DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by DannyDouglass

Recursive Ruby Script to replace File/Directory Names & File Contents

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 14:09:47 GMT

Over this past weekend I began templating a project structure that we use at my day/evening/night job to allow developers to simply execute a script and provide a few parameters to initialize a new development project (including build script, fxcop analysis, unit testing, visual studio projects, etc.). I didn't think this would take that long despite being relatively new to the Ruby world. Oddly enough, I had trouble finding similar examples on the interwebs - even StackOverflow didn't have the answer! The horror, the horror! No matter, I'm a developer after all and should be, better be capable of handling this simple script. I decided to start simple and just use the directory global searching method to recursively get everything within my project template's directory:

Regex Hero can now translate a regular expression into English

Sat, 18 Dec 2010 06:40:11 GMT

Regular expressions are one of those things that many programmers dabble with enough to understand the concept, but not enough to memorize the syntax. Code completion is a big step towards making things easier. Beyond that, sometimes an explanation written out in English is just what you need.

Microsoft Visual Studio - From Past to Present

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 12:15:38 GMT

Recently I've been working at a client site where they are using Visual Studio 2005 for their main project. I've gotta say that I was a bit surprised since I haven't come across VS2005 for a few years. I immediately became nostalgic and decided to share. So I'm proud to present, Visual Studio - from past to present!

Slash your ASP.NET compile/load time without any hard work

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 14:41:32 GMT

Tips & tricks to make your ASP.NET development more enjoyable (cut down compilation time / first load time).

Simplify Using Xml Data with AutoMapper and Linq-To-Xml

Sat, 06 Nov 2010 17:55:31 GMT

I recently ran into a scenario at work that required manually consuming several SOAP web services, which I'm sure you can imagine was rather monotonous. A co-worker (Seth Carney) and I tried a few different approaches, but we finally settled on a solution that simplified consumption of the xml and ultimately made the code more testable. That solution centered around leveraging AutoMapper, an open source object-object mapping tool, to create a link between the XElements returned in the SOAP messages and custom contracts we created - in a reusable manner. I put together a quick demo that shows how you could use the same approach to consume and display the Twitter Public Timeline (using the API's Xml response type).

A Better Hg Command Line Interface: Console2 + PowerShell + Posh-Hg

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 11:57:56 GMT

Moving from Subversion to Mercurial was more than a change from a centralized version control system to a distributed solution. I also found myself moving away from the explorer integration provided by the Tortoise products to the command line for the execution of my hg commands. This approach is dramatically faster once you get used to the syntax, which really only takes a hot minute. Certain features in TortoiseHg still provide visual advantages that I find useful, such as the visual repository log. During an Agile.Net Bootcamp with Jimmy Bogard he showed us an collection of tools he utilizes to provide an improved Mercurial command line experience. The final product is a more descriptive prompt that displays branch information, as well as the number and types of changes made since your last commit.

Introducing 'Vingy' Add-in for VS2010 To search StackOverflow, Web etc

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 23:15:51 GMT

Vingy let you search the web (mainly sites like StackOverflow, CodeProject, MSDN etc) in a non intrusive way, with out leaving the IDE. Vingy is a simple, but effective add in for Visual Studio 2010 so that you can search the web in a non intrusive way, and can filter results based on sources.

8 Best open source alternative to NHibernate.

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 05:05:41 GMT

NHibernate is one of the best ORM library in .NET to build data access code faster. We identified best open source alternative to NHibernate. According to the requirement pick any library and build the data access layer in .NET.

ASP.NET MVC: Using asynchronous controller to call web services

Sat, 25 Sep 2010 01:01:48 GMT

Lately I wrote about how to make a lot of asynchronous calls to web services during ASP.NET page processing. Now it's time to make same thing work with ASP.NET MVC. This blog post shows you how to use asynchronous controllers and actions in ASP.NET MVC and also you will see more complex scenario where we need to gather results of different web service calls to one result set.

OpenID for ASP.NET MVC, A Quick Setup

Sun, 26 Sep 2010 18:00:52 GMT

If you need to get your ASP.NET MVC website setup with some basic OpenID Authentication, I can help get you started. All you need is a DLL, a view, and two controller actions.

What's Nu in the .NET World Part 2: Creating a Gem

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 00:46:13 GMT

If you are not familiar with the Nu project start by reading my first post in this series that gives an introduction to getting started with this promising tool. As a quick reference I'll post a paragraph from the last post introducing Nu: "Nu is an open source tool built by Dru Sellers (and several others) that aims at bringing Gems, one of Ruby's most revered features, to the .NET world. If you are not familiar with Gems I suggest you take a minute to read up on them. I would venture a bet that you are already familiar with at least one gem - Ruby on Rails. The following line of code is all that is required to install the Ruby on Rails gem (after installing the Ruby library of course)." This post is focused on sharing my experience in creating my first gem for the Spark View Engine. I would be doing you a great disservice if I did not start by saying how easy it is to create a gem. Actually easy is the wrong phrase - crazy easy is more telling. Since I would never ask you to take my word for it, it must mean it is time to show some code.

What's Nu in the .NET World?

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 16:27:24 GMT

If you thought the word "Nu" in the title of this blog post was misspelled, you are in for a treat. And trust me, you are not the only one who made that grammatical assumption. Nu is an open source tool built by Dru Sellers that aims at bringing Gems, one of Ruby's most revered features, to the .NET world. If you are not familiar with Gems I suggest you take a minute to read up on them. I would venture a bet that you are already familiar with at least one gem - Ruby on Rails. The following line of code is all that is required to install Ruby on Rails gem (after installing the Ruby library of course)...

HTML5 Support In Visual Studio 2010

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 12:45:52 GMT

I was trying to play around with HTML5 assuming that VS 2010 had shipped with HTML5 support but to my dismay it was not the case. Bummer! So I did a bit of homework and came up with an easy workaround.

Mercurial: Create Remote Repositories Using PowerShell

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 02:24:05 GMT

One limitation when using http as a publishing mechanism is that you cannot create a repository remotely; no if, ands, or buts about it. Another twist was that our CM (Configuration Management) procedures dictate that our developers are not permitted to RDP into the Mercurial server. This left us trying to decide how to allow developers to create repositories remotely since our http communication channel does not allow remote repository creation. This post details an approach leveraging PowerShell as a solution to this problem.

Working with WCF: Pt. 3 - Connecting To Your Service With A Client

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 08:00:00 GMT

As with almost everything in WCF, you have several options about how you want to consume your service before you even start to talk about things like transport or security. As expected there are benefits and draw backs to each of the approaches. We'll take a look at two of them in the post.

Supporting multiple submit buttons on an ASP.NET MVC view

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 17:15:00 GMT

A while ago, I was asked for advice on how to support multiple submit buttons in an ASP.NET MVC application, preferably without using any JavaScript. The idea was that a form could contain more than one submit button issuing a form post to a different controller action. The above situation can be solved in many ways, one a bit cleaner than the other. For example, one could post the form back to one action method and determine which method should be called from that action method. Good solution, however: not standardized within a project and just not that maintainable. A better solution in this case was to create an ActionNameSelectorAttribute.

Spearmen, Javelin Throwers, and the State Pattern, oh my!

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 23:32:15 GMT

Jamie Farser & Ayende Rahein recently had a conversation about using the State Pattern for units in a game Jamie is building. I've been following along trying to figure my way through the state pattern as well, and decided to take a stab at my own solution to Jamie's problem.

Asp.Net MVC Membership Starter Kit Released

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 12:30:06 GMT

Almost six months after the official release of Asp.Net MVC 1.0 and nearly a year after the last release of the starter kit, I've finally rewritten and released the Asp.Net MVC Membership Starter Kit.

C# Regions are not Useful? Give me a Break

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 08:46:02 GMT

I often see arguments about use of regions in C# code. And this is one of the most annoying things I see on the Internet in my opinion when it pertains to code structure. Whoever says regions are not to be used, I'd love to see your code and know what standards you have established as a team with your code base. I bet you it's a mess and the reason you don't like regions is because the developers on your team has abused use of them and that there is no logical pattern or team standard established.

Resizing images without loss of quality

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 21:31:45 GMT

ASP.NET provides us with System.Drawing namespace where we can find classes we can use to manipulate with images. There are many people out there who mistakenly think that Image.GetThumbnailImage is best choice for image resizing. You can easily create crappy images if you follow the code examples in previously pointed article. In this post I will show you how to resize images without negative side effects.

jQuery Playground from Google

Sat, 24 Jan 2009 18:46:02 GMT

Awsome tool to test jquery online

Verifying code and testing with Pex

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:46:05 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.

ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate shipping in January

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 18:01:02 GMT

ScottGu talks about the upcoming Release Candidate of ASP.NET MVC V1 and the features it brings to the table

BlogEngine.NET Christmas update

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 14:16:03 GMT

Some exiting things have been going on with BlogEngine.NET lately...

Building a simple multiplayer game with ASP.Net MVC and jQuery

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 08:16:17 GMT

Last weekend I had presented a small multiplayer-game built in MVC and jQuery as a sample for a speaking engagement. There isn't much to the "game", as you currently can only move around, but it helps illustrate how easy it is to use jQuery and MVC together to make something interesting. Who knows, maybe the source could kick-start development on your own game?