DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by deason

Awful Command Line Parsing API in .NET 4.0

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 17:31:02 GMT

Miguel de Icaza about System.Core's new System.Shell.CommandLine

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.

A .NET Open Source Project Retrospective: Json.NET

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:16:18 GMT

A look inside the development of a .NET open source project. What went right and what went wrong and lessons learnt along the way.

Time released content in ASP.NET

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 01:01:17 GMT

"While working on the PDC2008 website, we had several time-critical updates. There were some announcements that needed to go live on the website at specific times to coincide with other marketing, there were updates to the list of of software being given to attendees that needed to go live right after the keynotes in which they were announced, etc."

jQuery Alert Dialogs

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 09:20:43 GMT

Cory S.N. LaViska (creator of one of my favorite jQuery Plugins - contextMenu.js) released version 1.0 of jQuery Alert Dialogs a few days ago. It looked interesting and worth some investigation. To test things out I decided to try and recreate the dialogs from one of my earlier posts ASP.NET Popup Message Box User Control which was originally based off a post by Janko.

Migrations in C# using RikMigrations

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 02:31:14 GMT

Jealous of those pesky Ruby on Rails developers? Want to be able to use Migrations in your .net apps? Well then check this post out!

.NET Database Migration Tool Roundup

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 22:46:17 GMT

A overview of all the available DB Migration tools available on the .NET platform

Saving time and effort with advanced Monorail features

Tue, 27 May 2008 01:39:54 GMT

In the third part of the Castle tutorial, we look into the features of Monorail that allow us to save a lot of time and effort when developing web applications. We explore advanced Monorail concepts that help us delegate error processing and authentication to the framework and reuse templates. We also look into how Monorail integrates nicely with ActiveRecord to automatically load and modify database objects based on HTML forms.

RikMigrations 0.2 Released

Tue, 13 May 2008 16:13:48 GMT

New release of .NET database migrations library.

Using AjaxRepeater Control, ASP.NET AJAX

Tue, 13 May 2008 22:01:11 GMT

Recently after reading blog post Ajax Templates by Nikhil Kothari I really liked the idea, the source code is great, and the control is huge help for AJAX development. In this blog post I want to share what I learned after investigating sample more carefully, and in what scenarios I feel this control is doing it's job quite well.

TimeSpanPicker released under BSD

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 20:55:35 GMT

A BSD licensed Windows Forms control for editing TimeSpan values.

LINQ to SQL Batch Updates/Deletes: Fix for 'Could not translate expres

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 11:21:20 GMT

I've found and posted a new fix in the code from my original post: Batch Updates and Deletes with LINQ to SQL. I'm not sure of the etiquette for this sort of thing: new post (like I'm doing) or just a comment in the original post. I want to be sure to make anyone who downloaded my code aware of an issue/fix (assuming they are monitoring via a RSS feed).

A C# fluent repeater

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 13:01:03 GMT

A fully-featured fluent class used for repeating method calls, handle exceptions, callbacks and more... Just plug-and-play and start repeating stuff!

Batch Updates and Deletes with LINQ to SQL

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 16:26:52 GMT

A couple weeks ago, I read the article, LINQ to SQL Extension: Batch Deletion with Lambda Expression by Jeffrey Zhao. In case you didn't read the article, it discusses the downside of most O/R Mapping frameworks when it comes to multiple updates or deletes. He states the fact that a SQL statement for each row flagged as update/delete in the entity set is created. I went about implementing something similar to what Jeffrey envisioned and I'll explain some of the hurdles I had to overcome to achieve it.

Ajax Templates

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:35:40 GMT

A prototype for an Ajax templating solution, combined with an Ajax-friendly server-side solution based on asp.net server controls.

FormatWith 2.0 - String formatting with named variables

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:31:02 GMT

An improved version of the string FormatWith extension method. It now has the ability to also work with named variables, e.g. "{UserName} last logged in at {LastLoginDate}".FormatWith(user)

RikMigrations - There was movement at the station

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 08:33:35 GMT

Development is ramping up on .NET database migrations using RikMigrations. The project was posted here a few months back but now has 3 new developers and seems to be moving again.

AJAX-style Asynchronous Progress Dialog for WinForms

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 22:30:11 GMT

A base class for adding a rich asynchronous progress animation to any Form. My company develops a lot of rich-client applications and we have forever wanted a nice "slick" way to indicate to the user when activity is occuring in the background. Rarely do we know how long an operation will take (web services, remoting calls etc) so we always use to just stick a little barber pole type animation in the top-right corner of the main application window. This was never a perfect solution though because we still had to do all the nasty "locking" of the Control/Form to make sure they couldn't queue up another action. Moreover, setting Enabled = False on many WinForms controls can look quite ugly and inconsistent especially if the Form has got a variety of different controls. In recent years AJAX on the web has actually pioneered some interesting GUI concepts. I've always liked it when web sites pop-up with a central window that turns the background slightly darker and then ask you for some input. Then you type that input in and press an OK button and then you get a nice little barber pole animation to indicate it has gone off back to the server and is waiting for a reply for the next step (if any). That's basically what this project is about. Bringing that "cool" AJAX-style asynchronous indication behaviour to WinForms.

YUI Style Glowing Buttons with the AjaxControlToolkit GlowButtonExtend

Sat, 09 Feb 2008 04:01:02 GMT

YUI Style Glowing Buttons with the AjaxControlToolkit GlowButtonExtend

TDD Proven Effective! Or is it?

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 04:46:02 GMT

So when Phil Haack announced that Research Supports the Effectiveness of TDD I was more than a little interested in seeing what the linked report actually contained.

New BlogEngine Theme - ThemeEngine.LayoutGala

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 23:31:02 GMT

Another experiment in BlogEngine dynamic theming.

New* .NET 3.5 Feature: AddIn Framework ( Part 1 of 3 )

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 06:16:02 GMT

Introduction to the addin framework in .NET 3.5

T4 Overview and Examples

Mon, 24 Dec 2007 01:00:34 GMT

T4 (Text Template Transformation Toolkit) is a free template-based code generation engine from Microsoft. It integrates into Visual Studio and allows you to use ASP.NET-like template syntax to generate C#, configuration or any other text files. This articles provides an overview of T4, compares it to some of the existing alternatives and includes links to ready-to-use T4 template examples.

RikMigrations - Starting from an existing database

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 08:54:48 GMT

Shows how to generate .NET migrations from existing databases using RikMigrations.

DotNetKicks button extension for Blogengine.NET

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 19:46:02 GMT

An extension for Blogengine.NET which allows you to easily add a DotNetKicks button to posts.