DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by aloker

Visual Studio: default build action for non-default file-types

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 09:30:40 GMT

With a simple file you can tell Visual Studio to use a certain default Build Action for specific file types. This reduces the chance of missing files on the server when using the built-in publishing functionality.

Markup Preview

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 08:44:55 GMT

Markup Preview is a web app that instantly renders a preview of varied markup languages as HTML.

ReSharper 4.5 gone gold

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 13:16:11 GMT

JetBrains has released version 4.5 of their multi purpose productivity plugin for Visual Studio, ReSharper. This updates contains some pretty cool features. For example, solution wide analysis now checks for members that can be made internal. Also, JetBrains promises to have improved performance and memory use. All in all certainly an update that is worth installing, especially because updating from licenses for version 4.0 and above is free

Debugging speed of Gallio fixtures - reloaded

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 02:21:31 GMT

As Jeff Brown found out, the slowish debugging experience of MbUnit 3 tests is due to the fact the MbUnit 3 uses a single threaded apartment (STA), whereas MbUnit 2.4 uses a multithreaded thread apartment (MTA)

If you have a shiny new hammer

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 14:41:00 GMT

Extension methods are cool and tempting. But try not to overdo it - sometimes less is more. Contains a review of the Generic Extension Method Project.

Ruby's send in C#

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 23:46:02 GMT

An C# implementation of the send function found in Ruby.

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 has been released!

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 18:31:02 GMT

To keep up with a good tradition (see here and here), I'm being one of the earliest bloggers having great news on ASP.NET MVC: we are at version 1.0! This means production ready, supported, stable, .! Grab the download at Microsoft.com.

Boxing nullables

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 16:38:40 GMT

If your code makes decisions based on the type of a boxed value be aware that nullable values are boxed slightly different: they lose their "Nullable-ness" and become either null or the boxed version of the value that they hold.

Slow debugging of MbUnit tests with Gallio and TD.NET

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 16:36:21 GMT

Using Gallio with NCover

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:16:03 GMT

The transition from MbUnit 2.4 to MbUnit 3/Gallio is not as easy as one might expect. This article describes how Gallio can be used with NCover in manual or automatic builds.

Algorithms: recursive and iterative depth first search

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 23:49:33 GMT

Just a quick post about an iterative depth first search algorithm which allows for "correct" unwinding during backtracking.

Big websites gone small

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 04:30:11 GMT

If you need a simple way to generate a thumbnail of a website, have a look at thumbscreator.net. This service created by Jan Welker and Klaus Bock allows you to create snapshots of websites in three different sizes by simply passing its address to a specific URL.

Re: Health Monitoring in ASP.NET 3.5

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:34:07 GMT

A description of the configuration elements and the preconfigured values related to health monitoring for ASP.NET.

.NET - Health Monitoring in ASP.NET 3.5

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 12:31:02 GMT

I am a big advocate on less is more, and when it comes to writing code to monitor an ASP.NET application, less code is definitely more. As a developer, once you have finished developing your application and it's deployed into production, you'll need to monitor it and have it notify you when something goes wrong. There are several ways to do this, from utilising the global.asax file to writing custom classes. But a little known feature in ASP.NET is health monitoring. This gives you the ability to monitor the health of an ASP.NET application. This article won't delve into the specifics of creating your own custom health monitoring class, but it will focus on what is available to ASP.NET developers out of the box.

Simple AOP: integrating interceptors into Windsor

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 21:07:15 GMT

In the previous article of this serious we learned how to intercept method invocations using DynamicProxy2 and IInterceptors. However, we had to create the proxy instances manually. If you use Castle Windsor you can let the IoC container create the proxies and inject the interceptors.

First attempts with Gallio

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 19:25:15 GMT

From time to time I like to check my development workflow and tools to see whether I'm still up to date. This time I thought it might be a nice idea to give Gallio a shot. If you don't now Gallio: it is a platform to uniformly run unit tests from whatever unit test framework (MbUnit, NUnit, MSTest etc.) you use. It also integrates into a bunch of other tools which I use (CruiseControl.NET, NAnt, NCover, ReSharper et al). So basically it sounds like a cool idea. Here's my list of thoughts after using Gallio for 60 minutes.

Simple AOP: call interception with DynamicProxy

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 07:44:24 GMT

Aspect oriented programming (AOP) allows us to keep implement different concerns in isolation. In this article series I'll describe ways to make use of AOP without much hassle. After the introduction to AOP in the first article I'll show how we can use Castle DynamicProxy to intercept method calls for the injection of advice code

Simple AOP: introduction to AOP

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 19:28:49 GMT

Aspect oriented programming (AOP) allows us to keep implement different concerns in isolation. In this article series I'll describe ways to make use of AOP without much hassle. This first article serves as an introduction to AOP to those that are not familiar with aspect orientation.

Subtle design: inheritance vs roles

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 16:05:11 GMT

Modelling relationships between entities as an is-a relationship, ie inheritance, is often the "obvious" choice, but can be very inflexible. Using a role-player relationshop can be much more flexible and will often reflect the reality better.

Subtle design: snapshot cardinalities

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:03:03 GMT

Cardinalities in UM diagrams can be interpreted in different ways with respect to time. Be explicit whether you're talking about snapshot cardinalities or historic cardinalities.

Using Nant for Metabase backup on 64bit Windows Server 2003

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 21:30:52 GMT

Using NAnt to backup the IIS Metabase on a 64 bit platform turns out not to be a trivial task. Here's what I did to solve the issues I faced.

NDepend update brings 64 bit compatibility

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 01:06:09 GMT

The current version of NDepend added support for dependency graphs under 64 bit operating systems. If you remember, this was one of the few points of criticism I mentioned in my little review on NDepend. Visual NDepend can now visualize the dependencies between types, namespaces and members

NDepend 2.10 Released - Interactive Code Dependencies Graph

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:16:02 GMT

This is indistinguishable from magic!

Getting rid of strings (3): take your app settings to the next level

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 00:31:02 GMT

In the first article of this series I talked about the problems with strings in code. This article will show you how you can use lambda expressions and expression trees as another tool to avoid strings

Retrieving values from an IDataReader

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:01:52 GMT

Despite the undoubted advantages of ORM you probably need to fetch data directly from an IDataReader from time to time. Getting values out of the data reader is easy at first glance. However, there are some issues that you should be aware of