DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by ericdcoolest

Managed and Unmanaged, Metaphorically

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 01:16:38 GMT

"Last night I was asked what the difference was between managed and unmanaged code by a non-coder. I came up with a metaphor which works and our CEO asked me to post it."

FormView not retaining values when server-side validation fails

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 23:57:27 GMT

Takes care of the problem in the Title

An Updated Abstract Boilerplate HttpHandler

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 22:18:07 GMT

An update to Phil Haack's standard abstract HttpHandler

The Future of Programming Languages

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 02:31:16 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)

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 03:16:33 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

Make Visual Studio Generate Your Repository

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 23:31:03 GMT

As many of you may know, I've been goofing around with Code Generation again with SubSonic's new MVC Addin. One of the things I really wanted to try and flex is Visual Studio 2008's code generation bits - T4. Not many people know it even exists, and to me it's one of the Great Hidden Secrets of Visual Studio 2008.

Load Virtual Earth on Demand

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 08:21:36 GMT

The Virtual Earth JavaScript control is not small weighing in at 217KB when compressed in Version 6.2. When you require the rich experience of Virtual Earth this size is not an issue, the control is aimed at broadband users and within a few moments of interacting with the map you can easy exceed this with the rich imagery being loaded on demand. But what if your web page only needs to show the Virtual Earth map when a user asks for it or you just want your page to load super fast? You need to load Virtual Earth on demand.

Start menu context annoyances

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 05:31:02 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

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 06:16:11 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...

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

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:16:12 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 23:31:02 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 12:16:03 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?

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 05:31:02 GMT

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

Changing Your Garbage Collector Settings on the Fly

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 01:01:12 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.

More F# At Code Camp Hartford

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:16:02 GMT

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

Generic Fiddling

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 10:01:02 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 22:46:06 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 22:01:10 GMT

Quick fix for IDisposable compiler error

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

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 02:31:08 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.

Developer Error or TFS Shortcoming?

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 04:01:03 GMT

Steve summarizes a recent experience where he had to reinstall his system and apps to eliminate a problem with unmanaged debugging. Source control ended up not having all of his code which could have been a disaster. Steve was able to successfully restore his machine but it took longer than it should have - couldn't TFS have helped with this?

Menu item usability vs. learnability

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 21:16:02 GMT

Lou Franco gives his take on application UI, inclusion/exclusion of menu items, etc. "A user interface is well-designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would."

How to Build a Managed/Unmanaged Library

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 22:46:03 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

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 04:01:03 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

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 01:46:03 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 20:31:02 GMT

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