DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by darrenstokes

SimpleDB tools for Visual Studio

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 13:31:03 GMT

A new add-in which integrates Amazon SimpleDB into Server Explorer and enables you to view and edit SimpleDB data within Visual Studio is up. It also integrates with the LightSpeed ORM framework and designer.

IoC libraries compared

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 18:01:06 GMT

A comparison of how to initialize various IoC libraries. Including AutoFac, Ninject, Spring.Net, StructureMap, Unity, and Windsor.

Line count in Visual Studio

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 03:52:06 GMT

Visual Studio can count...

VSTricks Video Blog: Visual Studio Block Select

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 18:01:03 GMT

Block Select, copy, cut, paste. Video is 90 seconds

Incremental Search (Video tip) in Visual Studio

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 02:54:43 GMT

CTRL+F is fine and functional, but check out CTRL+I :)

There is More Content than Just the Front Page on DotNetKicks

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:01:03 GMT

Are you tired of going to DotNetKicks and finding the same stories on the front page for days in a row? Trust me, there is some great content out there that never makes the front page. You just have to look a little deeper. When you do, you can help put some of that great new content in front of the masses. Even if you don't submit stories yourself, you can still help out by giving the initial votes that push a story to the front page.

Messaging is not just for investment banks

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 14:16:50 GMT

It seems that HTTP calls have become a default way to think about distributed systems. HTTP and Web services definitely have a lot to offer, but they are not the only way to do things and there are definitely cases where web is not the right choice. Unfortunately, lots of people just stick with web services and hack on, trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. In cases such as these, a different distribution paradigm can save us quite a lot of time and effort both in development and later in maintenance. One of those different paradigms is messaging.

Graffiti Extras 1.3 Released

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 10:23:25 GMT

Keyvan Nayyeri has released a new version of his open source Graffiti Extras. In this post he has described new features and tweaks of this release.

Skip the Visual Studio Splash Screen

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 17:16:03 GMT

Anything to speed up Visual Studio.

Snipt - Long-term memory for coders

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 06:50:32 GMT

Snipt is a collection of frequently used commands or code snippets. You can browse though all snippets, find them by tags or login with your OpenID and add your own snippets.

Reusing .NET Assemblies in Silverlight

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 16:50:05 GMT

Visual Studio 2008 doesn't allow Silverlight to reference ".NET assemblies". This document explains that there's absolutely no technical reason for this since .NET assemblies ARE Silverlight assemblies, then it shows you how to make the reference work.

How-To Change Visual Studio CSS Editor Default Format Settings

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 15:35:33 GMT

Here is a Quick Tip in order to Change Visual Studio CSS Editor Default Format Settings

Visual Studio Debugging Feature - Tracepoints

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 01:31:04 GMT

A tracepoint is simply a breakpoint that will emit a debug trace statement when it is reached. It can emit things like the current function name, stack trace, or the contents of a variable. What's really cool is that you don't have to actually stop execution. This allows you to quickly add debugging statements without the need to check out your code or remember to take the Debug.WriteLine statements out afterwards.

DimeCasts.NET - Free education vidoes.

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 15:01:02 GMT

DimeCasts.NET offer free education vidoes in field of various Microsoft related technologies. Advantage is most of these vidoes are 10 minutes or less in length.

What is Microsoft waiting for providing a decent path API?

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 19:31:13 GMT

I was recently browsing the code source of Managed Extensibility Framework and realized that this future part of .NET 4, full of tricky and advanced ideas, was naively relying on strings to describe files and directories paths. It seems that the version 4 of .NET will miss the need for a descent path API. There is the class System.IO.Path but it is feature limited, full of flaws and pitfalls (to not say bugs) and it fosters users to encode their paths into raw strings. It seems to me that using strings to encode paths is as primitive as using String.IndexOf("<tag>") to parse some XML.

Compressing JS files as part of your build process

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 23:16:02 GMT

Ideally, we want to develop using readable JavaScript files (even 3rd party files) and deploy compressed/obfuscated code. Our solution has simply been to apply a post-build task to our project. Here's what we did

Tired Of Working With Big Visual Studio Solutions?

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 18:01:06 GMT

a simple trick to make working with big Visual Studio solutions much more bearable

Encosia Best of 2005, 5 most popular posts

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 17:16:02 GMT

Reviewing Dave's stats for the year, you might think the only topic Dave wrote about is jQuery. Of the posts he has written in 2008, 80% of the most popular posts have been jQuery related.

StructureMap 2.5.1 Released

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 06:54:52 GMT

Jeremy D. Miller, the author of Structuremap, has recently released a incremental release of this popular DI framework. He has listed new features and bug fixes as well as future plans for SM.

Graffiti 1.2 Released

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 06:43:16 GMT

From the old Community Server days, Keyvan has been actively working on Telligent products (and so he has achieved a CS MVP). So who is better to talk about the new release of Telligent's next generation of personal CMSs? Take a look at Keyvan's writing about the new Graffiti 1.2.

Spark Language Package - Preview 1

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 03:46:02 GMT

This is a very early copy of a msi which installs a Spark language package for Visual Studio 2008. It will put dlls into a Program Files\Spark directory and add just enough registry keys to add color and intellisense to files with a .spark extension.

Transfer Visual Studio Settings Between PCs

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 21:53:20 GMT

Visual Studio has many hundreds of settings that can be configured using the Options dialog box from the Tools menu. If you use several computers, it can be useful to configure the environment on one machine, then transfer the settings to other systems.

Extending the Visual-Studio Context-Menu

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 17:16:06 GMT

We can add features to the Visual-Studio context menu, without installing addins. Here is an example showing how to add "Explore" and "Execute" commands to any item in the Solution Explorer.

Top 100 Blogs for Developers

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 18:46:02 GMT

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

Yet another Singleton Yada-Yada

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 09:01:04 GMT

Using a static-constructor in a singleton, affects it's laziness. Here's a generic singleton that is thread-safe using a static-constructor, and still lazy.