DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by markheath

30 Favorite Visual Studio Keyboard Shortcuts

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 12:45:52 GMT

Here is a list of my favorite Visual Studio Keyboard Shortcuts that I use all the time to increase my productivity and perform repetitive tasks with ease.

The religion of dependency injection

Fri, 21 May 2010 09:21:52 GMT

Disadvantages of using "poor man's dependency injection"

Simplify, Shorten and Speed Up Your LINQ Statements with "Let"

Wed, 12 May 2010 18:45:52 GMT

Details how using the "let" keyword can make your LINQ statements shorter and faster.

IQueryable Can Kill Your Dog, Steal Your Wife, Kill Your Will To Live,

Wed, 12 May 2010 19:30:52 GMT

If you take a quick detour over to StackOverflow, you'll realize very, very quickly that, when it comes to wholly and full-heartedly screwing up your Linq to SQL statements, the screw-up almost always involves a misunderstanding of the purpose and...

Visual Studio 2010 Keyboard Shortcuts Poster

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 14:00:00 GMT

You can now download the reference cards (available as print ready pdf's) for the default keybindings in Visual Studio 2010 for Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++ and Visual F# over here

Any() versus Count()

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 08:15:00 GMT

Jimmy Bogard brought to my attention today that I had been doing something wrong all along. I've been using Count() on my enumerations when I should have been using Any(). I've even done this in a presentation I've been giving the past few months. This is from Mash Up.

OMG, Better Rake (for .net)!

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 03:00:00 GMT

If you ask me, when it comes tools for writing automated build scripts nothing packs more bang for the buck than Rake. Until recently, using Rake to build .net solutions required a magic concoction of hacked together scripts which rarely exhibited Ruby's appreciation for beauty nor Rake's spirit of simplicity. ... and then came Albacore...

Reading Code is Key to Writing Good Code

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 10:30:04 GMT

Software product development is a creative activity taking place in the midst of that complex and adaptive world. So let's take a page from other creative professions (musicians, artists, etc.) and study the work of others, both within and outside our field, to help improve our own work.

What Makes Windows 7 A "Killer" OS

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 06:00:01 GMT

Randall C. Kennedy at InfoWorld in a recent blog post compares Windows 7 to its predecessors, XP and Vista, and reveals what is Windows 7's real killer feature. In his words, it is not because Windows 7 fixes Vista's issues, or Windows 7 has a new user interface, or Windows 7 is somewhat lighter than Vista. It is because Windows 7 has better scalability. Click here to find out his explanation in more detail.

Selective Unit Testing - Costs and Benefits

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Test Driven Development is widely regarded as a hallmark technique of professional software development, but should you really do it all the time? Steve Sanderson argues that unit tests yield significant practical business value only for certain kinds of code. This blog post suggests what might be the underlying forces that determine whether unit tests will justify the long-term expense of creating and maintaining them. These ideas are then applied to structuring an ASP.NET MVC application.

IoC, SRP and DI best practices

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 17:00:00 GMT

A blog post summing some of real world IoC experiences in 5 "laws"

.Net Developers Hear me Out! IronRuby is IN DA HOUSE!

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:46:17 GMT

Everywhere I go and preach about IronRuby I come across .Net devs who don't understand what's in it for them. This time I've decided to take action and tell you all about what's in it for you and why you should be as excited as I am about the upcoming IronRuby 1.0.

A complete Silverlight 3 drag and drop solution

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 05:13:12 GMT

This post shows you how you can create a complete working drag and drop solution in Silverlight 3. This solution works in every Panel and from anywhere in the application. This solution is inspired by Flex' DragManager class.

Silverlight 3 new features, pitfalls and oddities

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 04:58:04 GMT

Some oddities and pitfalls of the new Silverlight 3 features, like WritableBitmap and the Navigation Framework

Block-level formatting in DirectWrite

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 04:20:37 GMT

Having figured out how to render basic text using DirectWrite, I decided to go further and try to figure out how I can apply block-level formatting to paragraphs. Amazingly, it ended up being very easy. Here's how it goes.

[Behaviors] TextBox Enter Button Invoke (TargetedTriggerAction)

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 15:18:00 GMT

Few days ago I wrote a small behavior, which I think, can be used in many applications, so I decided to share it with you :) What are behaviors in Silverlight I won't write in this post, because there are many other places where you can find nice tutorial about this.... What I did is a "TargetedTriggerAction" behavior, which simulate button click on targeted button control...

To comment or not to comment

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:03:56 GMT

Anyone that has ever taken a programming class or read a beginners book on the subject know how important it is to write comments in your code. But is that really true? In this post I'm going to discuss/question the common practice of writing comments in your code. Bad comments A couple of weeks ago I was contacted by an old friend of mine that runs a construction company. They have an old custom system that they've had since the mid or late '90s sometime.

Introducing PostSharp 2.0: #1 - NotifyPropertyChanged

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 08:00:00 GMT

Gael Fraiteur does first revelations about PostSharp 2.0 on a real-life example: implementing the INotifyPropertyChanged pattern with an aspect. Be safely seated!

Is Silverlight the new WebForms?

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:30:01 GMT

Is Silverlight becoming the same crutch that WebForms was nearly a decade ago?

Are you a .NET Ninja?

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 23:35:51 GMT

wanna-ba-a-dotnet-ninja is a.Net quiz game following the "do you want to be a millionaire" style built with WPF. Version 1 uses object database db4o to manage 214 .NET related questions of varying difficulty. Can you prove you're a .NET Ninja? Download the installer and try it out. Should be great fun to run at the office!

Git For Windows Developers - Git Series - Part 2

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 09:30:00 GMT

If you want to use Git for a .NET project this is a MUST READ!

If it is Working Don't Touch it?

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 04:03:15 GMT

Occasionally I hear this sentence from here and there. Every time I hear it I get angry again. IMHO, when someone says that sentence it's probably indicating that there is a lot of pain coming at us in the future.

Free code coverage with Gallio and PartCover

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 16:04:36 GMT

How to measure code coverage with open-source products Gallio and PartCover.

Why Git?

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 14:00:02 GMT

I have been using Git for the past week or so, enough to get a good handle on its benefits and disadvantages. I moved to Git from Subversion, after having done a stint of almost 6 years of using Subversion. A stint which also included doing some development on Subversion. Despite appearances, I actually took a fairly structured (and long running) approach to learning Git, I got a book and read it, I played around with it, and I mostly dismissed it as "it isn't solving my problem" and "I already know how source control works".

How I found a memory leak

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 15:46:42 GMT

I got a report on a memory leak in using Rhino Queues, after a bit of a back and forth just to ensure that it isn't the user's fault, I looked into it. Sadly, I was able to reproduce the error on my machine (I say sadly, because it proved the problem was with my code). This post show the analysis phase of tracking down this leak. That meant that all I had to do is find it. The problem with memory leaks is that they are so insanely hard to track down, since by the time you see their results, the actual cause for that is long gone.