DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by parsa.amini

CLR Injection: Runtime Method Replacer

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:30:00 GMT

how the JIT compiles MSIL and create a utility that allow us to programmatically replace any JIT'ed method with another method at runtime. We will also create a debugging utility that will intercept JIT calls and print diagnostics information to the console.

A view from the cloud (or: locate your ASP.NET MVC views on Azure)

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Hosting and deploying ASP.NET MVC applications on Windows Azure works like a charm. However, if you have been reading my blog for a while, you might have seen that I don't like the fact that my ASP.NET MVC views are stored in the deployed package as well. Why? If I want to change some text or I made a typo, I would have to re-deploy my entire application for this. Takes a while, application is down during deployment, . And all of that for a typo. Luckily, Windows Azure also provides blob storage, on which you can host any blob of data (or any file, if you don't like saying "blob"). These blobs can easily be managed with a tool like Azure Blob Storage Explorer. Now let's see if we can abuse blob storage for storing the views of an ASP.NET MVC web application, making it easier to modify the text and stuff. We'll do this by creating a new VirtualPathProvider.

Screenshot in 2 Clicks using .NET

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 15:16:02 GMT

As a developer, I take lot of screenshots and its time consuming to press the screenshot button, paste it in MSPaint or any other Image editing software and then save it. The pain is even more when I need to use two Buttons for a screenshot (Fn + PrintScreen) in my Laptop ;-). So I thought I will develop my own screenshot capturing tool which will allow me to take screenshots as well as save it in just two clicks. In this article I am going to show you how easy it is to develop your own tool using .NET. Let's get started.

How to improve the performances of ASP.NET MVC web applications

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 22:46:04 GMT

Today I stumbled upon a nice presentation that Rudi Benkovic gave last week at the Slovenian DotNet User Group, about ASP.NET MVC Performances. It is an in depth analysis of a Digg-like site and how it went from serving (on a test machine) 6 req/sec to 390 req/sec. The analysis prove the usual rule of performance optimization: no matter what you do to optimize your code, the biggest performance hit is data retrieval, and the first thing you have to optimize is always this. But apart from this obvious outcome, I just want to take out from this presentation the 3 point that are really specific to ASP.NET MVC

ASP.NET MVC Best Practices (Part 2) - Kazi Manzur Rashid's Blog

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 22:01:02 GMT

This is the second part of the series and may be the last, till I find some thing new. My plan was to start with routing, controller, controller to model, controller to view and last of all the view, but some how I missed one important thing in routing, so I will begin with that in this post.

Ten C# Keywords That You Shouldn't Be Using

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:31:03 GMT

Overview of some not-so-common keywords and reasons to avoid them...or understand what the implications are if we use them.

Back to the future! Exploring ASP.NET MVC Futures

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:01:19 GMT

For those of you who did not know yet: next to the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 version and its source code, there's also an interesting assembly available if you can not wait for next versions of the ASP.NET MVC framework: the MVC Futures assembly. In this blog post, I'll provide you with a quick overview of what is available in this assembly and how you can already benefit from. "the future".

Resizing images without loss of quality

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 23:31:45 GMT

ASP.NET provides us with System.Drawing namespace where we can find classes we can use to manipulate with images. There are many people out there who mistakenly think that Image.GetThumbnailImage is best choice for image resizing. You can easily create crappy images if you follow the code examples in previously pointed article. In this post I will show you how to resize images without negative side effects.

SQL SERVER - Find All Servers From Local Network - Using sqlcmd

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 16:46:14 GMT

Very simple and very quick. Something when ran on your command prompt will surprise you with result. You may find servers running and active, which you are unaware of. Try it. Bookmark it!

Visual Web Developer Team Blog : Tip/Trick: ASP.NET Mobile Development

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 01:35:33 GMT

If you are using Visual Studio 2008, you might have noticed that it doesn't have item templates for ASP.NET Mobile Web Forms (which were previously available in Visual Studio 2003). To help users with this scenario, I've created the following item templates for ASP.NET Web Site and ASP.NET Web Application projects: * Mobile Web Form * Mobile Web User Control * Mobile Web Configuration File The templates are available in both VB and C# versions.

Configure SQL Server 2008 for File Stream

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 02:24:04 GMT

Agha Usman wrote about file streams in SQL Server 10

Fun with Empty string.

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 21:16:27 GMT

Which is the fastest / most readable way to compare to an Empty string?

Creating an ASP.NET MVC application with Google Gears

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 20:31:08 GMT

You probably have been working with Gmail or Google Docs. One of the features with those web applications is that they provide an "offline mode", which allows you to access your e-mail and documents locally, when an Internet connection is not available. When a connection is available, those items are synchronized between your PC and the application server. This offline functionality is built using JavaScript and a Google product called Google Gears. In this blog post, I will be building a simple notebook application using the ASP.NET MVC framework, and afterwards make it available to be used offline.

SQL Server 2005 Management Studio tips

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 18:16:02 GMT

Two SQL 2005 Management Studio tips

Getting Mono and Visual Studio to play nice together

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 03:16:12 GMT

The goal was to get some Mono project templates working with Mono assemblies and the Mono compiler in Visual Studio. The trick was to do it in a way that would be able to survive upgrades of Mono installations.

Creating a generic validation framework

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 01:01:18 GMT

Nice, concise article on the creation of your very own validation framework using generics. Excellent approach illustrated in this post.

Why ++ operator is not thread safe

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 01:46:14 GMT

Here is a quick hint on how to make your software thread safe.

JavaScript, 5 wyas to call a function

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 01:01:04 GMT

Get a hold of what can seem confusing when invoking functions in JavaScript.

Self Installing Windows Service

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 08:31:12 GMT

Reusable class that can be added to a Windows Service project to enable Install, Uninstall, Start and Stop functionality.

Hidden Features of C#

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 19:01:02 GMT

In this article, I'll just link to a pretty great StackOverFlow Question about Hidden Features of C#. Most of C# Features are obscure for us and need some explanations, the following list and explain how to use it.

SEO Tip Move Hidden ASPNET Fields To Bottom of Page

Fri, 26 Dec 2008 15:22:24 GMT

There are pros and cons to which way you go with this setting. The default setting ensures that the data in hidden form fields like __VIEWSTATE is available early in the browser-side page loading cycle, so that if a user clicks a button and posts back the page before it has fully rendered/loaded, the server will still get the contents of these hidden fields. This is a good thing, as otherwise the server will likely be unable to process the page. On the other hand, there's a good argument to be made that search engines tend to weight content higher based on how close to the top of the page it is, and that in some cases search engine bots may only grab a relatively small chunk of a page (from the top) as part of their indexing process. Assuming there is some truth to this, then pushing real page content as high up in the actual HTML as possible would tend to yield better placements in search engines. Thus, setting this so that hidden fields render at the bottom of the page could make a big difference in how close the page's real content is to the top of the HTML file, especially if there is a great deal of viewstate on the page.

Logging Tips

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 04:11:30 GMT

Some good logging tips

ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate shipping in January

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 19:01:02 GMT

ScottGu talks about the upcoming Release Candidate of ASP.NET MVC V1 and the features it brings to the table

Improve your jQuery - 25 excellent tips

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 04:01:14 GMT

jQuery is awesome. I've been using it for about a year now and although I was impressed to begin with I'm liking it more and more the longer I use it and the more I find out about it's inner workings. I'd call myself an "intermediate" jQuery user and I thought some others out there could benefit from all the little tips, tricks and techniques I've learned over the past year. The article also ended up being a lot longer than I thought it was going to be so I'll start with a table of contents so you can skip to the bits you're interested in.

Is F# faster than C#

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 06:16:11 GMT

I had a bet with a co-worker that C# would out perform F# for a simple counting exercise. This turned out to be quite a surprise for many reasons. In this blog post I will try to explain why.