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So I’ve been playing with some of the features found in the VS 2005 IDE and came up with a couple interesting improvements. Here are some screenshots.

This first one shows an alignment aid when working with WinForms in layout mode. The slight purple line on the left side of the text controls helps to align […]

I’ve been teaching my 11 year old daughter a little bit about her German heritage. The web has been an invaluable tool. For example I showed her that my hometown dates back to 400BC and that we had quite a battle take place in AD 58 - which she could relate to her Bible studies […]

It appears that MS not only provided VS 2005 with a new “Object Datasource” - allowing me to bind controls to business objects, MS also has become more and more vocal about the need of using proper domain objects instead of datasets. Thats nice. After 3+ years of railing against datasets as the “cure-all of […]

I’m famous for attending conferences without a camera. First the LA Car Expo, and now E3….. oh well.
So what did I like? XBox 360 dude. It rocks. Especially watching it being played on giant lcd sceens . I had the feeling that all lcd tv’s in Southern Caifornia had been bougth up by the […]

So there I was perusing the Beta MSDN Documentation when I came across this little ditty.
MS has finally decided to give us a class that lets us deal with a connection string in terms of properties as opposed to a straight out string. So now you can do stuff like “builder.Password = someNewPassword”.
Wadda ya […]

Uuuuuhhhhh, ahhhh…. nice!
Peter Provost touches on the use of generics to replace casting certain interfaces. Now thats what I’m talking ’bout! What a fun concept.
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Between December and March I had the opportunity to work with a developer who was so much better than 99% of the coders that I have known in my life, it took my work to a whole different level. Has that ever happened to you?
The thought crossed my mind that I should publicly thank […]

I received a free copy of a very anemic Visual Studio magazine. Leafing through it I was reminded how I used to read at least 3 different magazines on a monthly basis. I don’t anymore. As a matter of fact I used to read business related materials incessantly. Programing books, magazines, websites you name it. […]

Some aspects of ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 remind me a little bit of the changes that happened to Access when it went from ver 2.0 to 95. For the uninitiated, Access was the absolute king of the hill for developers during a short period in the early 90’s. It was the only […]

I’m almost a little sad to hear that the market for book publishers is back on an upswing. Economic downturns, like the .dot com bust, have an evolutionary impact on the industry. From programmers to software companies to publications, a downturn tends to weed out the lesser capable entities. Very Darwinian in a […]

Bertrand LeRoy points out that AJAX is available in ASP.NET 2.0 and the way it was implemented it actually works better than some of the 3rd party approaches out there.
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Jon Galloway explains a technique that I had never heard of before. Sounds nice.
“…Here’s a way to implement a database cache dependency in an ASP.NET 1.1 application. At a high level, it uses a timer on a background thread (in an HTTP Module) that checksums database tables. No database triggers are required.”
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Reflector Diff, a very nifty assembly diffing tool that uses Reflector is now .NET 2.0 compatible. Good deal Sean!

Scott Mitchell has a whole mess of examples on the usage of the GridView control posted on MSDN.
link here

In a former life, about 23 years ago, I was a chef. With a degree in culinary arts and all. Its a long story. Anyways I wanted to mention this as a way of establishing credibility for my opinion. So here it is:
If you are currently living in a City or State that does […]

Alex Furman wrote a very nifty utility that can record web interactions in an IE 5.5 and higher browser. I could see some use for this in automated testing of web applications. The most interesting aspect of this tool is the way in which it GENERATES C# CODE based on recorded script interactions with a […]

I just saw this on Phil’s blog and wanted to make a note of it for posterity. Something to read when there is a little bit of time. Article here