DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by bradygaster

20 Most Interesting Silverlight Tutorials

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 01:45:00 GMT

In this article we presents a collection of best Silverlight tutorials.

Composite Application Guidance (Prism-v2) sample application using Sil

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:00:02 GMT

Sample app showing SL 3 Child Window with Prism-v2

Profiling the Memory Usage of a .NET Application

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:45:02 GMT

Automatic memory management in .NET makes development a lot easier; however, it's still easy to introduce memory leaks into your application. For example, in a complex application, it's easy to forget to unregister event handlers, and these are notorious for holding on to objects which you don't need to keep in memory any more. This typically leads to an increase in memory usage which, if it remains unchecked and unresolved, can lead to your application exhibiting poor performance, or even running out of memory and crashing. This is where a memory profiler becomes necessary.

Application-wide action filters in ASP.NET MVC

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:30:02 GMT

Ever had a team of developers using your ASP.NET MVC framework? Chances are you have implemented some action filters (i.e. for logging) which should be applied on all controllers in the application. Two ways to do this: kindly ask your developers to add a [Logging] attribute to the controllers they write, or kindly ask to inherit from SomeCustomControllerWithActionsInPlace. If you have been in this situation, monday mornings, afternoons, tuesdays and other weekdays are in fact days where some developers will forget to do one of the above. This means no logging! Or any other action filters that are executed due to a developer that has not been fed with enough coffee. Wouldn't it be nice to have a central repository where you can register application-wide action filters? That's exactly what we are going to do in this blog post.

Learning the Decorator Pattern

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:15:00 GMT

Taking at how we can use the Decorator Pattern in our application. The decorator pattern is a structural pattern which allows you to attach new or additional actions to an object dynamically. Using the decorator pattern provides a very clean and flexible alternative to subclassing (via inheritance) your object and thus creating an unwanted inheritance tree

Abandon ASP.NET WebForms!

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 07:45:01 GMT

Interesting experiance with classic web forms....

Visual Studio 2010: Web.config transforms

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:15:00 GMT

Recently I wrote about Visual Studio 2010 and multiple web.config files support. Let's see how to play with web.config transformation so we can use one configuration on development environment and the other for production environment.

Automagic Time Localization

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 20:30:00 GMT

A trick to localize timestamps without requiring users to pick their time zone manually.

Customizing Silverlight 3 DataGrid Headers

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 01:32:02 GMT

Dan Wahlin demonstrates the use of styles to improve the appearance of Silverlight DataGrid headers. Nice tutorial if you're looking for a comprehensive example on how to use styles in Silverlight.

Creating a PowerShell Provider pt 1: Creating the Drive

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 01:29:56 GMT

Jim Christopher demonstrates the creation of a custom PowerShell provider. The data storage mechanism he chooses to provide via PowerShell? The ASP.NET P&M database!

The Most Powerful Development Tool Ever Made

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:00:03 GMT

Justin Etheredge wrote a great blog post about not inventing the wheel everytime a classic programming problem shows up.

Silverlight 3 Behaviors : Double Click Trigger

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 13:45:00 GMT

How to create a Double Click Trigger in Silverlight 3 to compose rich interactive experiences.

Binding in ASP.NET MVC

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 04:45:00 GMT

Answers to some frequently asked questions about binding data to forms in ASP.NET MVC. Covers Bind(), ModelBinders, and ViewData.Model.

ASP.NET MVC TDD using Visual Studio 2010

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 12:15:07 GMT

Phil Haack announced yesterday that the tooling support for ASP.NET MVC is available for Visual Studio 2010. Troy Goode already blogged about the designer snippets (which are really really cool, just like other parts of the roadmap for ASP.NET MVC 2.0). I'll give the new TDD workflow introduced in VS2010 a take.

Zen and the Art of Project Management

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 03:15:00 GMT

Nate Kohari, the developer of Ninject, announces Zen, a project management system based around lean/kanban.

Creating a Tag Cloud using ASP.NET MVC and the Entity Framework

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 19:45:01 GMT

A Tag Cloud is a visual depiction of Tags or categories on a web site. CSS is used to set the variable font size of each Tag to illustrate its relative frequency or popularity within the site. As part of the migration of my site to ASP.NET MVC, I am introducing one to replace the Categories navigation that appears on the left hand side of each page, which contains a count of items within each category.

A view from the cloud (or: locate your ASP.NET MVC views on Azure)

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Hosting and deploying ASP.NET MVC applications on Windows Azure works like a charm. However, if you have been reading my blog for a while, you might have seen that I don't like the fact that my ASP.NET MVC views are stored in the deployed package as well. Why? If I want to change some text or I made a typo, I would have to re-deploy my entire application for this. Takes a while, application is down during deployment, . And all of that for a typo. Luckily, Windows Azure also provides blob storage, on which you can host any blob of data (or any file, if you don't like saying "blob"). These blobs can easily be managed with a tool like Azure Blob Storage Explorer. Now let's see if we can abuse blob storage for storing the views of an ASP.NET MVC web application, making it easier to modify the text and stuff. We'll do this by creating a new VirtualPathProvider.

Handling Legacy URLs with ASP.NET MVC

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:00:00 GMT

According to Google's Webmaster tools, there are about 15,000 incoming links to my site. 13,000 of those reference a .ASPX file on disk. When I convert to MVC, with new Search Engine Friendly urls, all those links will break unless I do something about it. Presenting users with a 404 - file not found is not an option. I need to show them the content they were expecting, and update Search Engines with the news that things have changed. Here's how I will be managing those Legacy URLs.

LINQ in Action samples available in LINQPad

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 12:15:00 GMT

In addition to being a great LINQ tool and C# and VB snippet IDE, LINQPad now integrates code samples from LINQ books. The first LINQPad-enabled book is LINQ in Action. This allows you to quickly and painlessly discover LINQ.

Refactoring: parameterize constructor

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:45:03 GMT

In legacy code you may find classes with constructor where some objects are created and initialized. These classes are not easily testable because they depend on other classes and therefore when you unit test these classes they may also throw exceptions of classes they depend on. In these cases we can use parameterize constructor refactoring.

List of Microsoft training kits

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 23:39:45 GMT

Microsoft training kits are pretty good things to explore when you start learning some new technology. Here are links to some training kits I found to be interesting and useful. Some of these live also in my laptop and when I have free moments I explore them to learn more about these technologies. So, the list of training kits is here.

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."

How to Create a Custom Performance Counter

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 16:00:03 GMT

Taking a look at how to create custom performance counters for usage in your application Part of the core .net framework allows you to create code which can hook into the underlying performance counters which the windows OS has. We will show how you can easily create hooks to take advantage of these counters.

Free ASP.NET 4.0 beta hosting available

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 15:03:35 GMT

Guys from ORCS Web are offering free ASP.NET 4.0 beta hosting until the end of October. Hosting plan is called "VS2010 and Web Deployment Tool Beta Program". If you are interested in it then please feel free to sign up.

Vishal Joshi's Tangent: Web 1-Click Publish with VS 2010

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 12:35:08 GMT

Today my goal is to go through an end to end walkthrough of the Web 1-Click Publish feature of VS 2010. This walkthrough will cover following : Prepping up an ASP.NET 4.0 web application which is using a SQL Server Database for deployment, Gathering the remote web and database server information, Setting up Web.config Transformation to change your connectionString, Including SQL Server Databases in Web Deployment, Creating a 1-Click Publish Profile to Publish your web content, databases and transformed web.config files, 1-Click Publish your Web Application.