DotNetKicks.com

General Discussion of Windows Azure

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 19:31:04 GMT

David and Wally talk about Windows Azure in general.

There is More Content than Just the Front Page on DotNetKicks

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:01:03 GMT

Are you tired of going to DotNetKicks and finding the same stories on the front page for days in a row? Trust me, there is some great content out there that never makes the front page. You just have to look a little deeper. When you do, you can help put some of that great new content in front of the masses. Even if you don't submit stories yourself, you can still help out by giving the initial votes that push a story to the front page.

Verifying code and testing with Pex

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:46:05 GMT

Earlier this week, Katrien posted an update on the list of Belgian TechDays 2009 speakers. This post featured a summary on all sessions, of which one was titled "Pex - Automated White Box Testing for .NET". Here's the abstract: "Pex is an automated white box testing tool for .NET. Pex systematically tries to cover every reachable branch in a program by monitoring execution traces, and using a constraint solver to produce new test cases with different behavior. Pex can be applied to any existing .NET assembly without any pre-existing test suite. Pex will try to find counterexamples for all assertion statements in the code. Pex can be guided by hand-written parameterized unit tests, which are API usage scenarios with assertions. The result of the analysis is a test suite which can be persisted as unit tests in source code. The generated unit tests integrate with Visual Studio Team Test as well as other test frameworks. By construction, Pex produces small unit test suites with high code and assertion coverage, and reported failures always come with a test case that reproduces the issue. At Microsoft, this technique has proven highly effective in testing even an extremely well-tested component." After reading the second sentence in this abstract, I was thinking: "SWEET! Let's try!". So here goes.

Training to become a ReSharper Samurai - Code Navigation

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 13:31:02 GMT

Another episode in the series on becoming a ReSharper Samurai. In this episode we will focus on various ways to use ReSharper to navigate your code, we take a look at the following features. 1. Navigate to file/type/member 2. Go to definition/declaration 3. Show list of implementers 4. Find usages within code 5. Quick Scrolling to methods/properties 6. Display parameter information 7. much, much more

Self Installing Windows Service

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 01:31:12 GMT

Reusable class that can be added to a Windows Service project to enable Install, Uninstall, Start and Stop functionality.

Fun With Named Formats, String Parsing, and Edge Cases

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:31:02 GMT

Recently I found myself in a situation where I wanted to format a string using a named format string, rather than a positional one. Ignore for the moment the issue on whether this is a good idea or not, just trust me that I'll be responsible with it.

Filtering List Items - The Yield Return Solution

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 18:46:06 GMT

Here we are talking about filtering list items again :).

Skip the Visual Studio Splash Screen

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 17:16:03 GMT

Anything to speed up Visual Studio.

Introducing a new large scale ASP.NET MVC project framework: Unifico

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:31:06 GMT

Written in C# against MVC Beta and ASP.NET 3.5.1 the code currently recreates the account 'component' of the MVC example template with a simple SQL Repository. The ASP.NET Membership Provider is completely replaced with a component written against the Unifico Framework's pattern. In this example several things are achieved: * A Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) ready to be remoted through Windows Communication Foundation while using StructureMap to provide dependency injection from WCF. * A repository based data source also protected with dependency injection that is exposed through in a pipes and filters manor. LINQ to SQL is used within a particular repository implementation, but is in no way exposed to the service. * A Model View Controller (MVC) pattern is also used. The only objects returned from a service are models, and all controller activity is within the service itself. Virtual Paths are used to store the views within the component's assembly. * Utility methods have been developed to provide paging across the service interfaces while leaving the 'control' in the hands of the service. The paging methods support multiple filters and multiple sorts within any paging method for a general service. * The framework supports unit testing, however unit tests need to be added specifically for the account service. A project has been setup to show where this is done. * 'Form' Models are used for requests to a service to allow all validation for a request to occur within the service. The responsibility of form validation is retained within a service in this manor, and prevents outside code from creating models.

Username Availability Validator AJAX Control, Release Demo

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 03:46:02 GMT

Back in September last year (2008), I posted a demo about Username Availability Validator Control. This control developed by the community on a contest initiated by Dave Ward on August 2008 as I remember. At that time the control was in beta. On October 2008 the control was released to public on its first version. And finally I wrote a a very simple documentation on the project Wiki.

Thinking only of the Junior Developer

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 20:16:15 GMT

How do you treat Junior developers, what code do you give them, and do you let their presence change your architecture?

Secure ASP.NET MVC Applications

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 17:16:07 GMT

One of the greatest advantages of ASP.NET MVC is that it provides a "Close to the Metal" programming experience and you have full control over the HTML. It aslo means that you should care about the vulnerabilities regards with your HTML. In webform, server controls would be automatically HTML-encoded their outputs. While developing ASP.NET MVC apllications, you should filter your HTML to avoid XSS attacks. Use the following HTML helper methods to avoid vulnerabilities in your ASP.NET MVC applications.

Most Interesting .NET StackOverFlow Questions

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 15:46:02 GMT

Today a short list of My Personal Most Interesting .NET Questions to me asked on StackOverFlow I founded.

Visual Studio Debugging Feature - Tracepoints

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 01:31:04 GMT

A tracepoint is simply a breakpoint that will emit a debug trace statement when it is reached. It can emit things like the current function name, stack trace, or the contents of a variable. What's really cool is that you don't have to actually stop execution. This allows you to quickly add debugging statements without the need to check out your code or remember to take the Debug.WriteLine statements out afterwards.

DotNetNuke Moves to CodePlex

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 00:46:02 GMT

Find out why the DotNetNuke project moved to CodePlex from SourceForge.

DimeCasts.NET - Free education vidoes.

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 15:01:02 GMT

DimeCasts.NET offer free education vidoes in field of various Microsoft related technologies. Advantage is most of these vidoes are 10 minutes or less in length.

Generic Method Overloading Selection Pitfall

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 18:01:02 GMT

Recently I ran into a very unexpected behavior when working with an overloaded generic method. Basically, the selection process for overloaded versions of generic methods is different than their non-generic counterparts. Please be aware of this issue!

Hidden Features of C#

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 12:01:02 GMT

In this article, I'll just link to a pretty great StackOverFlow Question about Hidden Features of C#. Most of C# Features are obscure for us and need some explanations, the following list and explain how to use it.

Is lambdas syntatic sugar, or Turkish delight?

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 12:46:04 GMT

In this post, Tuna tries to clarify his points on whether lambdas are syntatic sugars or not.

Spark Language Package - Preview 1

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 03:46:02 GMT

This is a very early copy of a msi which installs a Spark language package for Visual Studio 2008. It will put dlls into a Program Files\Spark directory and add just enough registry keys to add color and intellisense to files with a .spark extension.

Best of 2008: 5 most popular posts

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 11:16:02 GMT

Simone Chiaretta, MVP, has gathered his favorite blog's posts in this post. Don't miss it!

Extending ASPX Panel Control to produce Rounded Corners

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 05:16:21 GMT

This article shows how to create a custom control which encapsulates scripts. Also shows how to add method attributes to interact with VS Designer and ToolBox as well as providing intellisense dropdowns.

Migrating from .asmx web services to WCF web services

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 20:16:02 GMT

Learning how to migrate from .asmx web services to WCF web services

TheBeerHouse MVC Beta Now on CodePlex

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 18:01:14 GMT

Tired of bitching about Oxite? Here's a new MVC sample application to sink your teeth into -- an MVC version of the famous TheBeerHouse Starter Kit.

Making the Entity Framework Fit Your Domain - Part 1

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 17:16:04 GMT

Need to use the Entity Framework but don't know how to fit it into your domain? Come check out this series on CodeThinked.com where you will learn how to keep your domain entities fairly clean while using the Entity Framework.