DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by momo

"Web Application Installer" moves to Beta

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 13:44:41 GMT

Remember last week when I mentioned the Microsoft Web Platform Installer? It's an bootstrapper that gets you setup for free web development, all in a single application. It'll setup IIS7, get you Visual Studio, SQL Server, .NET, etc. Cool. And there was much rejoicing (except XP folks, sorry.)

What is the coolest thing on the planet? - PowerShell

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 06:19:47 GMT

Walter and I gave a presentation at the WonderWorld 2008 conference in Las Vegas last week. To get many people exited about our talk, we asked customers what they think the coolest thing on the planet is. They thought first that this is a trick question, but we didn't keep them in the dark for too long. The coolest thing on the planet is: PowerShell

BlogEngine.net Post Security

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:46:10 GMT

BlogEngine.net 1.3/1.4 supports user roles. But we can't seem to be able to make it mandatory for users to sign in to see blog posts. That's not something you usually want on a public blog, but maybe for a corporate blog.

Customization of PowerShell hash table merges

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 18:17:35 GMT

PowerShell provides the += operator to add one hash table to another hash table. By default this operation will result in an error, if both hash tables have at least one key that is common in both collections. In some cases you may want to have a more granular control. For example, you don't want to get an error, if not only the key, but also the value is common in both collections.

Using the IronRuby Console in an ASP.NET MVC Context - Part 1

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:00:57 GMT

Though this is called a console for an ASP.NET MVC application, the author shows how to compile the Ruby.Console project to interact with any Class Library.

WPF Meets the iPhone

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 15:19:26 GMT

Nice and step by step article about WPF development

Using a Parameter Attribute to set a Default Value in MVC

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 20:01:12 GMT

A couple days ago I came across a breaking change in ASP.NET MVC PR4 that wasn't reported. The breaking change is that defaults from routes are no longer used as defaults for parameters in the action method, if no appropriate parameter is found in the request. So I decided to take this obvious disapointment and turn it in to something I have been thinking about for a long time, but never really had the motivation to impliment. In .NET you are allowed to add attributes to anything that can be defined via reflection, including classes, interfaces, structures, and even return types and parameters of methods.

A Practical Review of ASP.NET MVC

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 03:31:02 GMT

My big project for the summer has been the creation of a content management system for my job. Due to deployment restrictions, I was forced to use the .NET platform for development. After hearing rumors of .NET running Rails via IronRuby, I jumped at the chance to write a Rails application that could be deployed to IIS on Windows. However, after getting a prototype running, I discovered that this would be infeasible for the time table I was looking at. IronRuby simply would not be ready on time. My second choice, then, was the new ASP.NET MVC framework.

BlogEngine Flaws

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 14:01:10 GMT

Recently I've been having problems as the site has gotten more popular I've had comments and even posts disappearing randomly, sometimes re-appearing you might have experienced this yourself either on my site or in your own so after divulging into the code to see what was happening found something I thought was shocking. When you add a comment, or Rating, Approving and Remove Comments this is what BlogEngine DbBlogProvider actually does...

Finding missing and duplicate lines in text files using PowerShell

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:38:14 GMT

Every now and then I need to investigate bugs that get exposed because countable "things" are less or more than expected. In my special case I was dealing with an application that manages subscription handles to memory registers of programmable logic controllers (PLC). These programs are called Data Access Servers. Occasionally we get calls form customers reporting that the number of handles is less, or sometimes more than expected. The first step to debug this situation is to find out, which handles are missing or which ones are duplicates. This blog post describes how PowerShell's Compare-Object cmdlet makes this task, which used to be a pain in the "peep" now a piece of cake.

jQuery for ASP.NET MVC unleashed!

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:46:05 GMT

jQuery plugins for the ASP.NET MVC framework

Learning Ruby via IronRuby and C# Part 4

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 19:16:03 GMT

Part 4 in a multi-part series on learning Ruby using IronRuby and C#. Justin continues his series using familiar C# code to explain Ruby programming concepts. In this post, he goes over additional functionality of loops and ranges.

Some best practices for NHibernate by Ayende

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:01:11 GMT

A few hours ago I completed a code review of an application using NHibernate. This is not the first time I am doing such a thing, of course, and I noticed that there are quite a few areas where I tend to have comments in such code reviews. The following is based on several such code bases that I went through, and contains a partial list of things that you need to watch for.

Visual Studio Item Templates

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 14:46:03 GMT

Sometimes we are using the same patterns of code over and over again. Those of us who are lazy (but smart) will create their own code snippets, if you are not familiar with this subject, read about how to create code snippets easily. But what if we need to create lots of classes with the same pattern? Code snippets may not be enough because they lack of some functionality which is needed to achieve our goal.

Learning Ruby via IronRuby and C# Part 3

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:46:09 GMT

Part 3 in a multi-part series on learning Ruby using IronRuby and C#. Justin continues his series using familiar C# code to explain Ruby programming concepts. In this post, he goes over static methods (class methods in Ruby), parameters, conditionals and loops.

Phil Haack: Unit Test Boundaries

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:31:09 GMT

One principle to follow when writing a unit test is that a unit test should ideally not cross boundaries.

C#: Generate WebPage Thumbmail Screenshot Image

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:16:08 GMT

There are a few services out there that serve up screenshots of any webpage for you to display on your website. One popular one is Kwiboo; this is the one that DotNetKicks uses. For some time now I've wondered what the easiest way to do this in .NET was, and today I stumbled upon the undocumented WebBrowser.DrawToBitmap method that makes this extremely easy to do.

Extracting errors and warnings from a log file using PowerShell

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 18:01:53 GMT

This blog post shows a simple Powershell command that searches a log file for errors and warnings and adds the matched lines to either to the errors.txt file or to the warnings.txt files. It takes advantage of the most powerful operator in Powershell, which is the switch operator. In my example here I exported the log file from the Wonderware SMC logger.

New BlogEngine.NET release coming up

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 11:01:10 GMT

New BlogEngine.NET release, on the way

Renaming a series of indexed files with Powershell

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 22:42:45 GMT

I love Powershell. I am only halfway through Bruce's book, but I am getting already a glimpse of its potential. I like especially the dynamic aspect of it. Creating and extending types on the fly is something that is quite exciting. Next I am looking to find a solution for my open issues with sorting hash tables. I think building a custom PSObject type with an integer NoteProperty and a NoteProperty that holds a FileInfo object might get me a few steps closer to solving the sorting challenge.

MVC Storefront Part 16: Membership Redo With OpenID

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 14:46:02 GMT

Robs new Screencast - the focus in this screencast is the membership system.

Newspaper - a free theme for BlogEngine.NET

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:01:03 GMT

Newspaper is a free, lightweight, high-contrast, black&white theme for BlogEngine.NET. The name "Newspaper" comes from the fact that theme looks like real newspapers. You can see how does it looks like and download a free copy.

How to Build a Managed/Unmanaged Library

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:46:03 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]

Debugging 101 - Measure, do your homework and think out of the box

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:10:45 GMT

Being confronted with an occasional bug in a complex system can be quite overwhelming. There are three disciplines that help you to stay strong: 1) Read and learn about your platform and how to debug it. 2) Use tools to quickly get the low hanging fruit. This might be enough in most of the cases to identify the bug. 3) Think out of the box and try to be creative. Build a model, play with it, break it and fix it. In the worst case, you won't have found the cause of the bug, but you learned at least something new about your software.

Blog Engine.NET1.4 Released

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:01:03 GMT

Blog Engine.net 1.4 has been released. more...