Archives - July 2008
DevExpress Earthquake Video
DevExpress is one of several companies I work with via Lake Quincy Media , and it seems like a very fun place to work. Recently they launched a video site to help showcase their products, and earlier this week they made a video showing the reaction of some of their employees to the 5.4 scale earthquake...
There are no single developer projects
Oren wrote today, There is no such thing as a single developer project . At first this sounds like an obviously false statement, but read on: There are always at least two people in any software project: The developer who wrote the code. The developer who read the code. They are never the same person...
Batch JavaScript Libraries for Increased Performance
I've been meaning to set up batched loading of the JavaScript libraries used by Lake Quincy Media's administration application for some time, and finally had a chance this past weekend. The site uses a variety of third-party tools such as DevExpress , ComponentArt , AJAX Control Toolkit , Overlib , PeterBlum...
Avoid appSettings Usage in Controls or Shared Libraries
Since .NET 1.0, there has been a built-in appSettings section in configuration files. Many developers use this space to store application settings, such as the name of the site or (before <connectionStrings />) database connection information. However, many third party tools also make use of this...
VS Tip - Incremental Search in Visual Studio
If you're looking to navigate through the current file in Visual Studio, the typical approach is ctrl-F, which is the shortcut for Find and brings up a dialog like the one at right to locate instance of a string. Bertrand just let me know about another shortcut, ctrl-I, which does Incremental Search...
Travel Gadget - Power Splitter
Something I always keep in my laptop bag is a Liberator power splitter. All this does is split one power outlet into two, with a little bit of extension cord thrown in for added convenience. You can find a wide variety of such things here . Always Enough Power For You So, what's the big deal about having...
JungleDisk as Service on Windows Server 2003
I'm a big fan of JungleDisk , a $20 utility that makes using Amazon's S3 storage solution easy and backups cheap. I'm also a big fan of Red Gate's tools, and in particular SQL Backup, which makes backing up SQL Server databases much easier and compresses them down to almost nothing . I've been manually...
Getting Started with TDD
Recently DannyT wrote on the altdotnet list: On our next project I really want to nail unit testing and possibly even test driven development. My issue however is none of our team has any experience of either so we will be starting totally green. ... My question however is, with a goal of wanting to...
Word 2007 Search Commands
I recently complained on Twitter that the UI in Office 2007 (and specifically Word in this case) makes it incredibly difficult to find many of the things that I knew how to find in Word 2003/2000/XP/97/Every. Other. Version. This is understandably frustrating and I don't really see the Ribbon UI as a...
How I Got Started in Software Development
Keyvan tagged me for the latest meme ( started by Michael Eaton ) going round the developer blogger space. I'm not sure how much people actually care to read about these things, so I'll oblige but will attempt to keep it brief, and if you want more like this, check out my Five Things You Didn't Know...
Blog Roll
I want to update my blog reading habits and make sure there aren't really great bloggers out there of whom I'm unaware (I'm sure there are plenty). If you'd like to help out, please email me with your top 3 bloggers whom you actually read on a regular basis. Please *leave out* the really big and obvious...
Ann Arbor Give Camp
The Ann Arbor Give Camp is happening this weekend. I think this is really cool, and I'm bummed that other plans have prevented my being able to participate directly. That said, I would like to personally thank all of the developers who are participating. I think it's really cool and I hope you have a...
Show Similar Posts in Graffiti
I couldn't find this with Google Live Search but ScottW hooked me up. If you want to show related or similar posts in your posts in Graffiti , just add this script to your post.view file (which, amazingly enough, you can do via the admin tool without FTPing any files to your blog - how cool is that?...
Velocity CTP1 Install
Finally have a few minutes to play with Velocity , Microsoft's new distributed cache offering that's currently in CTP1 status (since a month ago at TechEd Developers in Orlando). Read the official announcement here . The installation immediately asks you to configure your machine as a Cache Host: To...
Run Tests By Project With MSTest
An annoyance I used to have with unit testing in Visual Studio is that it was often difficult to limit the number of tests I wanted to run. In VS 2008 there are some improvements here, and the nicest one is the ability to right-click in a test and select Run Tests and have it run that unit test (or do...
Testing Around ASP.NET Cache Features
It's still quite painful to try and test code that relies on ASP.NET Caching. Now, I love caching. Ask anybody. But testing around it can pretty much suck. The biggest source of pain for me at the moment is the SqlCacheDependency, which is freaking awesome in terms of functionality but freaking annoying...
Getting RSS Right
Just made some updates to the aggregate RSS feed on DevMavens.com so that it's more correct. We weren't displaying the author correctly before (and we're still not complying with the RFC that wants <author /> to contain an email address, but I see no reason to increase the spam these folks get...
Show Page Load Time
When testing performance for an individual ASP.NET page, it's often useful to be able to see how long the page took to render. The bar-none easiest way to achieve this is to simply add Trace="true" to the <%@ Page %> directive, which will yield results like this: However, often times this won't...
Visual Studio Break When Exception Thrown
By default, Visual Studio will only break when an exception is unhandled in user code. This is often some distance from where the actual exception took place, as several try...catch blocks might have been involved in the meantime before the exception goes unhandled. A recent thread on the ALT.NET mailing...
Unit Testing Time
Oren has a post showing how he deals with time sensitive code in his unit tests . One thing that's interesting is that, like my previous post, deals with the System.Func<T> construct introduced in .NET 3.5. I see this convention more and more and it's really growing on me. I've dealt with timing...
Cache Access Pattern Revised
Karl Seguin has an interesting post about using System.Func to fight repetitive code blocks , which actually addresses a pain point I've had for quite some time but had never acted on to fix. Whenever one access the Cache or a similar statebag that might or might not contain the value sought after, it...
Mavens in the Developer Community
Since launching DevMavens this week, I've had a few folks tell me they didn't previously know what a maven was. The site shows some definitions, but the concept that led to my choosing that name is from the excellent book, The Tipping Point: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference...
DDD Quickly
I picked up the print version of Domain Driven Design Quickly on Amazon recently. I didn't realize at the time that it was also available as a free e-book, which wouldn't have stopped me from buying except for the fact that it's less than 100 pages and $30 ! That's a bit pricey, in my opinion, for what...
Search Stored Procedures
Sometimes, especially on very old applications that have gone through several rewrites but are still using the original database, I find myself wondering which stored procedures reference a given table, or each other, or whether changing the name of a view or column name will break something somewhere...
IsNull Extension Method
I'm strongly considering adopting the use of an IsNull extension method in my .NET 3.5 coding projects. A quick search to see what others have to say about this revealed a new web site dedicated to extension methods , which includes this IsNull method ready to go: public static bool IsNull( this object...
Setting up Windows Live Writer With Graffiti
So now I've set up Windows Live Writer to point to my new Graffiti blog. The docs were true to the task and it was pretty painless. Assuming this post goes through, everything worked on the first try. Theoretically it will even have a custom URL of graffiti-windows-live-writer. Related Links: http:/...
New Blog Home
I'm updating my blog's home and moving to Graffiti and my own domain, SteveSmithBlog.com . I'm hoping that I'll be able to be a bit better about blogging as well, as my total volume of posts has dropped off of late (10 in June, 9 in May, 16 in April for a total of 35 for the quarter - compared to 52...
