DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by bbseven

New ASP.NET Charting Control

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:31:03 GMT

From ScottGu's blog. Brand new, Free, ASP.NET 3.5 chart control. It looks very nice!

Scan to Scribd (or anything) Tutorial

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 19:18:22 GMT

Lou has written an article about how to send scanned images to some place on the web. "All of the non-uploading code will work in any Scan to X project, where X can be Amazon S3, Azure SQL Data Services, Google Docs, SharePoint, or any CMIS compliant ECM (you just need to write the uploading part). "

Adobe Flex reaches out to .NET developers

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 09:01:19 GMT

An Adobe partner have today announced a free plug-in to allow .NET developers to write Flex front-ends to their applications entirely within Visual Studio, with full debugging and editing support.

The Future of Programming Languages

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 18:31:16 GMT

In this article I'm going to focus on Dynamic Typing and Metaprogramming in particular. It's interesting to consider what the impact on the maintainability of our code from their increased prominence might be.

Tidying Up Old Blog Entries (Cleaning up MS Office HTML tags)

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 19:16:33 GMT

Looking back it seems like complete lunacy. For a period of time my method of choice to create blog entries was to write them out in Word 2003 and then export html. The almost unreadable text has been haunting me for a long time and I've finally gone back and fixed them. Along the way I built a small utility for doing this and here it is

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

Managed C++ and IDisposable

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:01:10 GMT

Quick fix for IDisposable compiler error

How to Build a Managed/Unmanaged Library

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:46:03 GMT

Working with an unmanaged static library - with that, you can build a managed C++ wrapper that exposes the functionality that you need. The C++ compiler does some fairly amazing things in terms of knowing when to do unmanaged/unmanaged transitions, but sometimes it does some surprising things that will cost. [Sample code included in the post]

Free WPF Image File Viewer with Annotations

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:01:03 GMT

This post includes a free image file viewer application complete with annotation controls - source code for the project is also included - this is a Windows Presentation Foundation application, 100% .NET, and was built using the DotImage toolkit from Atalasoft.

A Safe & Asynchronous One to Many Stream Copy Through IL & Inheritance

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:46:03 GMT

This post discusses ways to manage or work around problems arising from the statefulness of .NET Streams, including an explanation about how this is possible both through traditional inheritance and also through some indulgence in hacking of object protection levels by emitting custom IL.

Custom functions in NAnt

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:31:02 GMT

Some ideas about using NAnt for multiple builds. Code provided but is there a better way to do this?

Queuing up Your Remote Invokes

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:01:03 GMT

Serializing requests for remote invoke or multiple requests at will? Here is some sample code and a free download that can help with setting this up.

The Cursed History of Smalltalk in .NET

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:01:04 GMT

Digging up the history of Smalltalk for .NET - none of the 5 are currently in development

Visual C++ Compiler Bug Discovered

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:16:03 GMT

This bug exists in the optimizer in VC 2003 and 2005. It does not exist in VC 2008. Code, etc. included.

ompiling, Linking, and Linq-ing

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 15:31:04 GMT

Thoughts about LINQ vs. flat files

Tips on Creating Portable APIs

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:46:16 GMT

Five tips and hints on creating good portable APIs.

Why Are Our Programs Still Represented by Flat Files?

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 18:31:25 GMT

It's time to leave the secondary, external structure of our programs behind. If you can treat the reflected code from a programming language like an abstract data structure, why can't you just keep the source itself in a similarly abstracted data structure? Isn't the structure of a program more similar to a graph, than a list? Besides the momentum of the past, what is keeping us tied to having our code in this format?

FlingScan - Free Searchable PDF Service

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 12:31:08 GMT

This web application generates a searchable PDF from any standard image such as a multipage TIFF or JPEG. The searchable PDF is emailed back to you where you can save it to your file system and search the content with one of many PDF search filters available for Microsoft's Desktop Search or Google's Desktop Search.