DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by zigamorph

Cleaning Up Your Git Repository For NuGet 1.6

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 23:50:08 GMT

Provides an article detailing how to clean up the packages directory to get your project and repository ready for NuGet 1.6.

Adding Git Command Line To Visual Studio

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 04:34:17 GMT

If you are an avid Git user like I am, but also happen to work in a Visual Studio environment, you know that getting to your Git Bash command prompt is anything but easy.

A Smarter Entity Framework Include Method

Sun, 27 Feb 2011 20:03:32 GMT

One of the things I have always disliked about Entity Framework and their support for LINQ is that while your whole LINQ statement is compile time checked to make sure you didn't fat finger any SQL statement, the Include() statement is not.

Adding Your Application To The Graph

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 15:58:56 GMT

Alternatively, if you really have bytes to kill, and you want to add relevant meta information to your page. You should probably be looking at the Open Graph Protocol:

Setting up a CloudFront Mirroring CDN in 5 minutes

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 12:05:02 GMT

Gives step by step instructions on how to setup Amazon's CloudFront Mirroring CDN in 5 minutes or less.

Lucene.Net needs your help (or it will die)

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 21:00:52 GMT

The Apache Foundation wants to kill Lucene.net. If you use it please chime in and help. This post explains a bit more in detail why this is happening

Timing The Execution Time Of Your MVC Actions - Nick Berardi's Coder J

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 01:30:52 GMT

Awesome approach for timing MVC Actions

Easy Mail Delivery with SMTP Smart Host

Sun, 03 Oct 2010 00:00:52 GMT

I knew the downfalls of using the default localhost and the potential mail delivery problems if I didn't properly set the DomainKey, DKIM, SPF, SenderID, Reverse PTR, and blah blah blah. But it wasn't really worth the hassle for me to properly set all this, because I can sent the number of emails sent from my server on one hand each day. And a 4 out of 5 times they were administrative emails sent to my Gmail account. But given all that it is still no excuse for poor email hygiene.

With Each Step Forward, Microsoft Takes Two Back

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 14:11:25 GMT

So why is Microsoft continuing to target PHP 3 users, when they should be targeting PHP 5 and Ruby on Rails users for the mind share of rapid application development? I am calling on Microsoft to take this abomination of a document down, and just put up a simple Razor syntax language reference at the very least, and at the very most gut this document and create a document that doesn't perpetuate bad software development practices and becoming a shining star to software developers and not a rusty anchor.

Turning JSON into a ExpandoObject

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 19:09:38 GMT

Recently I had the need for a web service of mine to take a JSON blob as an input. This isn't really exciting or all that interesting a problem, but I really didn't enjoy the code smell that came from drilling in to the resulting Dictionary object that comes from desterilizing the JSON object into something that .NET understands.

Run Cassandra As A Windows Service

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 20:02:59 GMT

One of the main issues that comes up over and over again for Cassandra is: How do I run Cassandra as a Windows Service? In this post I am going to answer that question and in the process demonstrate how to do it in less than 10 minutes.

Using LINQPad to Query Stack Overflow

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 23:04:00 GMT

In case you haven't read, Stack Overflow and the rest of the Stack Exchange sites are now able to be queried using OData. This is great because as Jeff points out in the blog post: .if you just want to play with the data, it's kind of tedious: you have to download the entire 700 plus megabyte archive, import it into some kind of database system - and only then can you even begin thinking about how to query out the results you're looking for. This hurdle has stopped me from performing some basic querie...

How Fluent Cassandra Handles Runtime Types

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 10:42:05 GMT

Explains how runtime types are serialized, stored, and deserialized in the Cassandra database when using .NET

Your First Fluent Cassandra Application (part 2)

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 13:22:46 GMT

Last time I demonstrated how to create your first Fluent Cassandra app. After we finished learning about how to create records and save them to the database, I issued a challenge to implement comments for our command line blog app we created.

Your First Fluent Cassandra Application

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 20:15:52 GMT

As your are probably aware by now if you follow my Twitter status or have looked in to some of my recent posts. I am developing a library called FluentCassandra which is a .NET library for using the Cassandra database in a .NETty way. The project has progressed quite nicely in the last couple of months and I am finally ready to start talking about it and giving examples on how it can be used in your applications. So lets gets started.

Creating a Time UUID (GUID) in .NET

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 20:04:13 GMT

Since we're going to want to display lists of entries in chronological order we'll make sure each Columns name is a time UUID and set the ColumnFamilys CompareWith to TimeUUIDType. This will sort the Columns by time satisfying our "chronological order" requirement. So doing stuff like "get the latest 10 entries tagged 'foo'" is going to be a super efficient operation.

Cassandra Jump Start For The Windows Developer

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 17:00:00 GMT

Cassandra is an open source distributed database management system. It is an Apache Software Foundation top-level project, as of February 17, 2010, designed to handle very large amounts of data spread out across many commodity servers while providing a highly available service with no single point of failure. It is a NoSQL solution that was initially developed by Facebook and powers their Inbox Search feature. Jeff Hammerbacher, who led the Facebook Data team at the time, has described Cassandra as a BigTable data model running on an Amazon Dynamo-like infrastructure.

Exploring how to use Layer Diagrams in VS2010

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 17:00:00 GMT

Explore how to use the new Layer Diagram feature which is part of Visual Studio 2010. The layer diagram feature of VS2010 is a new feature which allows you to create a map of your code (from the assembly level down to the method level) and then use that mapping later to validate your system still conforms to your architecture.

Editable MVC Routes (Apache Style)

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 18:30:05 GMT

After remembering a post by Phil Haack about Editable MVC Routes. By merging together Routing and Rewriting in the same process, and making the routes as editable as the rewriter rules I might be able make the differences or at least the benefits of having both a little more clear, because developers could play with both in real time and start to connect in their mind when one is more useful than the other. So I started with the latest release of my URL Rewriter and created a contrib project on GitHub that extended the Apache support in the rewriter to also include System.Web.Routing. The syntax looks similar to the Apache mod_rewrite but specific for routes.

Setting Up Basic Mappings w/ Fluent NHibernate

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 09:55:41 GMT

We continue to take a look at Fluent Nhibernate. We are going to focus this episode on setting up basic mappings for NHibernate. We will focus on setting up Many-to-One (References) and One-To-Many (HasMany) references as these are the most common mappings you will need to setup.

Performance Optimizations Made By JavaScript Minimizers

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:06:37 GMT

In the first post about JavaScript compression and the different levels supported by the three major competitors in the JavaScript minimization, obfuscation, and optimization tools space. I the article I discussed which tool provided the best compression in regards to the resulting byte count. And found that Google took the over all crown with Microsoft following very closely behind. This post will look at the performance optimizations made to the code, after it is run through the JavaScript Minimizers

Yahoo YUI Compressor vs. MS AJAX Minifier vs. Google Closure Compiler

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:00:00 GMT

A while back, YUI Compressor was king of the hill, and for the most part the only game in town that was really designed for production use. Since then a number of new competitors have been released by Google and Microsoft, and Nick Berardi checks out how they stacked up against the YUI Compressor.

Determining A Significant Change In A Web Page

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 14:24:22 GMT

The problem with many web pages today is that they include useless hidden pieces of constantly changing information that serves no purpose to the general web or anything else besides debugging. A pretty good example of this is one that I found on my own blog, and removed, as I was experimenting with the code in this post: view source print? 1  This really serves no purpose to anybody but the the few debuggers who might be looking at the code for performance reasons once every so often. You may be saying what's the big deal, it is a comment and it is not seen by the user, so who cares? Well you are right nobody does care, and this post isn't going to change that fact, this type of debugging flair is going to continue on for the entire lifespan of the web. But it does cause problems for any service that wants to figure out if your webpage has been changed overtime. Like search engines, proxy caches, and the service I am working on that inspired this post.

Exploring Operator Overloading in C#

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 15:00:09 GMT

Taking a look at how create overloaded operators for your objects. Operator overloading permits user-defined operator implementations to be specified for operations where one or both of the operands are of a user-defined class or struct type. When creating your own operators there are many different operators which can be overloaded. +, -, *, /, %, &, |, <<, >> All C# binary operators can be overloaded +, -, !, ~, ++, -, true, false All C# unary operators can be overloaded ==, !=, <, >, <= , >= All relational operators can be overloaded, but only as pairs.

Exploring .Net 4 Features - Tuples

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 14:15:00 GMT

Taking a look at some of the new features which are part of .Net 4. We will be focusing this episode on Tuples. Tuples allow you to return multiple values from a method with simplicity and ease by allowing you to dynamically create a return object which is typed for your specific needs.