DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by immothep

A Web Based Sequence Diagram Editor

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 13:16:13 GMT

After I published a post about SDEdit which is a free desktop sequence diagram editor, I received a mail from Steve Hanov who wanted to introduce me with a very impressive alternative to SDEdit. Steve has created a web service that creates renditions of sequence diagrams, it is completely online and...

SQL SERVER - Guidelines and Coding Standards Complete List Download

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 16:16:12 GMT

Coding standards and guidelines are very important for any developer on the path of successful career. A coding standard is a set of guidelines, rules and regulations on how to write code. Coding standards should be flexible enough or should take care of the situation where they should not prevent best practices for coding. They are basically the guidelines that one should follow for better understanding. The concept behind implementing coding standards and guidelines, is that the consistency and uniformity in programming so that if multiple people are working on the same code, it becomes easier to communicate, share with or understand each other's work. With the goal of promoting good coding standards and guidelines I have created document which can guide developers.

Development Tools I Use & Recommend

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 22:16:03 GMT

Eventually I will get to some technical code Posts. But for now, I'm a bit delayed with some other things at work lately. I will be blogging about Code Generation, OOP, and other topics very soon though. In the meantime, I wanted to share a list of tools I regularly use now or have used in the past as a C# / ASP.NET Engineer listed below:

SQL Server Tips and Tricks

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 05:46:02 GMT

The following are a wide range of tips and tricks I have collected over the years working with various versions or Microsoft's SQL Server. I always enjoy finding little snippets of code which are both simple and powerful. Why write complicated routines when one or two lines of code can do it?

EventArgs.Empty - Do You Use It?

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 06:31:08 GMT

Anyway, we can define EventArgs as a private member and use it instead of allocating an EventArgs object every time the event is raised. Fortunately, there is no need for that, C# introduce us the EventArgs.Empty...

So, What is Duck Typing?

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 19:16:09 GMT

"I'm going to lay out what I think Duck Typing is, and let you poke holes in it, and tell me where I'm wrong. "

SQL - Step By Step Installation of SQL Server 2008

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:01:04 GMT

Step by step installation of Microsoft SQL server 2008.

SQL SERVER - 2008 - Interview Questions and Answers - Download PDF

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:16:04 GMT

Interview is very important event for any person. A good interview leads to good career if candidate is willing to learn. I always enjoy interview questions and answers series. This is my very humble attempt to write SQL Server 2008 interview questions and answers. SQL Server is very large subject and not everything is usually asked in interview. In interview what matters the most is conceptual knowledge and learning attitude. I have listed all the series in this post so that it can be easily downloaded and used. All the questions are collected and listed in one PDF which is here to download. If you have any question or if you want to add to any of the question please send me mail or write a comment. Bookmark this first ever set of interview questions and answers.

Searching for files using LINQ

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 13:16:05 GMT

An LINQ example

An interview with Louis Davidson author of pro sql server 2008

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 14:01:12 GMT

Pro SQL Server 2008 Relational Database Design and Implementation is one of those books that should be in the hands of every SQL Server developer. There are tons of SQL Server programming books around but none of them covers the fundamentals of a good SQL Server database, the design. If your design is 'broken' then it is a lot harder to fix it down the road, design is probably the number one reason people have all kinds of problems with their databases.

JQuery, the very very basics - Lesson 2

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 08:01:12 GMT

So it is nice to be able to use a combination of JQuery selectors to grab an array of elements, however, it would be better if we know how to inspect them one by one and operate on them.

SQL Server 2008 Top 10 List for Developers

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:16:03 GMT

Well now that SQL Server 2008 has shipped, Zach and I are starting to put the finishing touches on all of our SQL Server 2008 early adopter initiatives and move on to planning for future releases. Before we do that I have some unfinished business to take care of.

CodePlex launches support for TortoiseSVN

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 11:01:03 GMT

No longer do you need to host SvnBridge yourself, or use the Team Foundation Client or the CodePlex client. Now you can use your favorite SVN client and connect directly to your repository!

JQuery, the very very basics - Lesson 1

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 08:46:02 GMT

JQuery is the star among the growing list of JavaScript libraries. A few of its characteristics are light-weight, cross-browser compatibility and simplicity. A task that would take 10 lines of code with traditional JavaScript can be accomplished with JQuery in just 1 line of code. I write to record the series of very basic lessons I learned about JQuery (my study source is the very readable book JQuery in Action).

Tips & Tricks: Use DebuggerDisplayAttribute for easier debugging

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 08:01:02 GMT

When debugging, it's common to hover over an object to get a quick view of what its properties are. This is where DebuggerDisplayAttribute comes in. The format string looks similar to normal .NET format strings in that the values to replace are between curly braces, but instead of being told what to substitute the debugger treats these values as expressions and attempts to evaluate them using the current context.

Subversion Support Comes to CodePlex. Sorta'

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 08:01:02 GMT

A little publicized feature lets you use Subversion to access project hosted on CodePlex - without the need to run SvnBridge locally!

Creating Custom Configuration Sections fo

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 14:46:15 GMT

A short screencast on how to Creating Custom Configuration Sections for you App.config/Web.config

Create amazing looking full-blown WPF applications within minutes

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 11:01:02 GMT

The Viydano team just released their public beta, you can download it from the website for free. It allows you to create full-blown data-driven WPF applications within minutes, without sacrificing or limiting development freedom. This is their second release and going by the new features list, it looks like it came a long way since the last public CTP.

Getting rid of strings (3): take your app settings to the next level

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 18:31:02 GMT

In the first article of this series I talked about the problems with strings in code. This article will show you how you can use lambda expressions and expression trees as another tool to avoid strings

How to view information in ViewState using ASP.NET 2.0 and 3.5

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 13:16:13 GMT

ViewState is a Base64 encoded string and is not readable by the human eye. However it is also not difficult to decode the viewstate and view the contents of the viewstate when it is passed over the wire. In this article we will see how to decode and view the contents of a viewstate.

Easy way to improve your image gallery using jQuery

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 19:16:02 GMT

Let's say you are browsing a CSS gallery and you want to check out some new and beautiful website designs. And you are of course interested in some details - for example, which category design belongs to, what's the rating or whatsoever. This information could be rendered below thumbnail, but there are other, more attractive ways of displaying additional data. In this article we'll see how to improve image gallery with a simple trick.

LINQ to SQL queries involving strings cause SQL Server procedure cache

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:01:03 GMT

Be careful when using LINQ. If an application is using LINQ to SQL and the queries involve the use of strings that can be highly variable in length, the SQL Server procedure cache will become bloated with one version of the query for every possible string length

Send Action Queries to Your Database in Batches

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 17:46:03 GMT

Coming from a database background, I should've known better. But, I didn't. Recently I found myself needing to write a GUI wrapper for a new Address Standardization component we got at work. This was purchased in order to clean addresses for a variety of data processing tasks we do on the way into the database, allowing us to completely automate these processes,

Free SQL Server Videos

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 00:31:10 GMT

Free Training and Videos for Microsoft SQL Server. Hours of content covering tips and tricks, along with a whole slew of videos on backups. The site is still growing and there's an RSS feed you can use to be updated of newly added videos.