DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by spoulson

Async without the pain

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:36:25 GMT

Simple solution for generic asynchronous operations. "Why can't we wrap this using functional programming?"

Why are thread safe collections so hard?

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 17:31:03 GMT

"Writing a collection which is mutable, thread safe and usable is an extremely difficult process. At least that's what you've likely been told all through your schooling. But then you get out on the web and see a multitude of thread safe lists, maps and queues. If it's so hard, why are there so many examples?"

You're Doing It Wrong

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 20:31:07 GMT

Templating tends to break down because it forces you to treat code and markup as two different and fundamentally incompatible things. We spend all our time awkwardly switching between markup-land and code-land using escape sequences. They're always fighting each other -- and us.

Microsoft Certification Exam - Discount Code - Free Second Chance

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 19:46:08 GMT

Please note down this important code or share with your colleagues who are keen to take Microsoft Certification Exam. This unique code is only available through Microsoft MVP's and only published here to help community and no other intention. Share and Book mark this post. Complete your community responsibility.

ToolMan DHTML Library: Direct Manipulation Using JavaScript and CSS

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 11:17:04 GMT

A collection of Direct Manipulation examples that work in modern browsers. Each example is a proof of concept. I'm answering the technical question "Can I do this?" as opposed to the interaction design question "Should I do this?". Most of the JavaScript has been bundled into a reusable package called the ToolMan DHTML Library

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.

Implementing a red black tree in C#

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 13:01:08 GMT

This article talks about how to implement a red-black tree in C#. The implementation is generic, and it also implements IEnumerable<T>.

jQuery Intellisense in VS 2008 - ScottGu's Blog

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 23:31:20 GMT

Last month I blogged about how Microsoft is extending support for jQuery. Over the last few weeks we've been working with the jQuery team to add great jQuery intellisense support within Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express (which is free). This is now available to download and use.

An excellent Introduction to Microsoft F# by Luca Bolognese (PDC 2008)

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:20:32 GMT

Learn about Microsoft's new language, F#, a typed functional programming language for the Microsoft .NET Framework. F# combines functional programming with the runtime support, libraries, tools, and object model of .NET. Understand how F# asynchronous workflows help tame the complexity of parallel and asynchronous I/O programming and how to use F# in conjunction with tools such as Parallel Extensions for .NET

Visual Studio Fail -- How not to debug .NET exception handling

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 23:38:00 GMT

...no matter what try/catch I put in my user code, I couldn't catch this exception with the debugger. Visual Studio would halt execution every time with "Exception unhandled by user code"...

Suspicious DNK Accounts

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 23:31:29 GMT

Conclusion There is an incentive for publishers that use DNK to setup phony accounts that will help get stories from certain domains on the front page. So guess what happens ... it would appear that a certain number of people are doing this.

C# Structs

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 00:16:02 GMT

What are the benefit of structs in C#? When can they improve performance and memory use? See examples and benchmarks as well as screens from CLRProfiler and the Visual Studio debugger. Is this is the best struct article in the world? Maybe!

Clashing with a c sharp keyword? Use the @ prefix

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 22:14:58 GMT

Need to call a class class and a string string?

C# 4.0 New Features Part 2 - default and named parameters

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:16:03 GMT

New feature in C# 4.0 number 2, default and named parameters! Look at what they are, and how they are used in C# 4.0.

Delete entity or collection in Linq to SQL without getting them

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:16:15 GMT

In order to delete an entity or a collection of entity in Linq to SQL, you have to first get them and then delete them. This requires additional database roundtrip. Here's a strongly typed maintenance free way to delete entities directly using their primary key.

7 Steps To Shameless (Successful) Self Promotion

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 01:46:13 GMT

How do you get yourself known in the community and in the industry? Jeff offers 7 steps on how to get yourself out there.

LINQ Farm: Covariance and Contravariance in C# 4.0

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 11:31:02 GMT

This post is designed to help you begin to understand a new feature in the next version of Visual Studio that involves covariant and contravariant support for delegates and interfaces. Eric Lippert's series of posts on this subject are definitely the definitive reference at this time. I'm writing this overview of the subject simply as an appendix to his explanation, and as quick reference for folks who want to get up to speed on this technology.

Windows Azure is born

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 01:46:12 GMT

Ray Ozzie announces the new new for the new Windows-in-the-cloud.

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

Crack.NET - A runtime debugging and scripting tool for .NET

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 03:16:15 GMT

Crack.NET is a runtime debugging and scripting tool that gives you access to the internals of any .NET desktop application running on your computer. If you love Snoop and Mole for Visual Studio, you'll love Crack.NET, too. Crack.NET allows you to "walk" the managed heap of another .NET application, inspect all kinds of values on objects, and even manipulate those objects via IronPython scripts.

Windows comming soon to Amazon EC2

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 04:01:15 GMT

This is big news! Amazon are to enable Windows Support on EC2. this will allow users to kick of Windows images for running SQL Servers, IIS instances and anything else (even HPC stuff) in the cloud! SWEET!

EventArgs.Empty - Do You Use It?

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:31:08 GMT

Anyway, we can define EventArgs as a private member and use it instead of allocating an EventArgs object every time the event is raised. Fortunately, there is no need for that, C# introduce us the EventArgs.Empty...

Simulate a Windows Service Using ASP.NET to Run Scheduled Jobs

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 07:46:02 GMT

Back in 2005 Omar Al Zabir (Co-founder and CTO of PageFlakes) posted an article on the CodeProject web site Simulate a Windows Service using ASP.NET to run scheduled jobs that many of you have probably seen. If you liked the idea at the time but didn't do anything with it, you may want to take another look now. In the comments, dselkirk provided an alternative that really cleans things up that Erichero then improved upon slightly and converted to C#.

Lutz Reflector now owned by Red Gate

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 01:01:05 GMT

Lutz Reflector, the free .NET disassembler every developer developer should have, has been purchased by Red Gate software. Red Gate has stated they will continue to provide the tool for free.

40 CSS/JS Styling and Functionality Techniques

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 03:16:02 GMT

Designing effective web forms isn't easy, as we need to figure out more practical styling and functionality techniques to provide a great user experience. Recently there have been a number of noteworthy techniques such as styling different form fields, live validation, Context highlighting, trading options from field to another, slider controls and more - using CSS and different Javascript libraries. Below we present findings of search to more than 40 tutorials and demos to showcase the capabilities and robustness of CSS and Javascript.