DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by traskjd

The Mindscape documentation process

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 21:56:12 GMT

A walk through how a commercial software vendor generates the help documentation for their products.

MVC HtmlHelper for Gravatar

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 15:01:04 GMT

Ryan plugs his Gravatar library into MVC in order to create a HTML view helper for building gravatar images.

Preventing Double Form Posts

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 21:01:09 GMT

Most posts on this topic focus on disabling the submit button that causes the post. This works fine when you only have one submit control. But, if you have multiple buttons and/or link buttons that can cause a post and want to avoid potential conflicts if a user clicks a second submit control before the first one has been processed then this is really simply approach.

XNA Game Studio 3.0

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:01:20 GMT

The good folks who put together our gaming tools have released XNA Game Studio 3.0.

Json.NET 3.5 Beta 1 - Big performance gains, Compact Framework support

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 09:46:04 GMT

New in this beta release of Json.NET 3.5 are big performance improvements (400%), Compact Framework support and lots more.

ASP.NET MVC and Json.NET

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 03:31:02 GMT

Bringing Json.NET to ASP.NET MVC

LightSpeed 2.1 Released - includes new search API

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 08:01:02 GMT

LightSpeed 2.1, the performance minded object relational mapping framework, is fresh from the oven with new features like database independent full text search capabilities using Lucene.Net, Visual Studio integrated designer enhancements and a bundle of other new features.

Caliburn Alpha for WPF and Silverlight is here!

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 02:58:54 GMT

Caliburn is a framework designed to aid in the development of WPF and Silverlight applications. It implements a variety of UI patterns that are geared towards solving problems encountered in real-world scenarios.

ASP.NET MVC P5 released on Codeplex

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 10:16:12 GMT

Keeping on with the 6 weeks release plan, the ASP.NET MVC team quietly release P5 of ASP.NET MVC on Codeplex.

Json.NET 3.0 Released

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 20:46:02 GMT

The latest version of Json.NET brings lots of new features including Silverlight support.

Organize Usings Across Your Entire Solution

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 20:01:06 GMT

One of the features I worked on for the Visual Studio 2008 release was the new "Organize Usings" feature. This feature allows you to: Remove Unused Usings - Determines which using directives are not used in the current file and deletes them. Sort Usings - Sorts the using directives in a file.

A Serious Challenge for Open Source?

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 23:46:02 GMT

. . . what Mindscape has done is really quite impressive. To evaluate, accept, and incorporate feedback that quickly into the product and to have the installer ready that afternoon is impressive - for anyone.

Create apple.com-like breadcrumb using simple CSS

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 08:01:02 GMT

Janko shows an extremely simple and nicely polished way to create graphical breadcrumbs like on apple.com.

First Thoughts on Wrox Beginning ASP.NET MVC

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 22:16:02 GMT

Simone Chiaretta writes about the new Wrox book that he and Keyvan Nayyeri are writing and is entitled Beginning ASP.NET MVC. This book targets beginner ASP.NET MVC developers.

Free Visual Studio File Explorer Add-in

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 09:31:03 GMT

The Visual Studio File Explorer Add-in (sexy name we know, but hey, it's self documenting) is a free Tool Window add-in for VS 2008 that provides a Windows Explorer style file system view. It's particularly useful for performing routine file system tasks without the need to "context switch" away from Visual Studio, which can be time-consuming over the course of days and weeks. It is shell-enabled so extensions like TortoiseSVN work too.

IronNails : Rails like development for IronRuby with WPF/Silverlight

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 13:16:12 GMT

For my book IronRuby I'm working on chapter 4. That chapter is about doing WPF development with IronRuby. I started out with a straight port of Witty to IronRuby. As I was doing that the cogs started turning and I came up with a way to bring the rails style of development to WPF. I decided to investigate that route a little bit further and now I have a small framework that enables you to write WPF applications with the MVC paradigm. I decided to open that code up as open source and host it on github.

Elegant Invariant Checking with C# 3

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 07:16:03 GMT

Leveraging expression trees and extension methods to build a fluent invariant checking API.

Spark and NHaml - Crazy ASP.NET MVC ViewEngines

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 11:46:07 GMT

Scott Hanselman's talks about two ASP.NET MVC view engines.

A Small and Fast Domain Modeling Tool

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 05:46:03 GMT

Mindscape have released a major upgrade to their LightSpeed domain modelling / ORM tool. Version 2.0 includes a visual model designer integrated into Visual Studio, LINQ support, and the ability to access multiple databases concurrently.

How to use NDepend to improve code quality

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 16:16:09 GMT

Code quality is an important aspect of every software development project - discover how NDepend can aid in giving you a richer and more meaningful understanding of the quality of your code as well as helping to identify areas you could improve. This post is a high level overview of what you can achieve with NDepend.

Faster domain model development with schema round-tripping

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 05:01:02 GMT

Schema round-tripping is the ability for your domain model entities to be updated seamlessly when schema changes occur or, when your modify your model, for those changes to be propagated back to your database schema without any fuss. This article covers how to leverage schema round-tripping with LightSpeed 2.0's Visual Studio 2008 integrated domain design tool. This functionality is baked into every version, including the free express edition.

How to apply model level validation

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 03:18:11 GMT

This post covers how to add validation to your LightSpeed models using the new Visual Studio 2008 integrated design surface. Validation support has always been an important feature of LightSpeed and now with version 2 the ability to leverage them is easier than ever before. Validation of your model objects is something that should be done at the model level and the support for this is deeply rooted into LightSpeed.

Unit Test Code Coverage - What Is A Good Number?

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 09:47:23 GMT

Should you be aiming for 100% code coverage from your unit tests? Why I don't think it matters.

Rich domain modeling with Visual Studio 2008

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 04:16:03 GMT

LightSpeed 2.0 includes a powerful visual domain model designer that has support for database round tripping (auto update on schema changes, push model changes to the database), creates .NET 2.0 compliant or .NET 3.5 compliant code depending on the target framework of your project and customizable code generation templates. Drag and drop database support for SQL Server, Oracle, My SQL, SQLite and PostgreSQL is also supported right out of Visual Studio 2008. Free version available.

Getting rid of strings (2): use lambda expressions

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 09:31:02 GMT

In the first article of this series I talked about the problems with strings in code. This article will show you how you can use lambda expressions and expression trees as another tool to avoid strings