DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by raymoni

My Year With TDD

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 16:46:02 GMT

It's been over a year now since I have been developing using TDD (Test Driven Development) as my primary development practice. I wanted to reflect on what it has done for me professionally. In reality, the past year has been great for my professional career in many ways.

ScottG:October 22nd Links: ASP.NET, Visual Studio, WPF and Silverlight

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 01:46:09 GMT

Latest quality link collection by Scott

Dynamically Add Text to Images Retrieved from the DB using HTTPHandler

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 19:01:07 GMT

We often create applications where we retrieve images from the database and display it on the page. At times, we may need to add some text or a copyright notice dynamically on the images. This article discusses how to do so using an ASP.NET Http Handler.

Handycons - a free, hand drawn social media icon set, By Janco

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 11:31:02 GMT

Handycons is a free, hand drawn social media icon set that contains 12 icons. Package contains icons for del.icio.us, Digg, Mixx, DesignBump, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Developer Zone, DesignFloat, Technorati, Twitter and RSS feed and Email icon, of course. All icons are available in four sizes: 16x16, 24x24, 32x32 and 48x48 pixels

Essential Visual Studio Tips & Tricks that Every Developer Should Know

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 07:01:02 GMT

In this blog entry, Stephen Walther lists the essential tips and tricks that every developer who uses Visual Studio 2008 should know. The list is kept brief. The list focuses on only those tips and tricks that can be used on a daily basis. Almost all of these tips and tricks are just as useful regardless of whether you are building an ASP.NET Web Forms or ASP.NET MVC application.

XAML to PNG with server-side WPF

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 16:01:03 GMT

XAML to PNG with server-side WPF sample

Accessing all the opened forms

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:13:51 GMT

Code snippet showing how to access all currently opened forms

Automate SQL Server Express Backups

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 17:02:17 GMT

This is a very handy little guide on how to automate backups or any other job using SQL Server Express 2005.

Services: Receive Configuration Updates without Restarting the Service

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 20:27:55 GMT

Services: How to Receive Configuration Updates without Restarting the Service : When using the configuration watcher, when you change the config file, it will refresh the sections that you passed into the constructor to refresh. You can actually dispose your inversion of control container and rebuild it after receiving notification of changes to your config file without having to restart the service.

[.NET] C# 'is' operator

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 18:49:41 GMT

The C# 'is' operator looks like a boring little fella at first, but once you get to know it you will eventually appreciate it - it checks if you can safely cast an instance of an object to a type

Batching in ADO.NET Data Services

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 17:53:44 GMT

In the post the author explains how to batch operations into one HTTP request in order to increase performance in ADO.NET data services.

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

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 21:16:13 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.

Data structure zoo: 6 ways of implementing an ordered set

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 02:20:25 GMT

This article compares six different ways of implementing an ordered set: AVL tree, red-black tree, treap, splay tree, skip list, and a pre-balanced tree. The different data structures make different trade offs and ultimately arrive at curiously different solutions that fit a variety of real-world use cases.

Google Chrome - Finally a Web2.0 browser

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 17:02:14 GMT

Google has silently released its own browser named Google Chrome. Their logo colors are very googlish and they have incorporated security features that we have only seen so far in the beta releases of IE8.

250+ .NET Interview FAQ's for Developers

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 00:16:11 GMT

A comprehensive list of 'good' ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET and .NET Framework questions for beginners and experienced people. Also a good read for people who want to refresh their memory with .NET concepts or take interviews on a regular basis.

Improve CollectionView Sorting Performance in WPF

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 08:24:46 GMT

A simple technique to minimize the number of refreshes to a collection view by using the DeferRefresh method.

Automating CRUD Operations with LINQ to SQL Part I

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 07:21:04 GMT

Can automated CRUD with LINQ to SQL improve your data access. This series takes a look at one strategy that eliminates repetitve LINQ queries by generating them on the fly! Part I features gives us an overview of the architecture which makes use of Fowler's Repository and Query Object patterns.

Alert - Don't register domains at Yahoo!

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 01:58:43 GMT

The renewal cost for domains registered at Yahoo! have gone up 251% to $34.95 (or higher!) per year after the initial registration.

Visual Studio Next Wish List

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:02:33 GMT

This is a list of things I hope to see added or improved in the next version of Visual Studio.

IE8 Beta2 - The RIA Slice (Silverlight WebSlice)

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:46:02 GMT

The Internet Explorer Beta 2 was released yesterday introducing quite some new features about which you already probably read in one of the various like the IE8 Homepage or the announcement on the official IE Blog. However there may be a feature that isn't mentioned too often which is the fact that now with beta2 RIA technologies like Silverlight are also supported in the flyout of a WebSlice. This is something that wasn't available with Beta1. And since it is not as obvious to integrate a Silverlight portion into a WebSlice I will give you a littel walkthrough on how to do that. First of all I want to introduce you to the concept of the different sources from which a WebSlice can retrieve its information. To understand that we first need to differentiate between the two main components of a slice which is the button in the favorites Bar on the one hand.

Loading Images Asynchronously Inside an ASP.NET GridView

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 23:31:04 GMT

Retrieving and displaying images in a GridView is a time consuming task. If done synchronously, this task can at times test the user's patience. One way to provide a good user experience is to load the images asynchronously. So when the GridView loads, we initially display a default image for the user to view, while the actual images are being loaded from the database. In this article, we will see how to do so.

Patten Matching in C# 3.0

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 06:08:50 GMT

Pattern matching works best with built in facilities in the language, yet this was fun to implement. Basically a pattern matching statement(expression, computation) is of type Type1 => Type2 which means it get a value of type Type1 and returns a value of type Type2. We need a set of pairs of lambdas. Each pair consists of computations of type (Type1 => bool, Type1 => Type2). First item of this pair helps us to decide if we must execute the second part or not...

The true meaning of readonly for value types

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 23:53:05 GMT

The article describes the side effects of making value type fields readonly.

Building a generic IoC wrapper.

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 23:29:48 GMT

This post steps through the process of creating an IoC wrapper that allows your application to be decoupled from the choice of IoC container. Using the IoC wrapper you can swap out IoC containers without affecting your application code and having to update code / references.

Open popup windows in IE/Firefox and return values using ASP.NET

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 17:31:16 GMT

This article explains how to transfer values between the Parent page and a Pop-up window. The code has been tested against IE7 and Firefox.