DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by marshall

Signs of a GOOD Manager / Team Lead

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 14:16:02 GMT

Characteristics / attitudes / process of good management & leadership: 1) Have a passion about technology but

What Gives? Microsofts Code Generation Tool

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 01:31:12 GMT

In a world of Microsoft and third party applications, out comes t4. t4 is a code generation tool that can compete with CodeSmith, but its FREE and built right into Visual Studio. It has been years since the first edition with very little publication of the actual application. t4 is a free code generation engine from Microsoft that underpins the Domain Specific Languages and Software Factory toolkits.

Expression Tree vs Reflection.

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 11:46:11 GMT

Expression Trees can be used to avoid Reflection poor performance when you need to invoke methods in object that you deos not know at runtime. In this post I show you how you can access to property of objects building and compiling an expression tree.

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:

Some Managed/Unmanaged Exception Tricks

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 14:01:23 GMT

I just spent 5 days tracking down a Heisenbug. Historically, I've tracked down a lot of these but not because I create a lot of them, because I'm good at finding them. In this particular case, I had a set of unit tests that were failing on our build server but did not fail consistently on my machine. This is not a good sign to start with.

Visual Studio Shell 2008: Bringing More .NET Languages into the Fold

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 04:16:03 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.

List of countries, cities, languages

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 09:31:03 GMT

You will find in the following links list of countries, cities, and their languages in CSV format, you can import into any database:

Great Design Pattern Resources

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 09:31:02 GMT

Some common patterns include the Singleton, Facade, Adaptor and Decorator. There are many, many patterns and below are some great resources to learn about them.

Roland WeigeIt's GhostDoc for Visual Studio

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 15:31:12 GMT

I have been using Roland WeigeIt's GhostDoc 2.1.3 for both Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 for about six months, and I am hooked. Here's a quick tutorial to get up and running with this free tool.

Free Visual Studio File Explorer Add-in

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 09:31:03 GMT

The Visual Studio File Explorer Add-in (sexy name we know, but hey, it's self documenting) is a free Tool Window add-in for VS 2008 that provides a Windows Explorer style file system view. It's particularly useful for performing routine file system tasks without the need to "context switch" away from Visual Studio, which can be time-consuming over the course of days and weeks. It is shell-enabled so extensions like TortoiseSVN work too.

Over 60 Free Controls from DevExpress

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:16:02 GMT

Once you register, you will be forwarded an Email with your login credentials to our product download portal. With this information in hand, you will be able to download and install all the controls and tools listed above free of charge. The applications you create with these controls can be distributed royalty free (see the EULA that accompanies the products for more information). Note that the installation you download will include evaluation versions of our entire product line. You can install these trials if you wish during the setup process. Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 are fully supported.

36 steps to success as technical lead

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 16:16:20 GMT

The "tech lead" role can be treacherous at times. While the name implies "leadership", most of the times it doesn't come with implied authority like a manager role for example. It often happens that this role is in a no-man's-land where it brings a lot of responsibility but not enough formal authority. In order to successfully help a project from this position one has to navigate through narrow and convoluted straits.

The Work-at-Home Developer's Guide to Happiness

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:31:02 GMT

As a long time work-at-home developer, I've come to realize over the years how important it is to have the right work routine and balance to remain happy in both your professional and personal life. I've worked from my home 100% of the time for the last 6-7 years and had often worked from my home in spurts before that. Without question, it requires the right mindset and dedication. There's an upside as well as a downside to working from home, but with the right routine you can be successful at it.

Software I can't work without

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:46:10 GMT

I'm about to configure a new development machine this week. It's going to be my 3rd install from scratch in the last 12 months, which I know is not all that much, but certainly more than I wish I had to.

Spark and NHaml - Crazy ASP.NET MVC ViewEngines

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 11:46:07 GMT

Scott Hanselman's talks about two ASP.NET MVC view engines.

Learning Ruby via IronRuby and C# Part 1

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 10:16:15 GMT

Part one of many in migrating your C# skills over to Ruby

Skip lists are fascinating!

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:16:03 GMT

Skip lists are a fascinating data structure: very simple, and yet have the same asymptotic efficiency as much more complicated AVL trees and red-black trees. In this article, I discuss the asymptotic efficiency of operations on skip lists, the ideas that make them work, and their interesting use cases. And, of course, I give you the source code for a skip list in C#.

Jump between braces in Visual Studio.

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:01:09 GMT

Move fast between open and close braces. No more scrolling to find beginning of that illusive if statement.

My version of the MessageBox control

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 08:01:09 GMT

Last month Janko posted an excellent article about creating standard website message boxes. Here is my take on it. I kept the idea the same but implemented it as a custom web control instead of a user control.

55 Free High Quality Icon Sets

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 08:01:02 GMT

A lot of freebie icons. Another great article from Smashing Magazine

Awesome web development and web design articles and sites in May 2008

Fri, 30 May 2008 15:31:12 GMT

This article shows a reviews of 16 great articles and sites I found in May 2008. There are articles about web development with ASP.NET, Ajax and jQuery. There are also a great web design resources, tools, plugins, BlogEngine.NET extensions and one great usability article.

A good coding font makes a difference. Envy Code R, better than ever!

Tue, 27 May 2008 20:46:12 GMT

Am I the only one who believes a great programming font can boost your productivity and increase your coding joy? Check out Damien Guard's superb new release of Envy Code R, my favorite coding font.

HowTo: Configure Microsoft Source Analysis

Mon, 26 May 2008 08:46:03 GMT

Lots of folks are complaining about Microsoft's recently released Source Analysis tool, and how they disagree with certain rules, and how it is not configurable. Well, it is configurable, but they put the dialog in a strange place.

Microsoft Source Analysis for C# Released

Fri, 23 May 2008 18:31:14 GMT

From post: "Source Analysis is similar in many ways to Microsoft Code Analysis (specifically FxCop), but there are some important distinctions. FxCop performs its analysis on compiled binaries, while Source Analysis analyzes the source code directly. For this reason, Code Analysis focuses more on the design of the code, while Source Analysis focuses on layout, readability and documentation."