DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by wisemx

ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 and Form Posting Scenarios

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:01:03 GMT

Another epic post by The Gu

How to Simulate Cookies

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 22:08:53 GMT

how to simulate httpcontext cookies for unit testing of asp.net components

Help us making IE8 better

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 14:17:03 GMT

Ok, you should know that we just released Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 and that is is awesome (check my mini-mini-mini review here). I'm sure you downloaded and installed it and started experiencing all the cool features. But. did you find sites that do not work well with it? Report them and help us making IE8 better!!! Just install the "Report a Webpage Problem Internet Explorer 8.0 Beta Add-On" and make sure you let us know when something is not quite right!!!

Form validation with ASP.NET MVC preview 5

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:31:02 GMT

In earlier ASP.NET MVC previews, form validation was something that should be implemented "by hand". Since the new ASP.NET MVC preview 5, form validation has become more handy. Let me show you how you can add validation in such a ridiculously easy manner.

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.

Free SQL Server Videos

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 00:31:10 GMT

Free Training and Videos for Microsoft SQL Server. Hours of content covering tips and tricks, along with a whole slew of videos on backups. The site is still growing and there's an RSS feed you can use to be updated of newly added videos.

Advisory: Daylight saving time changes in Brazil and Pakistan for 2008

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 01:11:38 GMT

Brazil has published new dates for daylight saving time (known in the country as the início do Horário de Verão) for 2008-2009. As confirmed on Brazil's Ministry of Energy web site, the Electric Power Sector Monitoring Committee (aka the Comitê de Monitoramento do Setor Elétrico, or CMSE) set the new dates for DST, which will begin on October 19, 2008, and end on February 15, 2009. See this link for more details (in Portuguese) or this link for the translation into English. Pakistan will delay their "fall back" this year, as confirmed on the DAWN site here, Pakistan's federal cabinet extended DST to Oct 31/November 1, which initially began on June 1 this year. This is a delay of the change that was supposed to happen on September 1: as such, clocks will "fall back" by one hour on November 1 rather than September 1. (This information has also been updated here: here on the faridi.net new site.) It appears that the information has not yet been posted to any government sites in Pakistan.

Check out my blog's Webslice (alt: how to add a Webslice to your blog)

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 23:59:21 GMT

(Developer and Platform Group, Microsoft Ireland) So having just installed IE8 beta 2 today I thought I'd have a go at creating a Webslice for my blog...Turns out it's pretty easy, and I was even able to put a version of the Popfly mashup from my last post in my preview (added my blog's logo to make the slice a bit more visually appealing - clearly I missed my vocation as a designer). Since it uses a mashup, it has active content (e.g. javascript) so as a result I needed to use an Alternative Display Source.

Dear Asp.Net Developers: Stop Making Our Technology Look Bad

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:01:11 GMT

Have you ever tried to use one browser and one browser only? This article outlines how impossible it can be even in 2008 to do. There are countless public facing Asp.Net web sites that require Internet Explorer. The perception and impact this has on the non Asp.Net community is something developers need to think about. It is an interesting read that provides a lot of insight into the problem and some ways to fix it.

IE8 Beta2 - The RIA Slice (Silverlight WebSlice)

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 08:46:02 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.

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 released

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:47:18 GMT

The second beta of Internet Explorer 2 is now available for download.

New: Microsoft Virtualization Feed aggregates site

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 17:43:56 GMT

The latest news and opinion from virtualization experts worldwide. Posts are updated in real-time without moderation.

Express Yourself (2008 Express Product updates)

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:16:46 GMT

I am interested in the Express version of our developer products for a couple of reasons: 1. These products provide a gateway to Microsoft developer technologies for free 2. SmartCare (the project that I personally volunteer for in Zambia) uses SQLExpress 3. These products are really lightweight and will install and run on older and/or more lightweight developer machines

How to respond with code 404 (Not Found) in ASP.NET

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 23:01:01 GMT

Quick tip on using HttpException

Completely Scripting a SQL Server Database

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:16:02 GMT

A guide on how to easily script out an entire database (schema and data) using the Database Publishing Wizard. A tool that you may not know you have access to. And if you have Visual Studio 2008, you already have installed!

SQL Server Agent cannot be started after adding an Alias Local Host

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 13:32:44 GMT

SQL Server Agent cannot be started after adding an "Alias Local Host Server" We might find ourselves in the following scenario: for a SQL Server 2005 edition, you accidentaly specify a wrong "Alias Local Host Server" in Management Studio. Now, what happens is that, when the SQL Server Agent starts, it tries to connect to this ALIAS and if the connection fails, the service doesn't start. What we see in the SQL Server Agent Logs can be similar to:

MSSQL Compressed Backup 1.0 Released

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 21:23:52 GMT

Version 1.0 of MSSQL Compressed Backup has been released. This is a command line utility that allows you to backup or restore your SQL Server 2005 databases to/from compressed files such as zip, bzip2, or gzip.

XamlPadX 4.0

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 17:05:14 GMT

So I finally got a chance to update XamlpadX and heres the new version. Whats new. The UI has been revamped to give the Blend sorta look. Menus have been rearranged to maximize the space. New addins: Clipboard viewer - which works well for analyzing rtf/xaml ... Path Designer/Jasema (thanks to Marlon) Snapshot utility to take snapshots and save the xaml rendering Syntax highlighting and collapsing (thanks to the editor control from SharpDevelop project) Error logs - left bottom corner has a link to the stack trace when there is an error Error light - editor has a red/green box at the bottom right corner Bug fixes/code restructuring

High Quality Image Resizing with .NET

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 19:16:02 GMT

Even though you just shrinks images, the quality of produced images is usually worse than the quality of original images. Learn how to use interpolation to resize images with a better quality.

Dr. StrangeLinq or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Linq

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 01:24:36 GMT

So, I finally got around to writing this up. Should have done it a long time ago. People have been asking me for a while where LINQ goes. Does it go in the Data Access Layer or in the Business Layer or ...? My stock answer has always been: "It goes where ever you want it to go." But lately I just don't feel like that is good enough. I was recently asked this again at a user meeting and from an email sent by Bob P. from Stillwater, OK. Once and for all here is the answer that I managed to come up with:

sqlexpress FAQ: Switching between SQL Server 2008 editions

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 18:45:01 GMT

Switching between SQL Server 2008 editions There is an extra step that you need to take when upgrading from one edition of SQL Server 2008 to another, for example when upgrading from Express to Express with Tools. This extra step is called Edition Upgrade (sometimes SKU Upgrade) and the net result is that you have to run the install wizard twice when upgrading an existing instance to a different edition. Why did we do it? http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlexpress/archive/2008/08/24/faq-switching-between-sql-server-2008-edtions.aspx

Display Request Processing Time in ASP.Net pages

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 16:53:31 GMT

There are some sites in internet who are displaying the time taken to process the request given to the server at the end of every page. This article will help us to implement this feature in our asp.net sites.

Typed DataSet : TableAdapter CommandTimeout

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 16:40:44 GMT

If you want to set CommandTimeout for Typed dataset's TableAdapter there is no public property exposed.You could still either extend the partial TableAdapter class or modify the existing designer generated code to modify CommandTimeout behaviour.

Cutting Shapes in Expression Blend

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 16:39:10 GMT

Somebody asked the other day how one can cut a shape in Blend. Blend doesn't currently have a scissor tool, but Blend has a set of geometric operations that can be used for this. Suppose we have a shape like this:

Tweetake Backs Up Your Tweets to CSV Files

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 16:38:22 GMT

There's a good chance Twitter might never lose all the messages, replies, following lists, and other data its users have racked up over its short, expansive life--then again, it's not exactly the paradigm of reliable service, either. Even if you don't need (or care) to secure your messages, free service Tweetake does a hack-happy job of grabbing selected parts of your Twitter profile or the whole thing and dumps it into an easily-opened Comma Separated Value file.