June 2005 - Posts
Pretty much since the moment my wife fell pregnant, I've been thinking that I really wanted to upgrade my digital camera. It's a measly 2 megapixel jobbie, with not very much by way of fine grain control over what the photo is that's being taken. Also,
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Good .net code requires many skills. There's a few skills I consider mandatory when it comes to writing good .net code. An understanding of the language. An understanding of the platform. An ability to think logically and to get your ideas out succinctly.
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Do any of you read Josh Ledgard's blog ? I've been following his blog since I first stumbled across the VBCommenter addin for Visual Studio. A couple of days ago he had a really cool idea. In an attempt to get to know his readers better, he asked that
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I like helping people. Really I do. That's actually the main reason I keep on writing in my blog. I like to think (rightly or wrongly) that some of the code samples that I write down are useful to people. I know people read a lot of my posts (especially
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This is something new I learned tonight. It make sense when you think about it I guess, but it bit us at work (luckily, not directly my fault this time :) but something I had to find an answer to since I'm the XMLSerialization expert there. Oh who am
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I had very specific plans for what I was going to do with my night tonight once my daughter had got to sleep. First, I was going to write myself a new skin for my blog. In the upgrade to Community Server 1.1 (thanks Brendan!), my old skin died a miserable
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There's a few tools and other assorted goodies that have become known as the 'standard' when it comes to productivity enhancements within Visual Studio - CodeBetter has even become friends with some of them :) But I'd like to take a moment to present
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Just like Steve Hebert did the other day, when the post appeared about the Broker Challenge , I knew it was something I wanted to play with. I'm not a huge SQL guy (yes, I'm pretty huge, but I'm certainly not made of S's, Q's, and L's - there's some lard
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"The time has come", the Walrus said, "to speak of secure communications". There's something I've been meaning to getting around to sorting out for a while now, but have been deliberately ignoring. My excuses have been that I've been too busy, and also
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You might recall a few days ago I mentioned how cool it would be to have managed extensions for Internet Explorer available ( V isual S tudio T ools for I nternet E xplorer). Well, after some advice from Frank , I got around to checking if someone had
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If you are, you might have noticed a couple of problems when your'e working with old school (read: SQL 2000) stuff. I haven't really played that much with Yukon myself, so I'm definitely no expert. But my ex-team leader has, and he's noticed a couple
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Update: Sorry guys, I honestly thought everyone would realise that this doesn't actually work. It's been long enough now, people have had their fun, so I think I need to make it explicitly clear (for the sake of Google and such). THIS ENTIRE ENTRY IS
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[Update 20050510]: As spotted by s_orbit in the comments, there was a slight (well, pretty important, but simple code fix) bug when you supplied verbs that were already disabled. I've updated the download to include the fix, and while I was at it I added
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You've heard of VSTO right? It's an acronym for V isual S tudio T ools for O ffice. I was doing the grocery shopping late last night, wandering from aisle to aisle, getting pissed off at the shelf fillers getting in my road all the time, and so I distracted
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Sometime back (I can't remember how long now) I wrote a post that mentioned some reflection stuff. It (and other factors) prompted Joel Pobar to pipe up saying that he was going to write an article on which bits of Reflection are really slow, and which
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Late one night last week Andrew Coates mailed the aus-dotnet mailing list offering the first 5 people a sweet DVD image. For once my staying up late playing with code for the sake of playing with code paid off, and I won a cupie doll. This is a very nice
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On Friday afternoon I received an email as part of the Canberra .net User Group mailing list, telling me what was happening this month. I like to know what's actually happening each month, even though I rarely go along to an actual meeting - most of the
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I can't remember who's blog post I saw it on, but sometime during the last week someone recommended a Visual Studio Addin called DPack , from USysWare. All these different addins for visual studio exist, there's so many to pick from. At one stage I had
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Who's there? Well, that's a good question in a web environment! The other day on the aus-dotnet list someone asked how to get the username of the current user in asp.net. It's quite an easy answer in general, but there's a few different gotchas depending
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A few weeks ago I wrote a post titled ' A Little Enum Tip '. In it I discussed mapping some random Integer value into an Enum, after validating that value was an actual member of the Enum in question. I finished with a nice generic code sample that could
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Once in a while I feel the need to write a simple post that link to someone else's post. This one is very worth it. Can everyone who reads this please go here and add a comment to the post. David Lemphers is trying to get 100 comments on his post so that
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I thought I'd talk a little bit more about a post from a few days ago, String Performance Over Different Languages . Actually, I think this Part 3, since Bill McCarthy mentioned some more string stuff as a result. He was talking about detecting white
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Well, the easy answer to this question is: whenever it receives a paint message. So the real trick then is: when do your forms receive a paint message? Ah, well, I'm glad you asked! You see, you know how there's a little tiny man that lives inside your
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It's already been said a few places, but the WSE3 CTP appeared for download in the last couple of days from the MSDN website. This wouldn't normally worry me, since I'm yet to actually find a use for any WSE stuff myself. I'm ot saying it's not useful,
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