging code built this way was going to be, well, a pain in the GAC." Steve Hawley from Atalasoft gives a great little tutorial on this would-be problem.

Is Managed Code Slower Than Unmanaged Code?

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 08:46:02 GMT

Ask anyone the question above and they will say that managed is slower than unmanaged code. Are they right? No they are not. The problem is that when most people think of .NET they think of other frameworks with a runtime, like Java or Visual Basic; or they may even think about interpreters. They do not think about applications, or what they do; they do not think about limiting factors like network or disk access; in short, they do not think.

.NET 3.0 Partial Methods

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 19:16:03 GMT

No, not partial classes, partial methods. Read on if you did a double take like I did.