DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by pjacobs

.NET continues to DoS attack me, seriously!

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 20:45:00 GMT

Yeah, it does! And I don't necessarily mean denial of service - that would mean that I couldn't get any programming done. Nope, far from it - but it sure is denial of sleep attacking me. Come one, I am struggling to keep up with all the new runtimes, features, frameworks and best practices coming out of Redmond. It's awesome and actually fun; no doubt about it - but sometimes it is excruciating as well. And today I am going to talk about the excruciating experience of seeing another reinvented wheel hobble out of Microsoft.

WikiPlex - An Embedded Wiki Engine

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 23:00:00 GMT

Introducing WikiPlex, which is CodePlex's wiki engine that has been re-written and made open source under the MS-PL license. The first public version has also been released!

SubForum To Be Designed Using the 960 Grid System

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 05:16:37 GMT

SubForum is an open source discussion forum using the ASP.NET MVC framework. However, we are going to use the 960 Grid System to develop the interface. The 960 Grid System is basically web design for 1024×768 display. Word is 800×600 is dead and 960 pixels is the new gold standard. The current interface was put together using css only. We are not putting any of the styling into the controls or aspx pages. All styling will leverage CSS and will not be embedded into any component, control, or page. We believe this will allow designers more freedom to develop themes which SubForum will support.

Simple Tag Cloud Implementation for ASP.NET MVC

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 09:58:23 GMT

I read this post by Mikesdotnetting a few days ago when I was trying to implement a Tag Cloud for our open source forum project SubForum. Although it was a good post and got me started on how to do it, I found it a bit complex for what I needed. One of the complications that I saw was obviously the Entity Framework and the data layer that Mike talked about to build the Tag Cloud. The data I needed was quite simple and didn't need to be that complex. I decided to implement a simple ASP.NET MVC Tag Cloud using plain SQL and a simple table structure. Also, I did not want categories. I just wanted posts and post tags, so that my Tag Cloud could more accurately represent the Tags in the posts.

Use Castle Windsor to Read Your Config Files Automatically

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 04:05:15 GMT

I have not updated my code to the latest Castle Windsor. I am still using the the previous version. With it you can setup your .config files to be parsed automatically and stored for you. All you have to do is setup an interface and initialize a class. From that point on if you need to add anything to your storage (app.config or web.config) you just have to update the interface.

How To Sort From Left To Right with SQL Server 2005 and above

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 05:04:05 GMT

A few months back I wrote a web service that generates lottery numbers for the Texas Lottery. The concept is that the numbers are not truly random; otherwise, there would be a uniform spread for the numbers. Also, some numbers are hot numbers and you are more likely to pick a winner using the hottest numbers.

SubForum.net Is An Open Source ASP.NET MVC Discussion Forum

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 13:15:00 GMT

we are announcing an open source project on codeplex called subforum.net. Subforum.net is an ASP.NET MVC discussion forum. We want it to be unique and different from other discussion forums but still maintain the ideals of a forum. We would like it to combine the best ideas of other sites such as stackoverflow and DIGG. Please join us and check out subforum.net.

How NOT To Design a UI - The dotnetkicks Example

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 12:42:35 GMT

With the advent of ajax and jquery flooding the internet, web developers are providing professional and polished web designs like never before. For example, when I search with google I type begin typing my query and google responds with other popular search terms and giving me feedback as I type.

Use a BindingListCollectionView from a BindingList from a List<T>

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:25:35 GMT

Let's say you have a WPF application with a DataGrid on it. You also have a strongly typed list of objects - I.E. List<Person> which you would normally bind to your grid. You might have been under the misconception that you can't convert the List<Person> to a BindingListCollectionView. I have searched google for answers and ran across people saying you can't do that. It is possible and I will show you how to make it happen.

WPF C1DataGrid how to tab or shift tab

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:33:55 GMT

I am working on a WPF project at work and we purchased a couple components from a couple of different component vendors. One of them is ComponentOne and we have used the C1DataGrid in several places. Recently a bug was submitted that said they could not tab or shift tab through the grid and have it select the next or previous row automatically when the beginning or end of the row is hit.

Visual Studio Team System DeploymentItem Attribute

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:20:56 GMT

Subversion is awesome I am a big fan of source control and subversion is my favorite. I used it for several years before being forced into using TFS on my current project. Subversion is great because it really doesn't get in your way. You hardly notice the code is under source control.

Regional Conflicts

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 12:55:29 GMT

We have all come to love our IDE features and take them from granted nowadays. Features like intellisense, code-complete, refactoring and code organization and of course the use of Regions. The #region and #endregion keywords basically provide the ability to hide code and collapse it into a short word or phrase provided at the beginning of the block with the IDE showing a plus sign to expand and collapse the region. Eg: #region Public Methods #endregion

Var Wars - Abuse of the CSharp var

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:04:49 GMT

CSharp 3.0 introduced the var keyword for declaring variables without having to explicitly specify the type. This was done for using anonymous types returned from LINQ queries. Now, I am seeing many developers use it all over their code and think its a good thing.

Generate c# Enums From Your SQL Database

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 01:01:40 GMT

Many developers like to stick their data inside the database and load their combo boxes and other application data from it. There are lots of reasons for doing so such as localizing your data or maybe you can't write to the local file system for whatever reason. In my case the local file system was untouchable.

Comparison of Linq to Sql and Orasis Generated Data Access Code

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 02:46:08 GMT

This is a very good and fair comparison. What does not show here is the difference in performance which I suspect LinQ to SQL must be slower.

Flexible WPF ToolTips via Markup Extensions

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 20:46:29 GMT

Presents a way to display a feature-rich ToolTip in WPF through a single line of XAML.

ReSharper 4.5 complains about my private fields.

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 20:46:03 GMT

Learn how to change naming style rules in R#.

Content Stealing Jerks

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 20:01:02 GMT

I've grown somewhat accustomed to seeing my articles regurgitated on some random blogger's site and passed off as their own. Usually I just send content stealing jerk (CSJ for future reference) an e-mail asking that they provide some sort of link back to my original article and leave it at that. Sometimes they comply, oftentimes they don't. In the end, life goes on. After all, it's not like I'm going to press charges over it.

Generic Repository

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 17:16:08 GMT

The purpose behind the repository pattern is to provide a layer of abstraction between your domain and data layer. For smaller projects, this typically isn't needed. However, larger projects can really benefit from a broker that specifically handles the back and forth between the two layers. With repositories your domain objects aren't burdened with infrastructure details and can therefore better focus on domain-specific behavior.

Top 100 Blogs for Developers

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:46:02 GMT

Jurgen Appelo outlines 100 blogs developers should be paying attention to.

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

TimeZone vs. TimeZoneInfo in .Net

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 18:31:04 GMT

Understanding the TimeZoneInfo classin .Net 3.5 and how it compares to the standard TimeZone class.

Fast Serialization

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 02:01:03 GMT

We use ALOT of serialization in the current system I work with. Serializing/deserializing 100,000,000 objects in a day is pretty common. For a long time we knew that the binary formatter was fat and slow but never rationalized writing something custom as we were always fast enough. Unfortunately our data throughput has raised 400% in the last year (when you start with gigs and gigs of messages this is a huge gain) and our little three or four year old dual xeon 2.2 has turned into the little engine that could during peaks lately so we finally bit the big one and threw something together quickly.

Creating a binding factory for Ninject

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 05:01:14 GMT

A quick primer on setting up a Ninject factory so that you can easily start using it in your next project.

Lutz Reflector now owned by Red Gate

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 23:01:05 GMT

Lutz Reflector, the free .NET disassembler every developer developer should have, has been purchased by Red Gate software. Red Gate has stated they will continue to provide the tool for free.