DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by deepakkapoor

4 Great Tools to use with Visual Studio

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 01:16:02 GMT

Today was a slow day so I was trying some Visual Studio Add-Ins for our team to help in the development and here are the ones that made the cut.

Get Processor Information In .NET Using C#

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 11:12:21 GMT

I recently had a requirement to programmatically detect the number of Processors on a machine. I thought this was a simple enough task. System.Environment.ProcessorCount gives me that information. But I was in for a surprise. Let me walk you through my findings.

.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.

Writing Windows Forms Client for Live Search

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 18:01:40 GMT

In this article we will look at how to write a Windows Forms Client to access Microsoft Live Search API. Via this API you can use the power of a giant search engine within your application. While developing our application we will see that the overall design of the API is simple and easy to work with.

Remove Duplicate Lines From A Text File Using LINQ

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 12:45:12 GMT

A question was posted on c-sharpcorner forums asking how you would remove duplicate lines from a text file. It got me thinking about how this problem could be addressed using LINQ.

Dynamic Sort With LINQ To SQL

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:12:50 GMT

Sometime ago I wrote a post showing how to do dynamic sort with LINQ. That approach worked well with LINQ To Objects. Today I spotted a question on the forums where Levi asked a question about doing dynamic sorts with LINQ To SQL. My earlier approach will work once all the data is retrieved on the client side. This of course is not an ideal way. A better option is to do sorting on database.

Enum Support With LINQ To SQL And SqlMetal

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:34:05 GMT

As a programmer I love my enums. I find code written using enums to be more readable than without them. However, there has been and there still is a disconnect between lookup tables in a database and enums in code. One has to restore to some creative trickery to get them working in harmony. Recently while working on a project which involves using LINQ To SQL, I came up with a process which gives me the best of both worlds i.e. using lookup tables in database and enums in code. I am documenting my solution here. Hopefully it will help you.

Writing Visual Studio 2010 Shell In WPF Reflects Confidence

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 09:16:39 GMT

Since its inception as Avalon I have dedicated countless hours to the technology we now know as WPF. I can probably say that I am one of the few people who have worked on WPF at a commercial level at least in Australia. This is because the number of projects using WPF have been scarce. And I was fortunate to get involved because of my community work around WPF. I have also tried to convince clients to go with WPF as the preferred choice over Windows Forms. I will admit that I have not been very successful in doing this. The main reason I believe is that WPF has suffered with lack of confidence. While the push has been there from Microsoft, somehow it has not come across very well. We all know about demos about spinning text boxes and playing videos in buttons. These I must say have not conveyed the benefits of WPF to business gracefully. Even though Microsoft has used WPF for their Expression products, it just has not been enough.

Free LINQ To SQL Training In Sydney

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 11:23:55 GMT

I am running a LINQ To SQL Training day on Saturday November 8th at Microsoft Office in North Ryde. The course is FREE for anyone to attend but there are only 20 places available. So if have not yet jumped into the wonderful world of writing LINQ queries. If you are considering LINQ To SQL for your project. If you think that you need a head start on LINQ To SQL. Then attend this one day course and give yourself a LINQ To SQL confidence boost.

7 of my favorite jQuery plugins for use with ASP.NET

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 20:46:04 GMT

Seven of my favorite jQuery plugins to use with ASP.NET and ASP.NET AJAX, based on my own successes and failures using them over the past year and a half.

View T-SQL Query Generated By LINQ To SQL

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 17:36:53 GMT

While working with LINQ To SQL there are times when you are interested in looking at the query which will be executed on the database. This post will cover different ways you can capture the query generated by LINQ To SQL.

Get A List Of Installed Applications Using LINQ And C#

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 19:08:53 GMT

To get a list of installed applications we need to look into registry. Microsoft.Win32 namespace contains objects which can be used to work with Windows Registry. In this post I will show you some code where I use the power of LINQ to retrieve and display a list of all applications installed on a machine.

Tutorial Reading A Text File Using LINQ | One .Net Way

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:07:18 GMT

At times us developers have to deal with delimited text files in our applications. Such files have been around since yonks and I often come across data import/export tasks where delimited files are used. Till now the common way in .NET has been to read each line and then extract data using some sort of creative string functions within for loops. But there is another way by using LINQ. In this tutorial I will show you how to use LINQ to read such data. By the end of tutorial you will appreciate how easy and logical it is to use LINQ for reading data from delimited text files.

An Open Letter to Scott Guthrie

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:32:01 GMT

Thank you for your team's contributions to the software development industry. ASP.Net, the CLR, and your other significant additions to the .Net platform have genuinely advanced the state of software development. Although it may seem that you are damned if you do and damned if you don't, most of us developers out here do appreciate your work.

Exam 70-502 Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Windows Presentation Foundati

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 15:43:18 GMT

Back in may I posted Part 1 of this series on my old blog. Looking at the statistics it turned out to be one of the highly visited post. Recently I also had a comment asking me when I was publishing other parts of study links. Continuing the same trend here is the second part of this series.

Refactoring In Visual Studio 2008 | One .Net Way

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 17:59:26 GMT

While there is a lot of talk about refactoring tools such as Resharper and Refactor Pro, not much is said about refactoring features available in Visual Studio 2008 straight out of the box. I think Resharper and Refactor Pro are fantastic tools but they cost money and most of the time our refactoring needs are simple or you maybe in an environment where such tools are not available. So what do you do? Worry not, Visual Studio comes with excellent refactoring support. In this post I will show different refactoring features of Visual Studio.

StyleCop Tutorial | One .Net Way

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:33:30 GMT

StyleCop is a source analysis tool for C#. It can be used for analysing source code as opposed to compiled assemblies which is the area for FxCop. StyleCop is currently in version 4.2 and can be downloaded here. In this tutorial I will show you how to use StyleCop.

Dynamic Sort With LINQ

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 16:47:18 GMT

In this post I will show you how to perform dynamic sorting with LINQ.

Different Ways Of Retrieving Data From Collections

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:28:26 GMT

C# as a language has matured over years. We have come a long way from the first version of C# to the current which incorporates LINQ. Here is an example I recently used in a training session. My objective was to show students how we can retrieve items from a collection based on a certain criteria in different ways.

More Details Emerge On Microsoft Master Certification

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 07:01:11 GMT

Few weeks ago Microsoft announced a new certification called Microsoft Certified Master. In an ever growing cluster of Microsoft certification this one allows you to specialise in a particular technology area. So what does this mean? Aren't other certifications specialising as well? According to Microsoft, Master certification is intended towards candidates who spend most of their time working with one product. This is different than your average developer who needs to know about many technologies such as ASP.NET, SQL Server, WCF, WFP etc.

LINQ To SQL Tutorial | One .NET Way

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:04:31 GMT

With .NET Framework 3.5 Microsoft released Language Integrated Query aka LINQ. LINQ enables developers to query data sources using a query like syntax with both C# and VB.NET. These data sources can be collections, SQL Server databases, XML, DataSets etc. Other than what is supplied by Microsoft, LINQ is also extensible. This means that you can query data sources beyond what Microsoft ships. Examples of such implementations are LINQ To Flickr, LINQ To Amazon, LINQ to Google etc. In this article I will show you how you can use LINQ To SQL to perform CRUD operations on a SQL Server database.

The Hits and Misses of Microsoft & Bill Gates

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 01:39:53 GMT

As Bill Gates finally bows out of Microsoft to pursue his charity interests, we look at some of the hits and misses of the software company he founded..........

First Look At Microsoft Cloud Computing

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 07:18:24 GMT

Microsoft's Cloud Computing Initiatives are taking shape. I expect a big bang launch somewhere around PDC 2008. Earlier I blogged about the whiff I got about Microsoft's offering for developers in the cloud by looking at the list of PDC 2008 sessions. Today I will look at what it takes to get started with Microsoft Online Services.

Error Importing Excel Spreadsheet in SharePoint VPC

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 16:15:54 GMT

While working with SharePoint VPC Image I got an error when I imported an Excel file for a custom list. The error says "This workbook has lost its VBA project, ActiveX controls and any other programmability-related features."

Proof: Alexa Does Not Work

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 20:06:02 GMT

I have always had my doubts on Alexa. I somehow was never convinced about its ranking system. Today I found what could be the mother of all malfunctions. I went to Alex to look at my rankings and I saw this: