DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by senfo

Meet the C# 4.0 team

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 13:16:05 GMT

... and some dude from the VB team. Anders and the guys in room 2543, building 41 (where C# was born) talk about the new features that will be in the next version of C#. I so wanted to blogspam this one. Enjoy your direct link.

ASP.NET MVC preview release 4 - part 1

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 11:01:09 GMT

The ASP.NET MVC team is in the final stages of finishing up a new "Preview 4" release that they hope to ship later this week. The Preview 3 release focused on finishing up a lot of the underlying core APIs and extensibility points in ASP.NET MVC. Starting with Preview 4 this week you'll start to see more and more higher level features begin to appear that build on top of the core foundation and add nice productivity. There are a bunch of new features and capabilities in this new build - so much in fact that I decided I needed two posts to cover them all. This first post will cover the new Caching, Error Handling and Security features in Preview 4, as well as some testing improvements it brings. My next post will cover the new AJAX features being added with this release as well.

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.

Reduce ASP.NET Page size and complexity using JQuery-Part 1

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 16:16:04 GMT

This is my first post on asp.net blog. ASP.NET Ajax and JQuery are two different ajax framework. In this post I will show, how we can enhance gridview using ASP.NET Ajax and JQuery. I also compare the implementation of these frameworks. In next posts i will explain more about JQuery and ASP.NET Ajax and also tell you "How to combine the power of both framework". My Future post will related to ASP.NET and related frameworks.

Microsoft cracking down on community extensions

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:01:02 GMT

Microsoft released a tool called Microsoft Source Analyzer, or StyleCop. It analyzes source code for standards violations. It's a 1.0 release, so it doesn't do some things ... like have a published API for custom rules or MSBuild integration. So the community dug in and figured out how to do these things and now MS is firing off license-violation emails. Don't they get it? The community wants to use the product, but it's too limited ... these extensions help make it better.

Extending ASP.NET MVC OutputCache ActionFilterAttribute - Substitution

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 10:41:54 GMT

In this post, Maarten Balliauw explains how to add partial caching (a.k.a. substitution) to his previously created OutputCahce filter for the ASP.NET MVC framework.

Performing Subselects with Linq2Sql

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:16:03 GMT

Short screencast on performing Subselects with Linq2Sql

A Programming Job Interview Challenge #10 - The Missing Number

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 08:46:09 GMT

Here comes the 10th question in our job interview challenge series, the answer to the ninth one is also attached, good luck

Difference between LINQ to SQL and the Entity Framework

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 22:16:02 GMT

LINQ to SQL and the Entity Framework have a lot in common, but each have features targeting different scenarios.

Silverlight Developer Reference Posters

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:46:08 GMT

Silverlight Developer Reference Posters - Silverlight 1.1 & Silverlight 2

Creating an ASP.NET MVC OutputCache ActionFilterAttribute

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 19:16:07 GMT

This blog post explains how to create an OutputCache ActionFilterAttribute to enable server-side and client-side caching. In every web application, there are situations where you want to cache the HTML output of a specific page for a certain amount of time, because underlying data and processing isn't really subject to changes a lot. This cached response is stored in the web server's memory and offers very fast responses because no additional processing is required. Using the ASP.NET MVC framework (preview 3, that is), output caching is still quite hard to do. Simply specifying the OutputCache directive in a view does not do the trick. Luckily, there's this thing called an ActionFilterAttribute, which lets you run code before and after a controller action executes.

donjon - an agile project management web app

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 23:01:02 GMT

From hammet - the man behind the castle project "Our first goal is to make an agile project management web app. Why? We are not happy with the apps we have been using. They clearly are clueless regarding usability, and the pricing is unreasonable - not to mention the drug dealer selling model. The one that has a very decent UI is just not flexible. Also, I'm not a total fan of SaaS model, so I'd rather host my and my clients projects and important data."

HashSet to the Rescue

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:16:03 GMT

If you are using a generic List<T> to store unique object references in there is a better way. It's called the HashSet<T> and it is new in .Net 3.5 It's indexed and it's blazing fast.

Queuing up Your Remote Invokes

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:01:03 GMT

Serializing requests for remote invoke or multiple requests at will? Here is some sample code and a free download that can help with setting this up.

How To Create a WPF Custom Context Menu

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:01:02 GMT

An easy to learn and implement example about WPF custom context menu creation

How to get Cross Browser Compatibility Every Time

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 18:31:10 GMT

Cross-browser compatibility is one of the most time consuming tasks for any web designer. We've seen many different articles over the net describing common problems and fixes. I've collated all the information I could find to create some coding conventions for ensuring that your site will work first time in every browser. There are some things you should consider for Safari and Firefox also, and IE isn't always the culprit for your CSS woes.

Playing Nice With Service Locators

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 19:16:09 GMT

An explanation of how you can use the Service Locator pattern along with dependency injection to make your code more flexible in certain cases.

IE Sends Mozilla a New Cake for Firefox 3

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:31:02 GMT

Sean from Microsoft came by just a few minutes ago to drop off a cake for the Internet Explorer team. As people may recall, the IE team sent Mozilla a cake after Firefox 2 shipped and it seems that they wanted to continue the tradition.

Which kind of cast should you use in C#?

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:01:04 GMT

C# offers two casting operators: the prefix-cast and the as-cast. Although the two operators compile to different op-codes in the CLR, the practical difference between them is in how they handle failed casts. Prefix-cast throws an exception on cast failure, while as-cast returns null. It's easier to implement correct error handling when you use prefix cast, because it doesn't require manual checks for null values that can cause problems in distant parts of your program. Prefix-cast should be the default cast operator on your fingertips, that you use for everyday situations - reserve as-cast for special cases where performance matters.

Keep your .config clean with external config files

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 14:01:19 GMT

The web.config (or app.config for non-web applications) file is the central place to configure your web application, starting from connection strings, over application settings to ASP.NET specific topics like caching, authentication & authorization, sessions as well as HTTP handlers and modules. Normally the web.config starts as a neat little pet you can easily manage. But as soon as your project grows mature, web.config turns out to be a huge beast. This article shows you a way to tame the beast.

ASP.NET MVC: Strongly typing form methods with input values

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:46:03 GMT

Description of how you can use LINQ to implement a missing feature of the HtmlHelper class

Overview of concurrency in .NET Framework 3.5

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:01:14 GMT

An easy-to-digest high-level summary of concurrency on .Net: what are the different pieces, where they differ and how they relate. If you want to know the difference between a Thread and a BackgroundWorker, or what is the point of interlocked operations, read this article.

Sending SMTP Email Asynchronously

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 16:16:09 GMT

Sending email using the Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP) can be a slow process, particularly when sending large numbers of messages using, for example, a bulk email tool. This process can be accelerated with considered use of asynchronous sending.

ASP.NET MVC Tip #1 - Creating New HTML Helpers with Extension Methods

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 09:31:02 GMT

In this tip, Stephen Walther shows you how you can create two new HTML Helpers that you can use within an ASP.NET MVC View. I show you how you can use extension methods to create new HTML Helpers for displaying bulleted and numbered lists.

Animation in-depth with Silverlight 2.0 Beta - Part Five

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 06:31:02 GMT

In the last part I've shown how the VideoBrush can be used and videos can be animated by dividing MediaElement into two parts. In this demonstration of Silverlight animation I'll focus on transitional animation. We've seen this type of animation many times in movies, television commercials, music videos, in sting which we see at the beginning of any news. The wipe effect and dissolves are mostly used in film and television. There are other effects which fall into the category of wipe and dissolves.