DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by bags

89 Ways for You to Become the Coolest Developer in the World

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:31:08 GMT

You can learn how to improve your programming skills, work better and enjoy it from this collection of advice from experienced developers.

CodeRush Xpress for Visual Studio announced

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:46:03 GMT

A free subset of CodeRush and Refactor! Pro is now available.

Documents 2.0 - Consumable Documents

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:46:02 GMT

Sidar discussing the need for more agile documents in business environments.

List of countries, cities, languages

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:31:03 GMT

You will find in the following links list of countries, cities, and their languages in CSV format, you can import into any database:

Improve Your Development Lifestyle

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 02:19:37 GMT

Developers are usually convinced and persuaded to drink lots of coffee, energy drinks, and sugary snacks to stay in programming Zen. Along with bad snacks you have the long night development crams where managers lure you with pizza, and early morning deployments with incentives of donuts. Take a look around your development environment and see how many people are wearing pants that are too tight, or count the number of bellies pouring over the belt.

Importance of a Personal Development Plan

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 16:18:14 GMT

Three mandatory books

SQL Server 2008 Express is now live!

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 04:16:09 GMT

I promised an update on SQL Express availability in my last post about the release of SQL Server 2008 so here it is. SQL Server 2008 Express is now available along with the release of the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, which is a prerequisite and Visual Studio Express SP1. As I mentioned, there are two more editions of SQL Express on the way. There are a number of prerequisites for SQL Server 2008 that you will have to install on your own before installing SQL Express. Here is the list and basic instructions:

How to run a software development company (INTO THE GROUND)

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 00:31:02 GMT

The series will cover the things you *shouldn't* do if you hold some sort of managerial stake in a software project. Sadly these tales will be from my own personal experience working for companies that have drifted into disarray. These examples will be embellished somewhat to drive the points home, but by and large, everything you will read in these posts will be true.

Documenting Coding Standards - Less is More

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 21:31:11 GMT

A colleague and I were recently invited to provide feedback on a client's coding standards and were sent a 60+ page document to review. In preparation for the meeting I diligently started to go through each section providing comments and suggestions as I went. But after about page 30 my concentration began to wane and my comments grew more and more sparse. The moral of this story... If someone that's being paid to review your coding standards is struggling to get through them then you can bet your bottom dollar your development team won't be reading them either. This post reflects on the things to consider when documenting your company's standards.

rules for spartan programmers : Using NDepend Query Techniques

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 22:23:41 GMT

Excellent content as always from the genius behind NDepend.

Some best practices for NHibernate by Ayende

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 23:01:11 GMT

A few hours ago I completed a code review of an application using NHibernate. This is not the first time I am doing such a thing, of course, and I noticed that there are quite a few areas where I tend to have comments in such code reviews. The following is based on several such code bases that I went through, and contains a partial list of things that you need to watch for.

Create PDF with C#

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 14:01:02 GMT

Create PDF with C# on the fly

NHibernate: Testing The Performance Urban Legend

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 02:01:10 GMT

I wanted to challenge the dogmatic urban legend passed down from .NET developer to .NET developer since the classic ASP days. That dogma simply states you should always access your database via stored procedure for "performance reasons". Inline SQL is BAAAAAAD. So I fired up Visual Studio, created a class and started writing tests.

Don't Use SELECT *

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 22:16:10 GMT

I've seen many developers actually using and abusing SELECT * FROM queries. SELECT * query not only returns unnecessary data, but it also can force clustered index scans for query plans because columns in the SELECT clause are also considered by the optimizer when it identifies indexes for execution plans.

Silverlight Photo Browser

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 14:12:10 GMT

Automatic on-the-fly image discovery and on-the-fly thumbnail creation make this Silverlight Photo Browser / Gallery application very easy to use.

C# - Singleton Pattern vs. Static Classes

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 23:11:21 GMT

Problem: Store some common data in a singleton or static class about your program in an object array, which you store in a class. It saves state between usages and stores some caches, and must be initialized only once and shared in many code locations. Making a new object each time would be expensive.

MVC Storefront Part 16: Membership Redo With OpenID

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 20:46:02 GMT

Robs new Screencast - the focus in this screencast is the membership system.

MVC Storefront, Part 15: Code Review With Ayende

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:31:14 GMT

Normally I would have gone through this many times already, however I have the good fortune of all your comments :). Even so, it's always a good idea to take a timeout and make sure you're not going off the deep end. In this episode I do a code review with Ayende and Steve Harman and have a really nice AHA! moment.

Difference between LINQ to SQL and the Entity Framework

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 04:16:02 GMT

LINQ to SQL and the Entity Framework have a lot in common, but each have features targeting different scenarios.

Replacing Loaded Assemblies - Paulo Morgado

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 02:46:02 GMT

Paulo shows us how to load, unload and replace assemblies at runtime.

Using "using" with a method

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 01:41:25 GMT

A nice coding technique I've just run into. It's one of those things that it's good to know about. Enjoy!

The 20 most kicked "top-10 stories" for Developers

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 20:46:04 GMT

A compilation of the 20 stories dealing with top-10 links or advices that were kicked most in 2008

Speed up Firefox when using Development Server

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:31:02 GMT

Using Firefox on Vista to view websites hosted by the Visual Studio Development Server can be unbearably slow. Pages take aeons (i.e. several seconds) to load while viewing the same site under IE does not suffer from this issue. Here's how to solve the problem.

Shortcut to Start and Stop MsSqlServer Service

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:27:36 GMT

How to create a shortcut to Start and Stop MsSqlServer Service

XML serialization does not support circular references

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:06:59 GMT

On a .NET 2.0 project I'm currently working on, where I'm getting my data from a webservice, I was getting the following error: System.InvalidOperationException: Er is een fout opgetreden bij het genereren van het XML-document. ---> System.InvalidOperationException: Er is een kringverwijzing aangetroffen tijdens het toepassen van serialisatie op een object van het type BusinessObjects.Domein. In English the error was: System.InvalidOperationException: A circular reference was detected while serializing an object of type BusinessObjects.Domein. I've found out that one of my objects must hold onto another object that is higher up in the chain which resulted into a circular reference. Yes indeed, this is true, but now it seems that xml serialization can't handle it. My business object has a logical parent-child tree structure and that's exactly how I want to have my business objects.