Category · 322 posts
.Net Original
2010
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JustMock and Moles – A short overview for TDD alpha geeks
People have been lurking near my house, asking me to write something about Moles and JustMock, so I’ll try to be as objective as possible, taking in the fact that I work at Typemock. If I were NOT working at Typemock…
2009
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Test Review #2 – ASP.NET MVC Unit Tests
See other reviews: Review #1: NerdDinner Here’s the second video review of Unit Tests. This is another one written by Microsoft – ASP.NET MVC ( source ). First, it’s important to state how surprised I was by the high…
2007
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Watching your computer breath using FileSystemWatcher
Breath is the only word that came to mind to describe the regular second to second operations your computer does just to keep itself in the current state while preparing for the next states (in terms of temporary files,…
2006
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Regulazy 1.02 is out and about
There's a new monthly version (1.02) out of Regulazy. You can grab it over here . (if the link is broken try http://tools.osherove.com/ ) Regulazy is a visual Regex Creation tool for beginners. It contains an easy…
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How to create your own Auto Login Remote Desktop Application
Speaking of Multiple Remote Desktops - it's not really that hard to build such an application. Microsoft had a "Microsoft RDP Client Control" ActiveX control that you can use in your apps. I've even went ahead and…
2005
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A better command line parsing class
Mike has recently recommended a command line parser library for .NET called Param.NET . Personally, I don't think this sort of thing should be driven (as is param.net) by a configuration file. In fact, custom attributes…
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Tips for a successful MSMQ-enabled application
For the past few weeks I've been deep down inside a client's project. It's a large distributed application and one of the features I was working on made me realize just how little I've gotten the chance to use MSMQ in…
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[Audio Interview] Ingo Rammer and Christian Weyer On Distributed Applications Architecture And Practices
I chatted with Ingo Rammer and Christian Weyer of the ThinkTecture team shortly after both of them had finished doing their talks about Distributed architectures at TechEd Europe. The interviews starts with Christian…
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Sherpa: Another Code/Layer/Application Generator
I'm not much of a fan of various "Application Generators" software, but Sherpa seems to be an interesting find. It's allows full application generation but with inherent extensibility (by changing templates, XSLT and…
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[Audio Interview] Steve Cook -Software Factories and Domain Specific Languages
The first of several Interviews I managed to do during TechEd Europe: I chatted with Steve cook for a very interesting hour about his role in the development of UML, the concept behind software factories and domain…
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"Visual C# .NET compiler could not be created" - Possible solution?
We started getting this weird exception when trying to build some solution manually: "Project <Name> could not be opened because the Microsoft Visual C# .NET compiler could not be created" It might be one of these…
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Popping up custom forms in the .NET PropertyGrid control
Someone asked me if I knew a way to add a custom dialog to pop up when dealing with the .NET property grid. I didn't, but when I looked it up I found a few good starting points on this matter:…
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UISafeInvoker: Making UI Thread safe methods - a little more easily
Update : See at the end of this post for an important issue you need to know about if you're going to use this solution. Here's something I've been using in my programs lately. I've been pretty darn annoyed with the…
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[Article]Simplify Data Layer Unit Testing using Enterprise Services
My first MSDN Magazine article is (finally!) up: Simplify Data Layer Unit Testing using Enterprise Services "Despite all the hype surrounding unit testing and Test Driven Development (TDD) many developers don't see them…
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[Recording] Roy Osherove on Software Factories and Domain Specific Languages
Last month I delivered a presentation at the Israel .NET architects user group about Software Factories and Domain Specific Languages. Perhaps it's just my big ego, but I definitely feel that people should be able to…
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Solving Binary serialization versioning conflicts
My friend, Jonathan Einav (His blog is, sadly, empty for now) just sent me this by email. It's a solution to a versioning problem he encountered, which he has made public for the community. This is a a nice approach to…
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New stuff on Team Agile: XtUnit and Interception block with basic documentation
Update: Fixed broken links (21-6-06) I just finished adding a new downloads section to the Team Agile website . In the process, I've revamped some of the downloads I've made available to date with some documentation and…
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[Article] Defensive event publishing in .NET
Summary Events and delegates in the .NET Framework present an interesting case of apparent simplicity with abundant complexity underneath. Unfortunately, we *have* to take into account the complexity underneath if we…
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Making ClickOnce publishing work in VS.Net 2005 Beta 1+
The following helps in cases when you get the following error messages: "Deployment manifest requires publisher and product specified" or "files missing from deployment" Here's what I needed to do on my Win Server 2003:…
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Full source for The Regulator released
I finally got around to release the full source code for The Regulator . Up until now the source code was partial and included mostly just the plugins for it. Now you get to see what a sloppy coder I really was when I…
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Using Regex to return the first N words in a string
Jeff Perrin needed a function to return the first N words in a string (to create a small summary or a snippet thingy). He did it using the manual and awkward method of parsing the string manually. That method is more…
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Return of the Extensibility Application Block
A while ago I released two articles about implementing plugins in your .net applications( here and here ). I then went ahead and created a generic piece of code that encapsulates the functionality demonstrated in those…
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A simple question about overloading
Given 3 classes: PersonBase, Employee and Manager: class PersonBase { } class Employee : PersonBase { } class Manager : Employee { } and given the following methods: public void Loop() { PersonBase [] people = new…
2004
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Manage many events easily with EventHandlerList
There were many little snippets and corners during Juval's class that simply made my day every time. This is one of those. What happens when you have a class that exposes many events (such as the "Button" or "Control"…
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Next generation iteration: Array.ForEach and Delegate inference
Sriram goes through hoops trying to write a function that maps a list to a function pointer that will be called on each item of the list. Yeah, it's easier in Smalltalk , today. But here's how it looks in .Net 2.0:…
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Do not serialize delegates and events blindly
usually, you should not serialize your class's delegates or events. This is because serialization takes he full object graph into play, and delegates by nature will serialize your subscriber list into the mix…
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Denying your public classes from your end customers
Here's a cool way to make sure that no one else but your application can use any of the public classes that are exposed by your business assemblies: you put a permission requirement on the class that requires the strong…
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Developing as non-admin made easier with VS.Net 2005?
One of the coolest things about VS.net 2005 is that you can actually debug your application using specific "Click-Once" security permissions. Simply go into the "properties" of your project, click the "Security" tab,…
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Session ideas and suggestions for Microsoft Tech-Ed 2005 and future conferences in general
I decided I want to speak at an international conference. You know, something like VSLive! or MS Tech-Ed. So, I went to the MS Tech-Ed site and submitted two session suggestions : First, a session about Test Driven…
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.Net Deep dive lecture videos online
Yes! You can now see the recorded lectures from the .Net deep dive event. Including my " Cool Tools " and " Test Driven Development " lectures. ( Here's the link list of the "Cool Tools" lecture..) Have fun!!!
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Juval Lowey in Israel
In two days Juval Lowey is going to be in Israel, speaking at the C# user group. I suggest you make the time and get there, since this is a rare opportunity to listen to one of the world's top architects for free.…
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More free cool components from SharpTools
"Hi Roy , Writing as a followup to your blog about our freeware developer tools in October - thanks for spreading the word about us! We've done almost 100 freeware developer downloads a day since then, btw, and are glad…
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Extending NUnit *easily* with version 2.2.1 (finally!)
I finally got some time so I sat down with the latest version of NUnit - 2.2.1 and tried using its extensibility features like the ability to create new custom test attributes that change test behavior, hopefully…
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The Regulator sucks for Non-Admins
Don is right . The Regulator will mostly be unusable to you if you work as a non-admin. Here's what I wrote as a comment to his post: This issue is something I've been looking into for quite a while but, most sincerely,…
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My TDD webcast yesterday was pretty fun
Yesterday's Israeli webcast on TDD was a blast. I mean it went fairly well and regardless of two crashes early on it went without a hitch (I ended up using Yosi Taguri's laptop to do the presentation). There were around…
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News of the week - Israeli blogger edition
Wow. What a week. I managed to pull off a user group talk at the IVCUG on Wednesday about Custom Attributes and Interception. Let me tell you, if you though the material was hard, try learning it well enough to be able…
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Israeli .Net Deep Dive chat going on right now
In case you were wondering - there is a live chat going on between the upcoming .Net Deep dive speakers and the community: http://www.microsoft.com /israel/communities/chats/dev /chatroom.aspx Feel free to join in and…
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Simple math with regular expressions?
A friend of mine (Ariel) made the bold claim that it is possible to write a regular expression (in today's languages such as .Net) that checks simple mathematical functions, for example if a number is divisible by 3. I…
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Osherove.Interception 1.04 - Change return values and incoming parameter values at runtime easily
I just love the idea of interception. It lets you do stuff like this: using Osherove . Interception . Framework ; namespace Osherove . Interception . Samples . AutoEncryption { public class CryptTestedClass :…
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Solving Team Development with web projects hell
I've been inspired by this article to change the way one of the teams at work has been handling a large solution. We had a big problem with a large solution (over 100 projects) that had many web services and asp.net…
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[Tools and Addins] : SharpTools, web controls and various utilities - free!
Jon Schwartz of " Morrison Schwartz " sent me an email saying he wished he knew about the (now closed) add-in competition , cause he's got a great add-in to put up there. Nevertheless, he sent me a link to his add-in,…
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Introducing the Osherove.Interception framework
Following the Nunit Extensibility framework , I did some thinking and made a More generic framework for interception ability. That means that you can create your own interception attributes not only for unit testing but…
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[Rediscovered] Advanced debugging tips and stuff you never knew about the "Find" combo box
I just "re-discovered" an old post of mine relating to some cool debugging tricks. Its amazing I forgot all about these cool tricks and it was fun to rediscover them. I bet some of you could benefit from them (again).…
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Introducing: XtUnit . An Unofficial Unit Testing Extensibility Framework - Add new attributes to NUnit or MbUnit easily!
Update : I've uploaded a more complete version of the framework and also changes the file name. please get it from here: http://www.teamagile.com/downloads/TeamAgile.XtUnit.Bin.zip…
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Upcoming talks and webcasts I'm involved with
I'll be doing a webcast about Test Driven Development using Nunit for Microsoft Israel. It's going to take place on the the 23rd of November . I'll give you a heads up with a direct schedule when I know more. It will be…
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DataSet hell - "Failed to enable constraints. One or more rows contain values...."
Important note: Hi folks. This post was written in 2004. Yes, people have been getting this for over 6 years . It’s 2011 now, and here you are, still stuck working on this crap. I highly suggest you read this , as an…
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ANN: Optimized automatic control binder is out - and its fast!
Last month I posted about a cool way we came up with to automatically bind all the controls on our application forms to various data sources . That solution was cool, but it was slow . Because it used binding. And…
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One treeview I'm not going to download
Award for "Most Trustworthy name for a control library" goes to: CrapStuff TreeView . I kid you not.
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Finding a Palindrome
[Update: I added a third variation of this which solves all the problems mentioned in the comments. Was really fun - used a single line of regular expressions and it worked like a charm!] It got me intrigued - so here's…
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How Test Driven Development proved itself in a big way!
Over the past year or so I've been going around trying to tell people how and why test-driven development will help their development process. Its hard to convince people. It's actually still hard sometimes, even after…
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See you at the .Net on the beach convention
I was there last week for the "Technet" on the beach" conference and it was a lot of fun! see you there?
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Yukon "Query Notification": a life saver
At the Israeli SQL user group today we had a special visit: Roger Woter - PM at Microsoft. he talked about the Service broker in Yukon. very cool stuff. However I learned a little thing that I think is absolutely…
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.Net Blogger geek meets Eric Rudder, asks questions, gets answers, is happy
I attended a meeting between Eric Rudder - Senior VP of Servers and tools at MSFT, and several Microsoft employees and external Microsoft technology leaders in Israel. I was sort of a Q & A meeting where people could…
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WilsonORMapper at version 3.0, and what's an OR mapper anyway?
it's free 50$, it sounds wonderful, and its at a version 3.0(via Mike ) - so its mature enough. I should really give the WilsonORMapper a try. I wonder why COM+ transactions are not supported though. What's an OR…
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Testing GUIs and customer tests using FIT
One of the things I have still not talked about in any of my talks is about testing GUIs. The reason is pretty simple: I don't really do that. I find that the amount of effort it takes to test a gui with NunitASP…
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Sunday at the VB.Net users group: Software Architecture: Techniques, Methods, and Issues
I hope to see you this sunday at the VB.Net users group meeting. should be really fun! here's the invitation letter: Once again, in BIG BOLD LETTERS – PLEASE NOTE THE 1-TIME DAY CHANGE !!! This month we will be meeting…
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Simple data binding simplified using [BindToField] and [BindToValueList]
In one of the projects I'm on we're doing lots and lots of Winforms data binding. One of the forms is composed of 12 different tabs each with about 2 dozen controls and grids and what not (don't kill the messenger!…
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Revisited: Killing a process, Introducing: TaskKiller
A few days ago I blogged about a trick how to kill a process that wouldn't die . Well, the trick I had up my sleeve was good, but there were better ways, described oh so eloquently by Pavel Lebedinsky as comments to…
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Tomorrow is DBA day, and .Net rocks is back on my mind
Hey. Tomorrow is a special day. A professional DBA is coming over to look at a database of one of my projects. Yes -I know he's not going to like everything he sees in there. but I intend to take that opportunity to…
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A Virtual PC keyboard bug and fix, a new blog, and an agile question
[Update: there's a nice looking FAQ and a Forum devoted to Virtual PC 2004 - though I Don't see this problem mentioned anywhere in there...] A couple of days ago I gave a talk in the Israeli .Net architects user group…
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Add-in Contest winners announced!
The final winners for the Add-in contest are: http://dev.magen.com/AddinContest/pages/Winners.aspx Total prize worth that we'll be handing out: over $2,000. I'd like to thank all of the prize contributors for their help…
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My upcoming lecture schedule
My plan to take over the world is starting to show some progress. if you're in Israel, here's my talk schedule in the coming weeks: This Wednesday - 4/8/2004 IVBUG : VB.Net user group: Regular Expressions in .Net…
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The SQL Server usability advantage
OK. I'll say it here - I fear Oracle a bit. I know it is psychological - or isn't it? this post from Lee Dise had me smiling: “... But backing up Oracle always struck me like trying to walk a cow to a different pasture…
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ADO.Net talk went great
Phew! this was an exhausting day! I was feeling pretty sick all through the morning today, but things cleared up a big in the afternoon. I also gave my talk at the C# user group today about ADO.Net . It went pretty…
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Unit Testing scalability and performance
I had an interesting chat with Clemens today. I told him about the Rollback ability using ES and he totally disagreed with me that its a viable option for testing database usage for several reasons: If you run tests…
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Announcing:Coolest Add-in Contest - Entries available for download
Announcing the Add-in Contest site: http://dev.magen.com/AddinContest/default.aspx Site features: Lists all the entries that were eligible to enter the contest, along with a download link and short descriptions. (some…
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Introducing: NUnitX and the Rollback attribute - Seamless database rollback with Nunit
Update : You may be more interested in XTUnit , which was released a bit later on and provides the same abilities, without needing a seperate version of NUnit to run. In fact, it runs on any unit testing framework for…
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Watch me speak: eXtreme Programming and Agile concepts, at the .Net Architects user group this month
Mark your calendars, folks. Greetings Israeli .NET architect! You are welcome to attend our next meeting to be held on July 5 th . Please note that this is the June meeting and has been postponed due to coordination…
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[Article] Simplified Database Unit testing using Enterprise Services
I was reading Test Driven Development in Microsoft .Net today(great book) - especially the chapter about doing database unit tests, and got this incredible idea in my head. I tested it on my home machine and it worked.…
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Implementing the BackgroundWorker component - today(source included)
Juval wrote a very cool article (registration required) about implementing the BackGroundWorker component found in VS.Net 2005 in C# today. Just for the heck of it (and because I needed to), I implemented this component…
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Problem & Solution: Allow only one instance of any MDI child form in your MDI application
One of the things I needed to do at an MDI application I was involved with was the ability to only load a specific form once, and make sure it does not load again. That form could not be modal, but could only have one…
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Unit Testing in Whidbey - some pointers for improvement
Jim Newkirk - apparently the guy in charge of all the Unit Testing stuff in VS Team System, and the guy who co-wrote Nunit , shows us a new object in the Unit Testing Framework of VSTS(Team system) - PrivateObject . The…
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Writing a VS.Net Add-in, ugh
I've been dabbling a bit with the notion of creating a Regulator Add-in for VS.Net. Still not sure what exactly it will feature - got any suggestions? Anyway - I don't have much experience with writing Add-ins for…
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[Problem and solution] Right-to-left menus get scrambled when form is maximized
Lots of weird things happen when you try to develop a right-to-left internationalized software package. For example, You *think* your menus on the main form are fine, in a right-to-left state, but when you *maximize*…
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Israeli Blogger Dinner postponed
Sorry. There's just too much to do :( But! Thursday, July 1st, 21:00 2nd Israeli Blogger dinner. no excuses! 2nd Blogger Dinner Are you an Israeli Blogger or developer? do you read weblogs about .Net? Omer has been kind…
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VB is rubbish? rubbish.
Bob powell writes a scathing post about how VB is rubbish . I have to say, as a Mort myself, some of what he says is true, and has been said before, but some of it is just total miundestanding of the reasons for the…
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Solving weird problems, and making others solve them as well
Scott blogs about a weird problem he had with ASP.Net, and then asks “Could this be a good problem solver question for an interview?” Certainly, some people would take days to solve this problem. Personally I think I…
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Planning a daily, automatic build
One of the tasks I'm facing at a project these days is coming up with a automatic build configuration for the project. the idea is having a “daily build” for an existing project which comprises of roughly 110 sub…
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More discussion about MS and agile methodologies
This post is a retort to this: http://geekswithblogs.net/jglynn/archive/2004/05/10/4751.aspx Jay hopes that my comments about adopting XP at Microsoft will never be heard. My answer to that would be hopefully never. In…
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Managed Smart Documents Wrapper
Oh, i know there are some people looking exactly for something like this : Vertigo Software's Managed Smart Documents WrapperT simplifies Microsoft® Office Smart Document Development with a new, object-oriented,…
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Israeli .Net User group meeting today - you coming?
Next Meeting: June 2 17:30 - 18:00 Assembly 18:00 - 18:05 Introduction and miscellaneous 18:05 - 19:15 “Challenges and Solutions in Building Rich-Client Applications – Part 1” Israel Kehat, I.K.S. - Israel Kehat…
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The Regulator 2.0.3 - *finally* with a help file!
What Is The Regulator? Go download it It's finally done. I took the time and made a Help file for The Regulator. It's now bundled along with the new version up on SourceForge - 2.0.3. Go get it . You can also download…
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The Regulator 2.0.2
What Is The Regulator? Go download it Notes: This is a minor bug fix release. This release mainly deals with Intellisense support. for example, you can now *disable* Intellisense altogether through the options dialog.…
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Opened: C# and .Net framework forum at Developers.org.il
I'm proud to announce that the Forums section of www.Developers.org.il is now re-opened with a new look and feel (and a new system underneath - lots of bugs with the old one). I'll be managing the C# and .Net framework…
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Announcing: Israel Agile Development mailing list
One more bit of news: I'm announcing the opening of the Israel Agile Development mailing list http://groups.yahoo.com/group/il-agile-dev Anyone can join in the discussion. The group will be there to discuss: Current and…
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Test Driven Development Workshop this Wednesday
OK. It's decided: Test Driven Development Workshop This Wednesday the 19Th , 18:00 Magen offices Beit Rubinstein 20 Lincoln st' 10 th floor Call me if you have any trouble. One more thing: 2 seats have opened due to…
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MSDN mag, this is why I lament
Some people think I was wrong in saying that MSDN has gone too far hyping up future content. There's a time a place to say "Get ready for this because it replaces something you've had to reinvent by yourself up until…
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Notice: TDD workshop at Magen rescheduled to next week
I'm going to move the expected date of the TDD workshop to next week (16-20th) because of time limitations. Moving to a new apartment while working full time is challenging enough as it is :) I'll also be emailing those…
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Test Driven Development and Microsoft
Test Driven Development is great. No, scratch that. TDD is life saving . But it's still young. Yes, event though it was being implemented more than a decade ago, it's still in its infancy stages. There's lots of…
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MSDN magazine has gone too far (into the future)
This is truly annoying. here's the MSDN magazine's current and future covers: um.. excuse me? Is there any particular reason I should be reading MSDN magazine if I wanted to learn something about a technology I am using…
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Code readability and communication
Memi writes about a simple case in which VB.Net's “wordiness” adds to the clarity of the code.: “Inherits vs Implemets in C# I guess the difference is obvious - you inherit a class and implement an interface. If you…
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My favorite Tech-Ed quote, and what you need to know about FABRIQ
Ido has a favorite quote from Tech-Ed Israel. I also have a favorite one, by Clemens , paraphrasing Don Box about why SOAP was designed over HTTP: “If, with all the efforts, sysadmins cannot really stop porn, they…
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Back from Tech-Ed, and another Israeli .Net blogger found.
Tech-ed was fun . I had a blast. I've already started posting some of the pics I took on my photo blog . Lots to write about but I'm really tired so I'll be writing the information in multiple posts over some length of…
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Book of the month: May
I've updated my current book of the month and the list of book recommendations. I've also added a “recommended books“ category to my blog, for future reference. I'd love to hear your book recommendations. Book of the…
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TrimEnd() Vs. SubString()
Many developers have had to write a loop that writes out a comma separated value list . There's always the trick of how you make that last comma get removed from the end of that string. Usually, at the end of the loop,…
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Why is VS.Net Add-in architecture so overly complicated?
One of the weirdest things for me is trying to understand the motives behind some of the technical decisions that went into designing the VS.Net Add-in/Plugin architecture. It's an amazing and powerful scheme that…
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How to: Creating project groups under a single solution
One of the features that I seem to miss most about working with VS.Net and working on an enterprise level application (10+ projects in the same solution) is having no folders inside the solution with which to group…
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Bill Vaughn blogs, and I ask an ADO.Net question
Bill Vaughn started a blog over at DotNetJunkies . Coolness! I've been reading an hearing some of Bill's thoughts on Data Access in the recent past and all I can say is that I wish I knew all the stuff he's already…
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1st prize just got a whole lot bigger
Just got the word- Essential Suite by SyncFusion has been added to 1st prize at the Add-in competition . That's the same suite of tools I use in The Regulator , along with the cool text editor that supports Syntax…
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Test Driven Development Workshop is a go!
[Note; Applies to Israeli developers only] Great news! I just got the go ahead from my boss here at Magen, Reuven, to use Magen’s facilities for hosting the first “ Hands on Test Driven Development Workshop” (see link…
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Hands on Test Driven Development - class resources needed
[Note: this post applies to Israeli blog readers] One of the talks that I *really* want to do at one of the user groups is “Hands on Test Driven Development Explained” (like this one ) . The thing about TDD is that the…
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VB.Net is diverging from C#. That can't be bad, or can it?
It's interesting to see how VB.NET is slowly but surely diverging itself into a whole different language and toolset. The most notable of these changes to me right now is the “ My” language addition , available in…
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[Coding Contest] Most Useful/Innovative VS.Net Add-in/Macro (and some huge prizes)
So here's the deal. We hold a contest. It will be called Most useful Add-in/macro for visual studio .Net You send me your submissions (including code) and according to who wins, we give out some prizes. The judges :…
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Ack! My DataTable magically grew a new data column. Here's why.
Ugh. That was almost fun :) I was showing some of the guys how to do unit testing against a database, and we got stuck on a test that does an insert using a dataset. Imagine this: you use a simple data adapter against…
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The Regulator v. 2.01 - now with Intellisense
In short - lots fixed, and cool stuff added! Go download version 2.0.1 beta -------------- -added: "Document Changed" dialog specifies the name of the document in question. -added: Intellisense in the Regex window. Can…
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Misunderstanding timestamp
timestamp columns in SQL server are misunderstood. I know they are because today I was definitely misunderstanding them, and I'm (according to Google) not the first. So what's to not understand? Well, here's the deal. I…
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Connection pools and a DAAB v. 3 mystery
Phew. Yesterday I gave a whole day about ADO.Net to a group of fine young people, and today I gave about an hour more about ADO.Net best practices. Boy am I tired. I found out that after about 3 hours of speaking my…
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DotNet vs. Smalltalk
This is an interesting read. (via Cincom) here's the end of it: “Microsoft, are you listening? I am making a concerted effort here to give up my Smalltalk bigotry and you guys aren't helping! What ever happened to…
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The Regulator 2.0 is out
It's just a beta , and most of the documentation will only be available on the wiki in the coming future, but: -added: installer -added: generate C# or vb.net code from regex(via tools menu) -added: regex Analyzer.…
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The next Regulator is gonna rock (with your help)
I've been getting a lot of requests for new features in The Regulator . Some people want it to be able to compile the regex to an assembly, some want it to be able to do a examine-o-matic in the style of Regex Workbench…
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Another book of the month, and what's up with ApplicationException?
OK. I have to admit that this book was a very close second to my Book of the month: .NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference Vol 1 , by Brad Abrams . I really like this quote from Brad about the book: I tried…
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Book of the month for April
Book of the month: Test Driven Development in Microsoft .Net From the reactions I'm starting to get from people this book is a winner. Highly recommended.
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From Java Generics to questioning assumptions
[ Small update : all occurences of “loose“ have been replaced by the word “dynamic“, due to an explicit request . So there. Can anyone explain the difference?] Bruce Eckel is Over it . Actually, he's over the fact that…
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Looking for a good Knowledge base management solution
There's a lot of knowledge hosted on our servers. documents, articles, links. you know how it goes. We want to index it and create a search able knowledge base with links to all the files,ability to add files easily and…
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"Database Access with Visual Basic .NET" is the book chapter I was pointing to
Heh. Turns out that last book chapter that I pointed to was from a book written by Jackie Goldstein and Jeffrey P. McManus. It's a small world. Jackie it the VB regional director for Israel and also heads the VB/VB.Net…
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VS.Net Database Projects - learn to use them (Sample chapter included)
I just got acquainted with the Database Project in VS.Net. Very cool. This sample chapter gives a very nice intro on the Hows and Whys of it(PDF). I'll be adding this to my current project shortly. Some of the main…
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Scripting .Net on MSDN-AA
My Scripting in .Net article just got published on MSDN-AA . I need to find time to write more articles....
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Very good contest news, and an apology to Mark Miller
Oh this is going to be good. I already have collected prizes for my upcoming contest. Let me just say that first place gets over 300$ worth of goodies . sounds cool already? I'm still looking for more prizes/swag (this…
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A Biztalk 2004 riddle - Catching an exception from a web service
So here's what my friend is trying to do: He has a web service which is throwing and exception, hard coded, so that we can test if BizTalk gets it. The exception was thrown either as a Soap Exception or as a regular…
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I think I found my book of the month
Looks like we have a winner for my next book of the month... Test Driven Development in Microsoft .Net by James W. Newkirk and Alexei A. Vorontsov That is, I'm planning to buy it. It seems to have lots of stuff I've…
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Troubled comments in XML documents
Note to self: a comment in an XML file must not contain string of this nature: '-------------' , or the XML file won't load into an XML Document object. Took me long enough to figure it out though... thanks Ohad.
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Israel .Net Architects user group meeting today :Service Oriented Architecture
The .Net Architects user group is meeting today (the 28th). The meeting will be about SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and the speaker will be Udi Dahan . Hope to see you there! I know some people from Megen are…
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The problem with Multi-Cast Delegates
Here’s a very interesting situation you can get yourself into when working with delegates: you have a delegate that returns a result. You use this delegate as part of your calculation. What happens when you have…
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Delegates & Events - A short Q&A
The other day I gave a presentation about Delegates & events to folks who were new to C#. I dawned on me that in fact, this subject is kind of confusing, and several questions arose from this presentation. Disclaimer :…
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The Regulator moves to SourceForge, slowly but surely
Speaking of pissing me off , I uploaded The Regulator to SourceForge , and will, in the coming days be doing an effort to put up some kind of real page in there. Or maybe I should just point to my home machine again?…
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How CodeRush pissed me off
CodeRush . What can I say? I may be a little less on the objective side, having used CodeSmart for the past several years, but any tool that claims they are the only tool to have a “code templates“ feature , either is…
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GotDotNet is friggin broken
What the hell is wrong with GotDotNet? My Regulator workspace is breaking for some reason! bleh :( Any got any data on this?
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Download Slides & code from my Regex and Plugins presentation
Download it all from this location . Note: 380k, but a pretty slow download (it's my home machine and my upload rate is.. less than good). As a basis for my Regex presentation, I used this presentation by Steve Heckler…
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Test Driven Development enters mainstream following MSDN Magazine article
Now, that MSDN Magazine itself has a full article proclaiming that Test-driven development (TDD) should be on every developer's radar screen , I can certainly say It's about friggin' time this became mainstream…
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Running The Regulator on .Net 1.0
Up until now, The Regulator could only run on .Net 1.1. Now you can run it against .Net 1.0 using this config file: http://royo.is-a-geek.com/regulator.exe.zip just put it in along with the regulator.exe file and run. I…
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The amazing CLR runtime re-appearing trick
[ Update : Joseph cooney alerted me to the fact that this is probably cause by Windows File Protection , and he was totally right. Coolness! Here's a very good article about this subject.] Here's a CLR party trick for…
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DevDays grab-bag should be improved
Ok. I've written about this before, but there is no reasonable explanation as to why other people who go to DevDays are getting some very cool stuff, especially a DVD with lots of goodies and all the lectures , and we…
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RegexLib's web service pays off big time.
The Regulator ’s Web-Search pane finally became useful for me today. I was helping someone out with some tricky parsing code and we had no idea how to do something (parse an SQL query). A quick search for “SQL” inside…
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My talk went very well. You missed out :)
Wow. I'm all energized about the talk I just finished at the Visual C# user group. The talk was divided in two: First part was regular expressions. It went great! I was so nervious at first, but when I actually stepped…
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See me speak at IVCUG about Regex and .Net Plug-ins
I'll be speaking at the Visual C# user group this Wednesday (that's tomorrow while I'm writing this) about regex and plug ins.
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Mortal Sin: Translating technical terms
We've all seen this (if you work in a country where English is not your mother tongue). A new person joins your team, and starts talking to you about really deep, thought provoking, mind numbing technical stuff. The…
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Logging block: RTFM
Reminder to self: RTFM! We tried installing the logging application block today, it took a while for me to figure out why it would not build. It kept throwing errors such as “Could not find namespace…
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ILdotNet - Israel's .Net User Group Information Center
(this only applies to folks living in Israel) I got tired of always looking up some specific user group's site, and what's the next meeting and all that. So I made this site: www.ilDotNet.com Here are the current site…
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Asp.Net slider control?
A friend is trying to implement a slider control in an ASP.Net page. Know any good control for download to do this out of the box? should have server events as well. I can't find any, and maybe ActiveX is not the best…
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.Net user group review: BizTalk rules engine
I met Memi today at the .Net architects user group. I knew Udi from before but Memi was news to me and he's a very nice guy. I think we're getting to that point where having a blogger dinner would not be a sad and…
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[Book] Writing Secure Code, 2nd Edition
Ever since we got the book Writing Secure Code 2nd edition at DevDays, I've been reading about a chapter a day. I have to say that a subject that I thought was dull,boring and basically “un-learnable” suddenly takes new…
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Iterating over collections - As simple as possible, but no simpler.
Weekend was amazing. 'Nuff said. Now for something completely different. Julie asks why not allow VB.Net developers have an easier and shorter syntax to use when iterating over collections: For Each cust as Customer in…
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Mortal sin: Just "Doit"
You've been there before, right? a big ass method (200-600 lines ) with a mess of SQL, logic and “SELECT * from...” in it. And it's called... “ Doit ”. Yep. I swear. But then it got worse. A method just as big, looks…
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Mortal sin: A non-relational relational database.
[Update: I removed the reference to COBOL. It was taken the wrong way and did not add anything to the conversation. Sorry if I've hurt anyone. ] This sin is probably one of the most prevalent of the sins I've listed…
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Get your resource kit (and disregard the kit name)
The ASP.Net Resource kit is now available for download . Don't ask any questions, just download it. Oh, and if you haven't downloaded the VB.Net resource kit , you should. Really. Even if you only do C# . It contains…
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Stuff to know about the Data Application Block
Version 3.0 has been out for a while . Version 3 of this block is out there, kicking some serious butt. This version has unit tests to go along with it and it fixes a bug that was found in version 2. Get version 3 from…
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SQL relations considered harmful?
OK. So I'm no SQL server guru but I do consider myself to know *something* about it. Which is why it was really weird to read this post and realize that I have no idea what that guy was talking about. Domains? Not using…
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[Article] Make your .Net application support scripting - the practical way
It was one of those nights. I had a small idea I decided to test, and *BAM* a flood of ideas started. And the end of the night I had this article sitting in my lap and I thought I'd share it with you: Make your .Net…
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Watch me speak at IVCUG: Regex and Plugins
If you're in Israel, mark your calendars. I'll be speaking at the Israel Visual C# user group on march 17th. Part I: Introduction to regular expressions with a practical example I'll introduce the power of the Regex ,…
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Winform Singleton pattern example
Stefano describes how he implements the Singleton design pattern for a form object in a winform application. I disagree. The main points of a Singleton: No new instances of the Singleton class can be created There…
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Israel DevDays
If you're in Israel you should try and sign up for DevDays in Israel: Israel DevDays It's on Feb. 10th. I'll be back home by then so I'll see you all there! (Look me up in the ent. dev. track)
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Convert a DataReader into a DataSet
Stefano describes a solution they use in a webservice, needing to convert a data reader to a dataset: Public Function ConvertDataReaderToDataSet(ByVal reader As SqlDataReader) As DataSet Dim dataSet As DataSet = New…
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Is SmallTalk a real option?
There's a nice little back and forth developing over at Cincom Smalltalk blog (Yes, it is a smalltalk'ish blog): Over on QLOD , a new Smalltalker asks: "What makes me wonder though: Are Smalltalkers really that much…
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Learning from mistakes: the Don Quixote pattern
Experience is built on mistakes. in the near future I'll try to describes some of the biggest mistakes I've made during my (short)career and the lessons that I learned from them. In this article I'll tell you about one…
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Using SOA on existing N-tier applications
Udi Dahan writes very eloquently and shows a simple implementation example using Service Oriented Architecture. While I agree with the main theme, I can't help but wonder, What happens when you need to introduce the SOA…
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Three free recipes from "ADO.NET Cookbook"
[ .NetWire :] " O'Reilly's recently released ADO.NET Cookbook contains over 150 solutions and best practices for everyday dilemmas. This week, we're excerpting three recipes from the book that show how to asynchronously…
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Service announcement: Source code for MSDN articles now available
The source code for my MSDN articles was missing on all of them. This has been fixed. So if you wanted to download the code, now you can :)
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New MSDN article: Turn Your Log Files into Searchable Data Using Regex and the XML Classes
Thanks to Kent , another article of mine has just been published on MSDN: Turn Your Log Files into Searchable Data Using Regex and the XML Classes This is one of my favorites, as it shows a real life example of…
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IntelliJ IDEA blows my mind again
Ah. Version 4 . And it even has Edit and Continue . How about that? Are you listening, Microsoft? this is the IDE I wish VS.Net could be one day. Please, learn as much as you can from the features of this amazing IDE…
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Debugging Unit tests using the VS.net debugger
[ Update : Bah ! how silly am I? Turns out you can do the same thing I outline here only much much easier using the amazing NUnit-Addin. It has a "Test with Debugger" command that allows you to do just what I explain…
2003
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Another article of mine published on MSDN: Search Dynamically for Plug-Ins
Search Dynamically for Plug-Ins Summery: "This article is an extension to my previous article about plug-ins . I encourage you to take a look at that before diving into this article. That said, my main goal in this…
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Code: CRUD base classes for unit testing
I never felt comfortable with doing unit tests against live database, alas, I feel it is a necessary evil to contend with, because the feedback you get is much more helpful than using Mock objects for such a task, I…
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My First *real* SQL optimization (and some good resources)
Yeah, I know how to design a database and normalize tables, but this is some optimization stuff I never had to do. It was fun! We recently encountered the task of optimizing a stored procedure that was taking very long…
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Problem and solution: Renaming htm file to aspx may cause javascript trouble
We ran across this when moving some old files to a new project. One of the tasks was to turn a very simple htm file into the same file with an aspx extension. The original htm file had a reference to a javascript file.…
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Service announcement: Feedable and Regulator live again, and Norway tips
Ah. My home machine is back up meaning Feedable is live again and so is The Regulator site. For some odd reason, the only person in the world who can not access these sites is little ol' me from Norway. Ah well, as long…
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Homesick, EIF and a session state FAQ
I dropped of the Mrs. this morning at the airport going back home to Israel. Will see her in a month and a half. Boy was that hard. Luckily it was a pretty swift goodbye since we were almost late for the plane. While…
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My first MSDN article is out: Creating a plugin framework
Update : If you can't find the source code in the article to download, you can also get it from here . It took a looong time and some pretty heavy paperwork, but my first ever MSDN article is up and about on the ASP.Net…
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Welcome Dino, and a word about MSDN articles
Dino Esposito Has started a blog here on .Net weblogs ( rss ). If you don't know who he is, I suggest you get acquainted with his work real soon as he is one of the finest authors I've ever read with cool solutions and…
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[Tool] Scripter allows you to configure a linked Javascript or VBScript file.
Scripter allows you to configure a linked Javascript or VBScript file. Select a script file and Scripter will tell you which files in your Web are currently linking to that script. You can then add and remove files very…
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[Review] CodeSmart.Net
AXTools has been on my “favorite tool makers” list for a couple of years now, if not more (disclaimer: I got a free copy of this product so that I can review it). When I did VB6 development, they came out with one of…
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Plugin frameworks in .Net links
It looks like making applications that can have plugins starting to catch on. But I really didn't get much feedback on my Extensibility Application Block - which enables exactly this . Perhaps I should have renamed it…
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Introducing: Extensibility Application Block
This has been burning inside me for quite a while. Now y'all get to see what I was up to. Download EAP 1.0 Extensibility Application Block overview: One of the demands from a successful application is the abilityto…
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DotNetNuke Rocks!
I've been wanting to make my Regulator site into a “real” site, so I checked out doing in using .Text. it was nice but it wasn't the “feel” i was looking for. Then I stumbled upon DotNetNuke and boy am I impressed! I…
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VS.Net refactoring Lessons from IntelliJ IDEA (redux)
I've posted about this here and here before but now Mike Gunderloy writes about refactoring support (or lack thereof) in Whidbey. Some hard hitting points such as the fact that only C# has “refactoring” and not very…
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Why are typed data tables columns declared "internal"?
Here's a question that Oskar Austegard left in response to what I wrote ,oh such a long time ago(6 months?), about typed datasets being scalable : How exactly does one go about using a TDS effectively in a different…
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The Regulator 1.02b is out
Download from GDN workspace, or get there from the Regulator Homepage I'd like to thank Mike Gunderloy and SBC for giving me lots of feedback on needed features and broken things. I'd appreciate more feedback from…
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[Tool] The Regulator 1.02a is out
Version 1.02a released! Features: Regexlib.com integration Search and import expressions and examples from RegexLib.com ’s database Post your own regular expressions into regexlib's database, direct from The regulator…
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[Article X 2] 2 more of mine published on MSDNAA
Two more articles posted on MSDNAA : Introduction to Test-driven Development with NUnit and the NUnit Add-in This article explores Test-Driven development (TDD) techniques. Fun with Unit Tests–Testing Abstract Classes…
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[Article/Code]: Easy Proxy handling through the ProxyFactory and ProxyInfo classes
I had to make The Regulator support Proxy servers, so I dug in to how the WebProxy class works, and with a little help from Darren , I managed to get it up and running. In the process, I wrote a little helper class that…
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Israel .Net web user group meets today - Design time programming in Vs.Net
The user group meets today, 29.10.03 registration starts at 17:00, groups starts at 17:45 at the MS HQ near ra'anana (Amdocs building) topics: What is it Design Time programming and what is it good for? Various…
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Refactoring, FINALLY!
If there's one thing that stood out for me from the Whidbey screenshots, it's this: FINALLY, some refactoring support! Hopefully, this is just the beginning. The Whidbey team should take notice of the amount of…
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Winforms menu shortcuts not working sometimes? Use ProcessDialogKey()
One of the one of the usability standards I always try to live up to in my win forms apps is letting the user choose how to perform any specific action, Mouse or keyboard. What I mean is that for every action that the…
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Calling webservices asynchronously - 2 possible ways
Calling a web service inside your win forms application is almost trivial. Making the user happy while you do it, is just a little less trivial, but very doable. Say I have this webservice call (and suppose I have an…
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The Regulator won't be available while I sort this GPL thing out.
Following the recent discussions about the legal status of The Regulator in terms of the GPL, I've decided to take down the public release of the program from GDN until: I can make it fully GPL compatible (i.e,…
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[Tool] Introducing The Regulator - advanced regex tool
Yeah, I've been away too long, but here's how I'm making up for it: Introducing The Regulator : An advanced regular expression tool with expert features such as: Syntax highlighting and folding Multi threaded operations…
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[Article] on MSDNAA: Creating a Generic Site-To-Rss Tool
My Site-To-Rss article was just published on MSDNAA : Creating a Generic Site-To-Rss Tool
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Introducing SiteFeeder
Now you can have an RSS feed for almost any site you want. Introducing SiteFeeder . 'nuff said.
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[Tip]:MemoryStream.GetBuffer() vs. MemoryStream.ToArray()
One of my readers posted a comment on my Site-To-RSS article that just solved me a bunch of trouble! In the article, I was using a memory stream to write the XML into memory. I was using the MemoryStream.GetBuffer()…
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When running 'aspnet_regiis -c' still doesn't fix it...
If you ever find yourself with this error: “ Unable to find script library '/aspnet_client/system_web/1_1_4322/WebUIValidation.js'. Try placing this file manually, or reinstall by running 'aspnet_regiis -c'.” and you've…
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Fun with NUnit - clarification
I just got a comment on my Unit Testing article. The comment was by Manfred Land - the Project Manager for csUnit, and it clarifies some errors and some things I didn't write(or know) about csUnit when I wrote the…
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See you at the Israel .Net user group tomorrow!
Next Meeting: October 1, 2003 (Wednesday) 17:30 - 18:00 Assembly 18:00 - 18:05 Introduction and miscellaneous 18:05 - 19:15 “Life Without Enterprise Services” Yosi Taguri and Lior Rozner , SPL Software 19:15 - 19:30…
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Unit Test Your .NET Data Access Layer: Where are the Mocks?
I was real excited to see an article up on MSDN that discusses Test Driven development (via Ashutosh Nilkanth ). Not only that, it discusses the issue of testing database related code inside your unit tests - a messy…
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[New article]: Creating a generic Site-To-RSS tool (site scraping)
It's been a long and very interesting week for me. I know it's weird hearing that the week I start looking for a new job, but it's true. I've been getting lots of interesting offers from people, especially from the…
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AmazReplacer - Convert Amazon's URL into your referrer URL automatically
I've created a small utility app that does that automatically takes whatever URL is in the clipboard , reformats it to be an Amazon referral URL and puts the result in the clipboard. Very easy and fast. You can download…
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[Article] Fun with Unit Tests – Testing abstract classes
Just posted my latest article: Fun with Unit Tests – Testing abstract classes Summary In this article I’ll be looking into a trickier part of unit testing– testing the functionality of classes who cannot be instantiated…
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I'm available
Perhaps it was in honor of my new MCP , or just because it is two days before the Hebrew new year's, I find myself looking for a job again . The tale is short and not that complicated. suffice to say that my current…
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[Article] Introduction to Test-driven development with NUnit and the NUnit-Add-in
It's been a while since my last article, but this one has been lurking inside me for the past month or so. It's the first of a series I plan to write about Unit-Testing in .Net (well, maybe just another one down the…
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Passed MCP 70-316
Today was a good day. Got up at 7am(on a Friday - that's a Saturday for you US folks) and drove Tal to her university course, and I myself headed over to “John Brice” IT schools HQ and took my first MCP exam related to…
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RegexLib RSS now even cooler
Darren just informed me that the RegexLib RSS feed now shows the description of the regex in the “subject” instead of the full regex text, which is a real blessing. Now I can sit back and watch for new and cool regexs…
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I'm in the "contributor spotlight" on MSDNAA
Looks like one of my articles on MSDN-AA just made the contributor spotlight section on the front page! Check it out, it's down there on the right lower corner. I'm am honored :)
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IsNumeric() hell
As an old VB'er I have to ask - what's up with the lack of IsNumeric() in the base class library? Why is there a Char.IsNumber() but no string.IsNumeric()? Why should I have to reference Microsoft.VisualBasic.Dll for…
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IsNumeric() hell
As an old VB'er I have to ask - what's up with the lack of IsNumeric() in the base class library? Why is there a Char.IsNumber() but no string.IsNumeric()? Why should I have to reference Microsoft.VisualBasic.Dll for…
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Document outline
For the past few weeks I've been deep diving into ASP.Net land. One of the things I wasn't prepared for was the amount of time I would have to spend tweaking and changing HTML and Java Scripts. A lot. Lots of times I…
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Israeli .Net web casts - finally!
If you're a Israeli .Net developer, MS israel has finally started taking baby steps towards providing webcasts in hebrew about .Net. Just got the email (Thanks dana). So - wer'e gonna have 3 webcasts: 22.9.03 - .Net…
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Issue and solution: Web custom control not showing in designer with "Security Error" tooltip
Tal, my wife ran into a weird situation today: She created a web custom control with very simple text output(”Hello world”), After compiling it, she created a new web application and added the compiled control to the…
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So, you have to live with 1.0?
Some of us still use the 1.0 framework (for pretty weird reasons, some people still believe that moving to 1.1 would be a bad thing.. and it's not - if you take the necessary precautions and know what breaks between…
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Issues and solutions with Process and Request Identity in ASP.NET
Just found a great KB article that explains how deal with all kinds of permission and identity issues when doing stuff from ASP.NET. I've highlighted the sections so you can see all the tasks that could use…
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Automatic Data-Relations
Greg asks about data relation support in Yukon . Meanwhile, in the present, there are several ways to avoid building those relations manually in code: Return hierachical data from your SQL server procedures (with the…
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Debugging shortcuts - Run to cursor, Find next statement
Here are some common debugging tasks that I've found you can do with the keyboard: * sometimes when I debug I go to all sorts of places in my code, while inside a breakpoint or when debugging line by line. In order to…
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Books to buy
Here's the list of books my company is planning to buy in the next few days (suggestions are welcome) : Windows Forms Programming in C# Essential .NET, Volume I: The Common Language Runtime Patterns of Enterprise…
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Israel Visual Basic User Group today - on ADO.Net
Israel Visual Basic User Group this Wednesday - on ADO.Net You don't have to be a VB programmer to learn about .Net. It's about the framework anyway. I recommend you be there. If you think you already know ado.net - go…
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Hosting the CLR - the native approach
A while ago I posted about a user group session which involved explanations about CLR hosting, among others. Hosting can be done either through COM interfaces or through native C or C++. Although the lecturer talked…
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The [Conditional] Attribute
If you want to write methods that are only available with conditional compiler arguments you can use an attribute just for that purpose: < Conditional("DEBUG")> _ Private Sub MyMethod() End Sub [Conditional("DEBUG")]…
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Asynchronous ASP.Net actions suck?
Every once in a while you get to do dev work in an area you know nothing about. That’s me and ASP.Net. Well, I do know some things but it’s all theoretical. I never really got to do asp.net development in a “real”…
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Loading Winform UI controls from a different AppDomain is problematic
I recently got a question regarding a problem loading dynamic UI controls at runtime. Part of the solution that person tried to do was to try and load the controls in a separate AppDomain , so that they can later unload…
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The ultimate connection string reference
This is the most complete reference of any connection string you'll ever need: http://www.connectionstrings.com/
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Combobox binding trouble - with a solution
I recently had a very annoying “thing”. On my winfom app, I wanted to bind a combobox to a dataset. For some reason the combo would not show anything. The Dataset was perfect, I even bound it to a grid to see that it…
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Some debugging tips
I was pretty sick last night and only got 1 or 2 hours of sleep. I had to stay in a little to sleep it off but now I feel better. I thought I'd put out a quick post before I get off to work. A lot of people don't know…
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Make your app support plugins - Part II
Make your app support plugins - Part II , including the source code for it (which was not available before), can now be found on MSDNAA . Thanks Lauri :)
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User Group notes: WMI, CLR hosting and AppDomains
If you missed it. Today was the monthly group meeting of the Israel visual C++ users group (I’ve been meaning to add a list of Israel’s .Net user groups to my blog links but somehow I always end up doing something…
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Make your app support plugins
Another one of mine made MSDNAA - Make your app support plugins .
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CodeSmart.Net
Is it just me or does CodeSmart.Net seem like one of the coolest VS.Net add-ins around the block? I've been a loyal Axtools customer in my VB6 days and thought the move to VS.Net would leave them little to enhance - but…
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WMI mind blower
If you have ever played around with WMI, specifically in .Net - this will blow your mind: Management (WMI) Extensions for Visual Studio .NET 2003 Server Explorer
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Catch ex As Exception When...
I too would like to add a cool little thingie in VB.Net after reading Rachel's post . One of the coolest exception handling features (which I could not find in C# BTW) is catching exceptions only on certain conditions.…
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My new favorite book
It's pretty darn late now, so before I go to sleep - this is my new favorite book: Debugging Applications for Microsoft .NET and Microsoft Windows
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Caching in WinForms
Just out of curiosity I decided to try out some caching experiments in winforms. I wasn’t out to do any performance counting or anything, but I was playing around with the caching application block. After messing with…
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Server.Transfer vs. Response.Redirect
I was recently faced with this question: What is the difference between Server.Transfer() and Response.Redirect()? I didn't really know the answer, because I'm more of a winforms kinda guy. However, my wife pointed me…
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About coding standards
" Here is the IDesign C# Coding Standard for development guidelines and best practices." [ Mark Brown ] This is written by Juval Lowy , which is a sort of hero of mine. A first look shows some really deep and thoughtful…
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Nasty bug in Data Access Block Ver. 2.0
Thanks to Mark Brown for discovering this bug in the Data Access Block Ver. 2.0. Short answer: Here's how to fix the data access bug: Open the SQLHelper.cs file look for the line that contains this line of code: C#:…
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DataReader.HasRows
One of the annoying things in version 1.0 of the .net framework was regarding the DataReader (Ole DB or SQL) class. You had no way of knowing whether the reader you got was pointing to any data or has no rows. You had…
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Filling typed datasets using Data Access Application Block v.2.0
The new Microsoft Data Access Application Block is out, and it contains some nice changes. One of the nicest (and simplest) is the ability to fill a dataset (that may or may not be strongly typed) using the SQLHelper…
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Checking for NULL values
I was recently asked how to check if a DB value you have in your hands is NULL . For one, you can use the System.DBNull class's ' Value ' property to check this like so: if (myVar==DBNull.Value) Another way, is when you…
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C++ for programmers
The past week has been quite interesting. As part of my new job I’m supposed to learn C++. When I heard that someone is actually gonna make me learn that language I was totally excited. I’ve been trying to learn C++ on…
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Scripting .Net
Chris Sells points to this article about implemeting scripting in .Net . Very interesting stuff. In one of my past jobs, I've implemented a full blown exstensible VB6 application, which used the COM Scripting engine…
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Skill Evaluation
I was listening to the .Net Rocks show a few days ago, and heard a very interesting idea: Mark and Carl offered their services as "Skills evaluators". Basically if you're a company that wants to hire someone as a .Net…
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Kit George on BitVector32 bug
Kit George, of Microsoft, responds to the BitVector32 bug that was posted about by Mattias Sjögren : " Just a note all: we are tracking this issue at Microsoft, and we do appreciate you taking the time to let us know…
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Your favorite add-in?
Have you voted for the best Visual Studio.Net add-in contest? Cast you vote here . What did I vote for? The Reflector Add-in of course. definitely the coolest tool and most useful I've seen yet. And it just got released…
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Managed C++ performence vs. native C++
The user group meeting today went great. Very interesting stuff. We actually got to see all the stuff that the .Net framework installation installs on the target machine. Lot’s of goodies in there right out of the box.…
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.Net articles on MSDNAA
Lots of great .Net articles over at MSDNAA (Hopefully one of mine will be published there real soon..)
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More maintainable code(and others) lessons
In the past week or so I’ve been going over all my code with the new guy who’s going to replace my in my current job(Yeah, I’m about to leave, but that’s a whole different post). It's strange. I have done code reviews…
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Tonight's user group meeting went great (or - What does the matrix, X-Box's "Halo" and COM+ have in common?)
Just got back from tonight's Israel web developers group meeting . The lecture was made by Yosi Taguri & Lior Rozner and was about the basics of COM+. Now, I never got the chance to work on an application that used…
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Israel .net web developers group meeting
Hope to see you all this evening at the Israel .net web developers group meeting . It looks like its gonna be a very fun lecture about Enterprise services. All I know is that they'll have XBox machines there as well. I…
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Advanced debugging tips and stuff you never knew about the "Find" combo box
1) You can set breakpoints on the callstack window as well - just select the call and hit F9 or right click. great for recursive functions. 2 ) You can set individual breakpoints on different expressions on the same…
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Settings Add-in ver. 1.0 released on GotDotNet
OK. I've released version 1.0 of my VS.NET Settings add-in on GotDotNet. Here's the project's URL. You can download the full setup there ( Currently tested on vs.net 2002 only ). After installation you'll get a new menu…
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What's missing in today's hottest languages?
Some of these changes refeer to stuff that is simply missing as an IDE feature rather than a language construct, but you get the drift.. Things VB.NET should have had out of the box: Multiple lines code (i.e. no "_"…
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Export and import VS.NET's text editor's color and font settings
I like customizing the way my VS.NET text editor looks and feels. I like dabbling with the colors and settings of the editor until everything is just as I like it. One caveat – If I move to a different computer – all…
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A much needed SchemaHelper class
Phew . I've made a fixed version of my SchemaHelper class (this time in C#). This class solves the problem of not being able to automatically find Data Relations while filling a Dataset object with tables. Although…
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Why I write in Both C# and VB.NET
I keep getting this question: Why do I write some posts in VB.NET and some in C#. Short answer: · Future employers like to see that I’m fluent in both · I want to be able to move between them seamlessly, as I believe…
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Automatically Create DataRelations Based On OleDB Schema
I was frustrated about the lack of automatic support for DataRelation creation via the DataAdapters , and the less-than-friendly OleDBConnection.GetOleDbSchemaTable() method, so I've decided to create a small class,…
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More about .Net Deep Dive
Just wanted to add the following items about yesterday's event: People: · I got to meet some of my old work colleagues · I got to meet the head of the ASP.NET user group , Nimrod, which is a cool guy. The idea came up…
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.Net Deep Dive Recap
Today was a long and cool day (Although it was hot outside). The “.Net Deep Dive” full day event at the Hilton (a.k.a ‘Teched for the financially challenged”) took place today, and I got to attend four lectures. 3 of…
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FillSchema and AddWithKey Don't Operate As Promised?
uuugh! I've been struggling with this one for a few days now, so after hitting all the relevant newg groups, let's see if anyone has a good answer: Given a DataTable, I need to know all the Other DataTables that have a…
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Quick & Easy ADO.NET Speed Improvements
OK, I coudn't resist... 1) It’s about 20 times faster to create DataTables in your dataset using code, than letting your DataAdapter create them. 2) A very good potential for speed improvement lies when filling a…
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Disabling Connection Pooling
ADO.NET Data Providers automatically use connection pooling turned on. If you want to turn this functionality off: In an SQLConnection object, Add this to the connection string: Pooling=False; In An OLEDBConnection…
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A Little Macro To Automate Creating Connection Strings
I've created a little macro that automatically creates a connection string and inserts it in your code. It pops up the infamous " Data Links " dialog for you, saving you, the poor programmer, from having to remember all…
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Winforms Data Binding Lessons Learned
Over the past week or so, I've been learning quite a lot about Data Binding in WinForms. I've decided to put the most important lessons I've learned in a short article . Her'e are its headlines: Lesson 1 : Displaying…
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How To Know When An External Application Exits
I was asked how one can launch an external application and know when it is finished. Her'es the code (Console Application): using System . Diagnostics ; static void Main ( string [] args ) { Process p = new Process ();…
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Winforms DataBinding Bliss
Played around with the Winforms DataGrid some more yesterday. Boy, it's nice. real nice. DataBinding Rocks . In VB6 I almost never used DataBinding, since I was mainly into N-Tier development, thus DataBinding would…
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Funny Behaviour
Tamar, a friend of mine, alerted me to this funny behaviour. can anyone tell me why the following code: static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine(21 - 5.45); Console.WriteLine(21 - 20.45); Console.Read(); }…
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Data Binding Woes - A Simple Solution
Wooho! Found the solution to the Data Binding problem I was having . I got it from this free book chapter: How to use Data Views from this book . I'll explain the problem and then the solution. Problem : How do you get…
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Winforms Data Binding Woes
I recently needed to get into Data Binding in win forms. I’ve read several articles( 1 , 2 , 3 ) and came up with several conclusions/questions: 1. Win forms Data Binding is very cool and powerful Using The…
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About Reflector, Encoding, And an Article Error
Yes. Lutz Roeder's Reflector is one cool tool. I just found out using it that my latest article has some bad code in it because of reflector. The article mentions that in order to write to a memory buffer instead f a…
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AppDomains Reloaded
Oh man . Reading Chris Brumme’s Post/Book Chapter about AppDomains was a bit like the first Matrix Movie. I figured I was in for a ride, but I never knew just how in-depth it was going to be. After the beginning, I kept…
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.Net Debugging Resources Grows
Thanks to Julia's latest post , my .Net Debugging Resources page is now a little bit bigger. If you know of something missing in there, contribute!
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Nice DataBinding In Winforms Article
A nice article about Data-Binding in Winforms: http://www.akadia.com/services/dotnet_databinding.html Among other things, it explains about the Currency Manager, BindingContext,Master-Detail displays - all the stuff…
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Article Source now Online
I've just put the source code that goes along with my Regex, XML and Log Parsing Article online. It shows a very simple, yet pretty cool example of loading a log file, and searching through it using a small GUI. Grab it…
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.Net Rocks Show Do's And Don't's
cool. Chris Sells is on .Net Rocks : " Chris talks with Carl and Mark about Longhorn, Working at Microsoft, his book with Don Box, his new Windows Forms book, dealing with Printer Margins, passing command-line arguments…
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[New Article] Using Regex and The XML Classes To Parse Your Log Files
Phew. My new article is up. It's my first one for the O'Reilly network, and my first "real" article ever. You could say I'm a bit excited :) " Summery : Most systems these days can generate log files to store data about…
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Free Chapter From ADO.NET- Core Reference
Here's a free chapter I found from ADO.NET - Core Reference,Microsoft : Chapter 10: Submitting Updates to Your Database coolness. UPDATE: boy, this chapter rocks ! it's more advanced than I first thought. here's an…
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Amazon .Net books Feed
Want to know of all the cool .Net books that arrive at Amazon's door? Inside your favorite RSS reader? http://www.yaywastaken.com/amazon/amazon-rss.asp?keywords=.Net
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[New Article] Support Application Plugins 2 - Dynamic Plugin Search
" Summery : This article is an extension to my previous article about plugins . The last article showed how one can create a plug-in architecture for the application. One of the comments I got on that article mentioned…
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Improving Typed Datasets
Shawn Wildermuth has an article over at OnDotNet which further illuminates some of the problems with Typed Datasets, and some of the solutions to those problems. It focuses mainly on several annotations in the XSD…
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Performance Tuning and Optimizing ASP.NET Application
Just found out this book was recently published: Performance Tuning and Optimizing ASP.NET Application I know my wife, Tal, could use it in her project....
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Create More Readable Code By Interface Prefixes
Here's something that might help write more readable code: When defining a class that implements an interface, instead of just declaring the interface overrides like so: public class MyCustomHandler :…
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.Net Developer Journal May Issue PDF download
The May Issue of .Net Developer Journal is here , and you can download the whole paper in PDF (5.x Megs) right here . (Free) Coolness... I don't know how it is in your company, but in mine we have almost no magazine…
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About Dynamic Plug-in Discovery And AppDomains
I've gotten several comments on my Plug-ins article which was published both here and on CodeProject . One of them mentions the obvious missing feature for a plugin architecture - Dynamically discovering plugins without…
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New Article: Extend Your Application With Custom Plugins
My latest article deals with the design and implementation of a simple architecture to allow creating applications that can be extended via custom plug-ins. Add run-time functionality to your application by providing a…
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.Net Debugging Resources
I've put up a resource link to all things relating to .Net debugging: .Net Debugging Resources Eventually it should grow up to become something usable, but right now I only have a couple of links in there. Please…
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Microsoft Internet Controls Life Saver
If you're going to be using the Microsoft Internet Controls (i.e. "ShwDocVw") in your application, this article is a life saver . Lots of hidden treasures that we absolutly needed . Cool. Gotta love Sample book chapters…
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Strong Vs. Loose Typing/Loose binding
Ted Neward writes about the differences between Loose-Coupling, Loose-Typing, and Loose-Binding. Well, that's just the beginning. He starts off a discussion about which might be better for which tasks, the coding of GUI…
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The Books I Really Really Want
<Alert>Yes, I am an Amazon affiliate</Alert> How Would You Move Mount Fuji? Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle - How the World's Smartest Company Selects the Most Creative Thinkers .NET Security Essential .NET, Volume I:…
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UI Threading - A Very Simple Solution
God loves the simple solutions. It turns out that there is a really simple solution to the problem of working with UI threads.Much simpler then mine . I was given this simple pattern by a guy on the win_tech_off_topic…
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Articles, Articles, Articles!
Want something to read? Go here and just press the "Go" button.
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UI Threading Helper Classes
Following up on my post about how UI threading sucks , and Julie's post about the subject (Julie or Julia? which is it?), I've decided to create some helper classes for working with UI threads. Meet UIThreadHandler and…
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System.Text.Encoding.Tip
I learned this the hard way, so you don't have to. This applies to anyone who is going to be using System.IO to read ANSI files that combine Hebrew And English mixed inside. Now, when I attempted to do this, I used the…
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A Long Day!
Arrgh! It's been a hell of a long day! Imagine going 7:45 - 20:15 head to head with something that you thought you could do in an hour! I'll post heavily on it later (And a rant about .Net as well) but for now I'll just…
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Strip HTML tags from a string using regular expressions
Paschal asked me to find a simple solution for stripping HTML tags from a given string using Regular expressions. The solution is quite simple: 1. Retrieve all the HTML tags using this pattern: <(.|\n)*?> 2. Replace…
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New Article: Practical Parsing Using Groups in Regular Expressions
Hi Folks. here's my latest article: Practical Parsing Using Groups in Regular Expressions Have fun :)
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More Books On My Shelf
I forgot to put some books on the “ My Bookshelf ” link. Here they are: VB C++ For VB Programmers Developing COM/ActiveX Controls using Visual Basic Project Management Managing Software Requirements AntiPatterns…
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Implementing A Data Layer
Ted Posts about ways to implement a Data Layer. I never liked Data Layer generators myself. They never actually did a good job. I fear I've become a sort of "Generator-Bigot" because of my past experiences with them. In…
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About Design Patterns
Christopher posted about " Design Patterns Explained ". Having been down that road myself (and so has any developer that learned this stuff at one time or another) I can only congratulate you on a good decision. Some…
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Free Book Chapters
Lots of free book chapters here about All things .Net (most are beginner material, but there are some gems)
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Introduction To Regular Expressions
I just added a new article: Introduction To Regular Expressions Have fun.
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How I Learn New Technologies
As the years go by, I seem to understand better and better how my learning process works. When it comes to new technology, I seem to be a “ circle thinker ”. When I try to learn something, I do it in stages. I don’t…
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More About Using Undocumented API's
Jimski Replied to my Post which discourages the use of undocumented API's. Among other things he mentions that if you test it thoroughly enough , You can get away with it and it will be just like you use regular API's.…
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How Access 2003 Helped Me Out
Kudos to MSFT for the latest installation of Office. Overall, Office 2003 beta is one great product. Outlook , being the main attraction for me for office use, is much more usable then it was before, with numerous…
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UI Threading *Might* Suck
This article clearly explains the troubles needed to go through in order to interact with a Winforms UI from a background thread. I found it when I started stumbling around with my own UI, having long operations…
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Regular Expression Library
This looks like a very good regular expression repository Update: Darren Neimke Says: " Check out the new CheatSheet that Steve added last night --> get to it via the CheatSheet link on the side menu. " I agree. It's…
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Oops! Typed Datasets ARE scalable!
I was wrong about typed datasets. I see the light now, but i was wrong before . The conclusion I came to was that Typed Datasets can be used in an enterprise application. The reason I thought this was a problem had to…
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DataSets, Web Services, DiffGrams, Arrays, and Interoperability
Here's a good article on MSDN : DataSets, Web Services, DiffGrams, Arrays, and Interoperability . "Summary: Matt Powell examines the issues involved in deciding whether to send DataSets to and from Web services, while…
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Blue Bricks
Great Interview with Michael Stuart on .Net Rocks Show . He's the main guy behind the Microsoft Application Blocks (Data Access, Exception Managent) and he talks about the future blocks (named 'blue bricks') that will…
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Blue Bricks
Great Interview with Michael Stuart on .Net Rocks Show . He's the main guy behind the Microsoft Application Blocks (Data Access, Exception Managent) and he talks about the future blocks (named 'blue bricks') that will…
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Typed Datasets Are Not Always The Answer
I've recently recieved an enail regarding my article about typed-datasets . It posed an interesting question as to when one would use typed datasets and on what types of projects. I'm posting it and my reply. Hi Roy, I…
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EchoStream Class
This Very nice EchoStream class that lets you map two stream object in which you read into one stream, and the input to that stream is automatically written to the other. It can also do the same for writing - Writing to…
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More VS.NET Tips & Tricks
For you keyboard junkies out there: Cut the current line - CTRL+L (Saves you that 'long' HOME,SHIFT+END,CTRL+X) Delete the current line - CTRL+SHIFT+L (Saves you that 'long' HOME,SHIFT+END,DEL) Move to the closing or…
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A VS.NET 2003 Registry Tweaker Don Could Use
Since Don was writing on how you can tweak the registry in order to be able to ShellExecute VS.NET associated files into an open instance of VS.NET(instead of a new one each time), I decided to take the 'challenge' and…
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Advanced Dataset Helper Classes
While Trying to help my wife find material regarding dynamically creating tables at runtime, I stumbled across a very nice group of articles , All about Dataset helper Classes doinf various cool things with the dataset.…
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ASP.NET Authentication Question + Answer
I can't seem to find an answer to this: Is it possible to use the tag in web.config to allow some of the pages in your site to be non-secure, meaning users can browse them without being redirected to the login page?…
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More Debugger Problems: aspnet_regiis does not work on Windows 2003 Server
I've added the following solution to the Resolving Debugger Problems Article: aspnet_regiis does not work on windows 2003 server: Solution: "you can work around it by setting the identity of the application pool (app…
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Regular Expressions And Log Parsing
My company needs a small utility to parse log files generated by some of the speech engines we are using in our products. They generate old-style ASCII log files that are easy to read but cumbersome to parse. I started…
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File I/O Support In Transactions
I was recently at a lecture concerning .Net and COM+. Wow. COM+ is really powerful. I never got the chance to work with it on any of the projects I have created, but I did play with it here and there. I never knew there…
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Debugging Problem
I got this comment about debugging Web Services: " I am trying to debug a C# application and when I step into a web serivce all of the breakpoints stop working. Can you help? Scott " I can't. can you? I'll post the…
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Typed Datasets - Can You Get Much Cooler?
I'm currently developing a small winforms application for my company. It's really nothing fancy - just a data entry system connected to an Access database. In the old days, using VB6 i would have the following options…
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Resolving Debugger Problems in VS.NET
The Article I posted about resolving debugger problems in VS.NET seems to be quite popular. Ive been getting hits from all over. Just in case you missed it and are stuck on something - Here's the link to it . Of course,…
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ASP.NET is cool + DataGrid Designer Tips
Forget my previous rants about ASP.NET. I was plain wrong. This stuff is cool ! I gave myself a little project : create a food ordering site for my company's intranet. Nothing fancy. but it should put me through all the…
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Free GUI component for VS .NET users
Developer Express have released a cool GUI component XtraNavBar and it's completely FREE if you use VS.NET (You don't need to prove that you use it though.. :) ) It sure looks nice, don't it? Thanks, Dev Express! Get it…
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Explorer Tips and tricks for the keyboard junkie
Windows Trick o' the Day I knew this trick existed, but I couldn't remember it. If you to drill down through your directory structure all the time, this is a real time saver. In Windows Explorer, you can highlight a…
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App.Config Magic
Here's another tidbit i found: If i want my application to have a config file, i need to create a file named .config in the output directory. but here's a nice touch you can do with VS.NET: click " Add Item " button,…
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Cool IDE Shortcut
here's something i just found out: Select some text in the ide and press CTRL+SHIFT+U - and the selection becomes UPPERCASE . Use CTRL+U to make it lowercase .. tada!
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Killer IDE macro
I found there is only one(for now) macro that i use in the VS .NET IDE - the one that puts two curly braces in the following lines and puts the cursor in between them. this HAS to be a killer macro. i assigned it the…