DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by alashcraft

Dotnetkicks Homepage Updates

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 04:19:13 GMT

Almost a year ago, DotNetKicks underwent some considerable changes including a new overall look to the site. Today, we again launched several new features.

Using Tika in .NET for extracting text out of documents

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 15:45:51 GMT

Tika is an open source Java-based tool for extracting information out of various different document formats. It can be used with Lucene for indexing and searching documents, among other things. In this post, Kevin Miller talks about how use Tika in .NET via the IKVM.net utility.

How to use Google Data API in ASP.NET MVC. Part 2 - YouTube

Tue, 25 May 2010 18:45:52 GMT

In this second part of my GData series I tried to explain how to use YouTube API for .NET to store/retrieve videos on/from YouTube.

List of Undocumented Stored Procedures in SQL Server

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 15:30:00 GMT

I have been searching for a list of Undocumented Stored Procedures in SQL Server for quite a while. Here is a list collected from forums and other sites for your reference

FOR XML Workshop - Understanding FOR XML RAW

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 13:15:00 GMT

This post explains how to generate XML documents using FOR XML RAW from TSQL (SQL Server)

How to use Google Data API in ASP.NET MVC. Part 1 - Google Analytics

Sat, 17 Apr 2010 08:00:00 GMT

This article shows you how to use Google Data API to interact with Google Analytics data and show your website's visitors statistics on your website.

Snapshot Databases - A Wonderful Gift to Testers

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 02:45:00 GMT

If you do not know how Snapshot database work, here is a quick note on the subject. However, please refer to the official description on Book-on-Line for accuracy. Snapshot database is a read-only database created from an original database called the "source database".

The black arts of custom Type conversion in c#

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 12:30:01 GMT

One of the little used features of c#, is user written implicit and explicit type conversion. Put simply: sometimes you have a object (custom or built-in .Net framework) and want to convert it to another type of object. While you can easily write left to right style code to accomplish this every time, there is a lot cleaner way of doing this by empowering your objects to cast themselves as another type.

5 Tips to get the most out of your coding time

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:00:00 GMT

I remember seeing an add from Microsoft I believe for hiring programmers and the jist of it was "We give you an office with a door". Why you might wonder?

DiffPlex - a .NET Diff Generator

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 08:15:00 GMT

DiffPlex is a combination of a .NET Diffing Library with both a Silverlight and HTML diff viewer. It is released open source on CodePlex under the MS-PL license.

The Kayak Framework: An easy way to speak HTTP with .NET

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 16:30:00 GMT

Kayak is a lightweight HTTP server for the CLR, and the Kayak Framework is a utility for mapping HTTP requests to C# method invocations.

Mercurial tutorial - by Joel Spolsky

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 04:30:00 GMT

Mercurial is a modern, open source, distributed version control system, and a compelling upgrade from older systems like Subversion. In this user-friendly, six-part tutorial, Joel Spolsky teaches you the key concepts.

Binding UI Events from View to commands in ViewModel in Silverlight 4

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 11:15:17 GMT

In previous two posts we covered wiring up the Views and ViewModels and Blendability and showing ModalDialogs in MVVM way. Today we will touch another problem that people starting with MVVM very often fail to address properly: Handling the UI Events of the View in the ViewModel while avoiding placing any logic in code behind of the View. So our design goals for this post are: * We want to be able to wire-up UI Events to the commands in ViewModel via DataBinding in Xaml without any code behind in the View * View should not be aware of the ViewModel's type or any other details of its existence - View should just use Silverlight's DataBinding to access its ViewModel public properties (its DataContext) regardless of what is actually set to be there * We want to be able to handle any event that occurs in View (that includes not only Button clicks but also Mouse events, Drag and Drop events, Loaded events etc).

Context and Best Practices

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:15:01 GMT

The Right Way versus the Better Way; Default Architectures; Starting Small

Optimize LINQ to SQL with PLINQO Futures

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:30:07 GMT

PLINQO future queries are a way to defer query execution until it is needed. The difference between standard IQueryable deferred queries and future queries is that the future queries are batched up and executed in a single round trip to the database.

Using CDN Hosted jQuery with a Local Fall-back Copy

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 12:45:00 GMT

How to use a jQuery hosted on a CDN with a fall back to a local version in case of an outage.

New Release of Pex and Code Contracts

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:30:00 GMT

Microsoft Research has released new versions of Pex and Code Contracts. You are required to go to DevLabs to download the commercial evaluation of Pex and Code Contracts. You can retrieve the academic version of Pex and Code Contracts from Microsoft Research.

.NET Framework 4.0 Poster

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 10:30:00 GMT

Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 Poster in DeepZoom - Silverlight

How Fanboys See .NET ORMs

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:15:00 GMT

A play off of the recent "How Fanboys See Operating Systems" post.

jQuery 1.4 Released!

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 21:00:07 GMT

In celebration of jQuery's 4th birthday, the jQuery team is pleased to release the latest major release of the jQuery JavaScript library! A lot of coding, testing, and documenting has gone into this release, and we're really quite proud of it.

Making NCloak fool Reflector (an implementation) : Paul Mason

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:15:00 GMT

In the last article of the series we took a look at two different methods for stopping Reflector being able to successfully decompile our code: inserting invalid IL, and modifying header information. Today we'll implement the more common approach: inserting invalid IL into each method inside our assembly making unreadable in Reflector.

How to not suck at a techincal interview

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 21:00:03 GMT

CORRECT LINK THIS TIME. Tips to improve your marketability during a technical interview. Mostly a rant :)

Creating Ribbon Applications on Windows 7

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 18:45:07 GMT

The ribbon concept was first introduced with Office 2007 and is now natively supported on Windows 7. Developers can create ribbon applications with rich user interface with either C++ or managed code such as C# or VB.NET. To get started with creating Windows 7 ribbon applications, you can review the ribbon guidelines and the ribbon roadmap available on MSDN and the PDC08 presentation on Windows Scenic Ribbon at Channel9. For C++ developers, this color picker sample app provides a quick look at how to work with color schemes using the ribbon framework. For C# developers, this ribbon library along with 18 sample applications shows how to add the ribbon feature to your Windows Forms applications. A good resource for all developers including VB.NET developers is this Windows 7 Training Kit for Developers, where you can find samples on ribbon and all other areas. It is worth noting that if all these sample applications require a ribbon compiler, uicc.exe, which is available in Windows 7 SDK. If you try to run them on a 64-bit computer, you may run into some errors that may be caused by the incorrect pre-build event command line which you can find on the project properties. You will have to fix the command line by fixing the %ProgramFiles% environment variable, or manually run the command line to generate required ribbon binary file, header file, and resource file. In some cases, you may be able to find a quick fix by copying three files, uicc.exe, uiccDLL.dll, uicc.xsd, to the same folder where the ribbon markup xml file resides. However, this quick fix requires that you copy these three files for each ribbon project, therefore it is not a very desirable solution.

Silverlight 4 - How to Capture Audio and Video from a Web Cam

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 18:00:31 GMT

One of the coolest new features in Silverlight 4 is the ability to capture audio and video input from Web Cameras. With a few simple lines of code, you can request permission to your users to leverage their capture devices and then capture both the audio and video streams. So far, there have been some great examples of how to capture the video and use it as a background "brush" to paint a screen in the browser to show what the camera sees along with a few samples for enabling "snapshot" images from the webcam. But no one has actually taken it all the way to saving the captured video and audio streams locally (in isolated storage) to allow for a later file upload of the captured video segment - Until now. Check-out this post from Mike Taulty's Blog - where he shows you how to successfully save the streams to disk: http://mtaulty.com/CommunityServer/blogs/mike_taultys_blog/archive/2009/12/30/silverlight-4-webcams-oncemorewithaudio.aspx

Visual Studio Myth Buster

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 19:30:04 GMT

Need help justifying to the boss why you need to explore all the cool new features that are releasing soon in Visual Studio 2010? Stuck in a rut on an older version of Visual Studio and feeling the "need for speed" when it comes to increasing productivity for architects, developers, testers, and all the other IT folks involved in the ALM process? The Visual Studio 'Myth Busting Matrix' reveals the benefits of upgrading to Visual Studio 2010 and helps dispel some widely held myths.