DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by traskjd

A Simple .NET Profanity Filter

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 10:29:48 GMT

A website I am working on right now accepts public comments, and one of the requirements is to do a basic check for dirty language. Surprisingly for such a common problem I wasn't able to find any code on the net that did what I wanted and so I've ended up writing my own. The Censor class is pretty simple: you give it a list of words you want to censor, either simple text or with wildcards, and the censor will star out any matches it finds.

Model design - refactoring domain models using LightSpeed

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:15:00 GMT

If you've used Visual Studio for any length of time, you undoubtedly make heavy use of refactoring. Even the simple refactoring of renaming a class or method and having Visual Studio automatically update all references is a huge time-saver. Until now model design with designers have not provided good refactoring support. This post details how the LightSpeed model designer now supports partial class, solution wide rename and convert to manual implementation refactorings. Provide feedback on domain model refactorings you would like to see.

Working with large domain models just got easier

Wed, 27 May 2009 12:15:00 GMT

One painful thing when working with design surfaces for domain models in most products is managing very large models. Hundreds or thousands of domain entities are difficult to manage visually. In this post Ivan details how Mindscape LightSpeed now includes filtering - filter for entities based on their name or even tag up your entities to create custom sub views. Particularly powerful is being able to show associated entities and filter by eager load graphs. Can't remember what entities are going to be pulled back by a certain load graph? Just filter it and see!

No bandwidth MSDN: Reflector

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 01:01:17 GMT

How you can use Reflector to browse the insides of the .NET framework classes and why choosing Reflector over MSDN will make you a better developer.

Mindscape LightSpeed Designer Visual Studio Addin

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 10:46:02 GMT

The LightSpeed Model designer is integrated directly into Visual Studio so that you don't have to leave your development environment to create a rich domain model. With a sophisticated design surface that supports both model first and database first approaches you can work exactly how you want without having the tools get in your way. The LightSpeed designer is available as part of every edition of LightSpeed. See their website for a free fully functional trial of their Express Edition. See www.mindscape.co.nz for downloads.

Blog Driven Design

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 07:11:03 GMT

Blog Driven Design is discovering code is too verbose to reasonably include in a blog post and is the additional work put into the design to trim it down to a blogable size.

Kobe - In the nuts & bolts and don't really liking it

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 21:16:02 GMT

There is another ASP.Net MVC sample app, this time it is official, passed the proper review procedure, and is explicitly marketed as "intended to guide you with the planning, architecting, and implementing of Web 2.0 applications and services." I am saying all of that in order to distinguish it from Oxite, which was non of this things. There have been a couple of reviews of Kobe already. Frankly, I don't really care for them, mostly because I think that they dealt too much with nitty gritty details of the app that doesn't really matter much. I don't much care for extra using or the use of System.Int32 vs. int, the naming convention used or even what sort of HTML formatting they used. I mostly care about the code and architecture. So I decided to take a look myself.

Native JSON in IE8, Firefox 3.5 plus Json.NET

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 13:46:04 GMT

This post looks at how to use the new native JSON API in IE8 and Firefox 3.5, and how it can complement Json.NET's server side JSON support by parsing and generating JSON on the browser.

Business for geeks: Naming your software company

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 02:31:03 GMT

A second post in the series about starting a software development tools company covering the process undertaken in picking the name of the company. Covers points to consider when picking a name for your own software brand. This isn't strictly code but might be interesting for entrepreneurial .net geeks out there.

CodePlex Project of the Month audio interview: Json.NET

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 20:31:03 GMT

An audio interview about Json.NET, the March CodePlex project of the month. Interview covers what is JSON and Json.NET as well as the trials and tribulations of managing an open source project.

ASP.NET MVC for RoR developers: do as locals do

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:16:12 GMT

A few days ago, Simon Tokumine, a Ruby On Rails developer from UK who had to build a web app using ASP.NET MVC wrote a nice post that makes a comparison between RoR and ASP.NET MVC. In this post I'm going to give him and to other RoR developers that want (or are forced to) evaluate and eventually use ASP.NET MVC in a project the tips that they need to do as locals do

Starting out - The story of starting a software tools company

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 04:01:10 GMT

Not strictly about coding, this post talks about starting a business that builds tools for software developers (in this case, tools for developers on the Microsoft stack). Covers some of the lessons learned and experiences in the first few months.

Git/Github survival guide

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 18:16:10 GMT

Now that all the cool guys are moving to Git/GitHub, Ivan posts a survival guide, with all the most useful commands of git and how to get started with github/git

ASP.NET MVC Tutorial Part 4: Model binding and easy validation

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 05:44:25 GMT

Part 4 of Jeremy Boyd's ASP.NET MVC 1.0 tutorial covers setting up your model bindings so that you can more easily validate your domain objects and present validation failures to your end users. It digs into using the xVal Framework with LightSpeed entities to simply validation concerns - bridging server side and client side validation.

ASP.NET MVC Tutorial Part 3: Setting up your website

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 05:37:15 GMT

In this third installment of Jeremy Boyd's tutorial on getting started with ASP.NET MVC 1.0, he covers setting up your website, where to manage your database connection, configuring your controllers and then driving data into your View.

ASP.NET MVC Tutorial Part 1: Creating the model

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 05:27:05 GMT

First in a series of blog posts by Jeremy Boyd on going end to end with the ASP.NET MVC framework 1.0. This post outlines setting up your domain model and outlines the intentions of the rest of the tutorials to follow - leveraging Ninject, JQuery, LightSpeed and NUnit.

Pimp your command-line for git

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 03:13:17 GMT

Show your git branch in both bash and powershell

Mindscape releases open source ASP.NET MVC extensions

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 04:01:03 GMT

Mindscape have released an open source library with a collection of helpful extensions to make developing solutions with the ASP.NET MVC framework easier. Attention has been paid to ensuring it's easy to deliver solutions based on LightSpeed but there is also significant samples and code for developers working on MVC solutions with other domain modeling tools. Patches and suggestions are welcome.

ButtercupReader - A Silverlight Digital Talking Book Reader

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 07:19:41 GMT

Launched at Mix09, ButtercupReader is a free Silverlight 2.0 application for viewing and playing digital talking books (DAISY) on the web by blind and partially sighted users.

ioDrive, Changing the Way You Code

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 20:31:07 GMT

A look at the new ioDrive device and how devices like it will drastically change how you think about performance critical data storage applications.

IronRuby MVC progress

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 05:31:12 GMT

A progress update on the implementation for Ironruby and asp.net mvc

Unit testing O/R Mappers - Feedback wanted

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 06:15:33 GMT

This blog post explains how developers can stub out parts of their repository and entities to more easily create in memory tests. It examines one approach, highlights planned future enhancements to make testing LightSpeed easier and asks the question - what would developers like to see to aid in testing their domain models.

Single table and concrete table inheritance with LightSpeed ORM

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 01:46:02 GMT

One of the benefits of working with an O/R Mapper is the ability to use inheritance and have your objects still persist to the database. In this post, Mindscape explains the difference between two types of relational inheritance - Single Table and Concrete Table. The post also demonstrates how to create these models using the LightSpeed O/R Mapper.

A New Look for Visual Studio 2010!

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 04:46:02 GMT

At the PDC and TechEd EMEA last year we described our new editor support built on the WPF technology in .NET Framework 4.0. Today I'm happy to reveal the new UI for Visual Studio, also built on WPF:

WPF Flow Diagrams 1.0 Released

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:33:53 GMT

Mindscape have released WPF Flow Diagrams - easily create rich interactive flow diagrams in your WPF solutions with this powerful component. Commercial, but with a 14 day trial, it's useful to explore if you need this capability in your applications.