DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by flago

SEO Tip: Submitting All of Your Blog URLs to Search Engines

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 19:40:24 GMT

DotNetNuke does a pretty good job of providing an XML Site Map for your to submit to the major search engines. However, it does not contain any dynamic URLs. A good example of what I am talking about is the DNN core Blog module. This module dynamically generates a new URL that will not show up in the Site Map that is generated by DNN.

15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 05:46:02 GMT

Your website is designed, the CMS works, content has been added and the client is happy. It's time to take the website live. Or is it? When launching a website, you can often forget a number of things in your eagerness to make it live, so it's useful to have a checklist to look through as you make your final touches and before you announce your website to the world.

DebuggerDisplay and DebuggerBrowsable - Two Debugger Attributes to kno

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 21:31:20 GMT

two very useful debugger attributes any programmer should know

5 Minute Tutorial on Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 20:01:04 GMT

A quick, to the point tutorial on exposing and consuming a plugin architecture created with MEF.

Tuning Click-Once deployment performance with VRTA and PowerShell

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 06:07:25 GMT

Some of our client applications get distributed using the Click-Once paradigm. One day we noticed that the time between the initial click on the download link in the browser and the complete initialization of the Click-Once desktop client application took much longer than a user would tolerate. We decided to debug the deployment of the application and fix the problem. We chose the Microsoft Netmon 3.2 and the VRTA (Visual Round Trip Analyzer) for the initial analysis.

13 ASP.NET MVC extensibility points you have to know

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 20:46:06 GMT

One of the main design principles ASP.NET MVC has been designed with is extensibility. Everything (or most of) in the processing pipeline is replaceable so, if you don't like the conventions (or lack of them) that ASP.NET MVC uses, you can create your own services to support your conventions and inject them into the main pipeline. This post shows 13 extensibility points that every ASP.NET MVC developer should know, starting from the beginning of the pipeline and going forward till the rendering of the view.

5 Most Common Asked Questions When Using .Net RIA Services

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 17:01:03 GMT

From the comments on my previous articles on .Net RIA Services and from the search queries that lead to those articles, a pattern of a recurring set of questions showed up and I am sure that most .Net RIA Services enthusiasts face the same issues. This post address a few of these issues

Being a software startup in a recession

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 23:01:02 GMT

Lessons learned about being a software startup in a recession.

Learn ASP.NET MVC (Getting Started & Digging Deeper)

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 23:46:28 GMT

I have a few ASP.NET MVC links I've had for a bit for when people ask me where they should start from in learning ASP.NET MVC, so I thought today it would be good to get them out there and get them posted.

Generating NUnit tests with PowerShell

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 13:53:11 GMT

The other day I needed to write NUnit unit tests to for a large number of method overloads. There were almost 100 methods that needed to be tested. The method signatures followed a well defined pattern. This didn't look like much fun at first, but then I looked in my toolbox and I saw the smiling face of the PowerShell ISE shouting "Pick me! Pick me!". About two hours later I had created a script that would parse the method signatures and generate NUnit test methods for each of the functions.

Waterfall development just work as great

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 12:41:10 GMT

Waterfall development is still a valid way to develop software. Setting up the requirements, making proper analysis, coding and then testing works just as fine. However. not for ever changing software like a website. If I were to build an e-Commerce website, I would never choose to go Waterfall.

Ajax autocomplete textbox in GridView

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 11:43:48 GMT

In this example i am implementing the AutoComplete functionality to textbox in the EditItemTemaplate of GridView using AJAX autocomplete extender, for this we need to create a web service which calls the method to fetch data from database and display results as suggestions for textbox

Cast<> to the rescue.

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 06:22:20 GMT

How to convert an collection of classes to a collection of interfaces.

Debugging the Future (Advanced .NET Debugging) Video Presentation

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 05:49:53 GMT

My esteemed colleague, friend, and fellow instructor at DevelopMentor Jason Whittington gave a great presentation on advanced .NET debugging recently at the Oklahoma City Developer's Group. They luckily recorded it on video and published it on their website so that it may "live on in the Google".

T4 Templates: A Quick-Start Guide for ASP.NET MVC Developers

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:31:23 GMT

"As mentioned in our recent blog post on the ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate, our code-generation features (namely, Add Controller and Add View) now use the T4 (Text Template Transformation Toolkit) templating technology behind the scenes. Because users can customize the templates to a great extent, we wanted to make a post to bring everyone up to speed on T4."

Creating a WPF / Silverlight Control With a Semi Transparent Backgroun

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 23:16:29 GMT

Yesterday I was trying to create a control with a partially transparent background,. I am writing this because what I thought was so straight forward, was not.

Getting Started: Scripting Incuity EMI models with PowerShell

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 13:24:28 GMT

The Incuity EMI (Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence) software lets you connect to various plant historians, real time plant data servers and conventional relational database servers and access the underlying information through an unified entity model. The heart of the model is a powerful and elegant meta-repository. The setup of the data sources and the creation of the entity model can be automated by using an easy to use client .NET API. This article describes how to get started with this API and demonstrates the creation of a connector to the plant historian server from Wonderware using PowerShell.

Ninject 2 Reaches Beta

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 19:31:03 GMT

Version 2.0 of the Ninject dependency injection framework has reached beta status.

Announcing TeamCity.CodeBetter.com

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 04:31:02 GMT

CodeBetter - in collaboration with JetBrains, IdeaVine, and Devlicio.us - is proud to announce the launch of TeamCity.CodeBetter.com - a continuous integration server farm for open source projects. JetBrains is generously supporting our community efforts by funding the monthly costs of the server farm and providing a TeamCity Enterprise license. Volunteers from CodeBetter, IdeaVine, and Devlicio.us are administering the servers and setting up OSS projects on the build grid.

A New Look for Visual Studio 2010!

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 03:46:02 GMT

At the PDC and TechEd EMEA last year we described our new editor support built on the WPF technology in .NET Framework 4.0. Today I'm happy to reveal the new UI for Visual Studio, also built on WPF:

Parallel.For(.): A Deeper Dive - Parallel Programming in .Net 4.0

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 18:46:05 GMT

An in-depth look at the Parallel.For() method from the Parallel Extensions coming in .Net 4.0. This article examines the return value and optional parameters of Parallel.For, including local thread initialization, finalization and the ParallelState object. Most of the information also applies to Parallel.ForEach, as well.

One PowerShell Script to download PDC2008 Videos, Code and PowerPoints

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:46:08 GMT

Yes I did it. I downloaded all 65,563,667,714 bytes and saved them as 407 files on my nice new WD Passport hard drive that I brought home from the PDC2008. And, yes I did it the old fashioned manual way: Right-Click on link and Save-As. But you don't have to do it. In this blog post I provide the metadata of all the files I downloaded and a PowerShell script that will help you automating the download process. Besides the PDC content you also get to a treasure trove of PowerShell scripting techniques ranging from dynamically generating Regular Expressions to loading meta-data form XML and CSV files.

Silverlight Game Programming Tutorial - Getting Started

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 03:23:40 GMT

A Silverlight development tutorial that shows you how to create your own 2D web based games. This series attempts to recreate a game originally developed with Flash, and can be used to highlight the differences between the two platforms.

Integrating NUnit test results in Team Build 2008

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 22:24:48 GMT

When using Team Foundation Server 2008 and Team Build, chances are you are developing unit tests in Microsoft's test framework which is integrated with Visual Studio 2008. This integration offers valuable data hen a build has been finished on the build server: test run results are published in the Team Foundation Server 2008 data warehouse and can be used to create detailed metrics on how your development team is performing and what the quality of the product being developed is. Not all software development teams are using Microsoft's test framework. Perhaps your team is using Team Foundation Server 2008 and creates (unit) tests using NUnit. By default, NUnit tests are not executed by the Team Build server nor are they published in the Team Foundation Server 2008 data warehouse. The following guide enables you to leverage the features Team Foundation Server 2008 has to offer regarding metrics, by customizing the build process with the necessary steps to publish test results.

Set-Content -Encoding parameter matters, if the content says so...

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 22:08:31 GMT

I use a simple PowerShell script to replace some of the URLs in my blog post's html source before I publish them to www.tellingmachine.com. In my case the posts are stored as XML files. Usually I use Windows Live Writer to write my posts. I publish the documents for test purposes frequently during the authoring to the VisualStudio 2008 development web server that runs locally on my machine. Once the post is ready to put online, I take the XML file, run the PowerShell script against it and then copy it to my production server. Occasionally the XML files refuse to open in Internet Explorer after I ran the script. It took me few minutes to figure out why. Here is the story!