DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by cbenien

Automatically minify and combine JavaScript in Visual Studio

Thu, 21 May 2009 05:06:38 GMT

As you begin developing more complex client-side functionality, managing the size and shape of your JavaScript includes becomes a key concern. It's all too easy to accidentally end up with hundreds of kilobytes of JavaScript spread across many separate HTTP requests, significantly slowing down your initial page loads. I hope you'll find that this technique is a good compromise between the tedium of using manual minification tools and the overwrought complexity of setting up some of the more "enterprisey" automation solutions.

WPF NotifyIcon Released

Mon, 11 May 2009 06:16:04 GMT

This is an implementation of a NotifyIcon (system tray icon) for the WPF platform. It does not just rely on the corresponding WinForms component, but is a purely independent control which leverages several features of the WPF framework in order to display rich tooltips, popups, context menus, and balloon messages.

Implementing a simple genetic algorithm

Fri, 01 May 2009 19:01:02 GMT

In this blog post I'll give a quick introduction to what genetic algorithms are and what they can be used for. We'll implement a genetic algorithm that attempts to guess an RGB color by evolving upon a random set of initial guesses, until it at some point evolves into the correct RGB value.

22 amazing JQuery - Modal - Plugins

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 08:31:03 GMT

A collection of 22 amazing JQuery - Modal - Window - Plugins

Just say No! to C# Regions

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 10:01:02 GMT

You need a language construct so that your IDE can help you hide your big messy code block from you (because it's just so hideous, you don't even want to look at it anymore)?

Test-After Development is not Test-Driven Development

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 04:46:02 GMT

Test-Driven Development is first and foremost an application design methodology. If you write your unit tests after you write your application code, then you are not driving the design of your application with your unit tests. In other words, Test-After Development ignores the Driven in Test-Driven Development.

13 ASP.NET MVC extensibility points you have to know

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 22:46:06 GMT

One of the main design principles ASP.NET MVC has been designed with is extensibility. Everything (or most of) in the processing pipeline is replaceable so, if you don't like the conventions (or lack of them) that ASP.NET MVC uses, you can create your own services to support your conventions and inject them into the main pipeline. This post shows 13 extensibility points that every ASP.NET MVC developer should know, starting from the beginning of the pipeline and going forward till the rendering of the view.

Using the ASP.NET MVC Futures AsyncController

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 17:31:04 GMT

Last week, I blogged about all stuff that is included in the ASP.NET MVC Futures assembly, which is an assembly available on CodePlex and contains possible future features (tonguetwister!) for the ASP.NET MVC framework. One of the comments asked for more information on the AsyncController that is introduced in the MVC Futures. So here goes!

Using complex types to make calling services less... complex

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 22:46:03 GMT

A detailed examination of how jQuery can call ASP.NET AJAX web services (or page methods) with complex types as parameters, to simplify the process of serializing and sending several fields of data at a time.

File Uploads in ASP.NET MVC 1.0 RTM

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 06:16:10 GMT

I had not messed around with file uploads in ASP.NET MVC for a while and so when I fired up ASP.NET MVC 1.0 RTM I was pleasantly surprised to find out how easy they had made it!

Activity Monitor is Empty - Fix Activity Monitor for All Users

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 20:31:02 GMT

Activity Monitor is essential tool for doing analysis of of system. Many users does not use this because when they open it there is no data. Due to same reason they move on. This article very quickly shows how to fix the same issue.

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 has been released!

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 20:31:02 GMT

To keep up with a good tradition (see here and here), I'm being one of the earliest bloggers having great news on ASP.NET MVC: we are at version 1.0! This means production ready, supported, stable, .! Grab the download at Microsoft.com.

10 C# Shorthands that improve productivity

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:46:02 GMT

One of the best things about C# is that as the language and libraries expand thought is put into keeping things readable. Below I have listed 10 shorthands that you can use to make your code tighter and less wordy. No doubt you know one or more already - but do you currently use all ten of them ?

AnkhSVN 2.0.6310 Released - Subversion Plugin for Visual Studio.

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 23:31:20 GMT

New features include: Experimental support of Visual Studio 2010, Overall performance improvemens, and much more...

ASP.NET - YSlow and ASP.NET: 100 points "A" grade is possible

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 19:46:02 GMT

Just in case if somebody doesn't know what YSlow is? YSlow is Firefox add-on integrated with Firebug. It analyzes web pages and tells you why they are slow. You can run it on you project and see your grade. You can do some easy improvements and maybe even get D grade. However to get higher then D grade becomes a real challenge. Below I will describe how I got A grade (100 points) on my web blog application.

A cool puzzle game for programmers, written in Silverlight

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 23:31:13 GMT

The goal of the game is to program a robot to pick up stars. The puzzles are submitted by other users, and ranked by difficulty based on votes.

Googleman - Quite possibly the best WPF application ever

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 07:01:03 GMT

Googleman is a fun and pointless application for launching Google.com in the style of the Batman 60s TV show, complete with spinning Google logo and sound effects. Now when a friend or co-worker says "To Google!" you can open your favourite search engine in style. Googleman uses WPF and is written using the MVP pattern.

Using C# "Yield" for Readability and Performance

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 22:46:30 GMT

I must have read about "yield" a dozen times. Only recently have I began to understand what it does, and the real power that comes along with it. I'm going to show you some examples of where it can make your code more readable, and potentially more efficient.

Why aren't I an MVP?

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 00:16:03 GMT

There's a problem with the MVP program I'd like to talk about. The fact that I'm no longer an MVP (haven't been for over a year now) isn't the problem, merely a symptom. My problem is that I don't know why I'm not an MVP, and by extension I don't know why others are. The process of becoming and remaining an MVP is completely opaque. Plainly, the MVP program lacks transparency.

Sad Way To Do Business

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 01:01:03 GMT

how to make a bad impression with poor support and bad atitude and throw away thousands potential customers.

"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.

Cheap way of speeding up Visual Studio I/O

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 10:01:02 GMT

Visual Studio loves file I/O. It really, really does, and it cares very little about caching and the like. What this means is that, when you open a solution file, it always reads it from disk. Which means that the speed of operation when generating lots of files (e.g., via T4 transformations) is typically atrocious. The fact that file I/O in VS does not appear to be multithreaded is another hindrance. In short, it's a mess.

UTF8Encoding.Default != Encoding.UTF8 (.NET C#)

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 04:46:03 GMT

Explains why you should never use ASCIIEncoding.Default, UTF8Encoding.Default, UnicodeEncoding.Default, UTF32Encoding.Default or UTF7Encoding.Default! Never ever!

Why you should not use the ADO.NET Entity Framework

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 04:01:12 GMT

Reasons to why the ADO.NET Entity Framework is not mature enough for real business application.

The Cost of Net Negative Producing Programmers

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 04:46:12 GMT

Discussion of NNPPs and how to tackle them.