VarunMaggo

Blogosphere

August 29th Links: .NET, ASP.NET, IIS Express, Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 Mon, 30 Aug 2010 06:23:36 GMT Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my VS 2010 and .NET 4 series and ASP.NET MVC 2 series for other on-going blog series I’m working on. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] .NET/WPF/EF 5 Little C#/.NET Wonders that Make Code Better : Nice blog post from James that highlights 5 nice language/framework tips you can take advantage of within your apps. I’m betting a lot of people didn’t know about the StopWatch class. WPF Ribbon Control Released : The WPF team recently released the final V1 release of the WPF Ribbon control. This makes it easy to build ribbon-based applications. Also read this WPF team blog post...(read more)
Patch for VS 2010 Find and Replace Dialog Growing Mon, 30 Aug 2010 04:57:22 GMT One of the top reported Microsoft Connect issues with VS 2010 has been an issue with the Find and Replace dialog – which grows 16px each time you use it (which is pretty annoying). The Visual Studio team recently released a patch that fixes this issue. You can download and apply it here . Hope this helps, Scott P.S. A few people reported issues installing the patch if they had an older version of the Silverlight 4 tools installed. If you see an error message that says you need an update to Visual Studio to support Silverlight 4, you can fix it by installing the latest Silverlight 4 tools release . Read More......(read more)
Search and Navigation Tips/Tricks with Visual Studio Tue, 24 Aug 2010 07:24:57 GMT This is the twenty-seventh in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. Today’s blog post continues on from the Debugging Tips post I did last week, and covers some useful searching and navigation tips/tricks you can take advantage of within Visual Studio. These tips were ones that my friend Scott Cate (who has blogged dozens of great VS tips and tricks here ) recently recommended to me as good tips that most developers using Visual Studio don’t seem to know about (even though most have been in the product for awhile). Hopefully this post will help you discover them if you aren’t already taking advantage of them. They are all easy to learn, and can help save you a bunch of time. Ctrl + i - Incremental...(read more)
Hanselminutes Podcast 227 - Inside Expression SuperPreview with developer Mike Calvo Fri, 20 Aug 2010 20:15:33 GMT Scott talks to Mike Calvo, a Microsoft Lead Developer based out of Minnesota (!) about Expression SuperPreview. SuperPreview helps developers and designers with cross-browser CSS and HTML issues. How'd they build it and with what? What's inside? How does the cloud fit in and how do they support Safari? I played with SuperPreview a bit last year, but started looking at it again last month when I noticed that version 4 has introduced support for Safari on Mac via a Cloud-based Remote Service. I fired up Expression SuperPreview 4, and saw this: Then I signed up: Which enabled Mac Safari for this initial beta. I assume they'll add a pile of other browsers. If I don't see immediate browser support for ALynx, the Amiga port of Unix...(read more)
Tip #107 Did you know … How to improve debugging performance for MVC2 application in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate? Thu, 19 Aug 2010 18:40:58 GMT VS2010 Ultimate included IntelliTrace functionality by default. IntelliTrace captures events (e.g. exceptions), and can affect performance of debugging. The typical performance hit is about 5% in the default mode (collection can be increased to...(read more)
Debugging Tips with Visual Studio 2010 Thu, 19 Aug 2010 04:48:46 GMT This is the twenty-sixth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. Today’s blog post covers some useful debugging tips that you can use with Visual Studio. My friend Scott Cate (who has blogged dozens of great VS tips and tricks here ) recently highlighted these to me as good tips that most developers using Visual Studio don’t seem to know about (even though most have been in the product for awhile). Hopefully this post will help you discover them if you aren’t already taking advantage of them. They are all easy to learn, and can help save you a bunch of time. Run to Cursor (Ctrl + F10) Often I see people debugging applications by hitting a breakpoint early in their application, and then repeatedly...(read more)
Clay: malleable C# dynamic objects – part 2 Wed, 18 Aug 2010 14:00:00 GMT In the first part of this post , I explained what requirements we have for the view models in Orchard and why we think dynamic is a good fit for such an object model. This time, we’re going to look at Louis ’ Clay library and how you can use it to create object graphs and consume them. But before we do that, I want to address a couple of questions. 1. If we use dynamic, aren’t we losing IntelliSense and compile-time checking and all the good things that come with statically-typed languages? And is C# becoming overloaded with concepts, and trying to be good at everything but becoming good at nothing? Hush, hush, everything is going to be all right. Relax. Now think of all the XML/DOM styles of APIs that you know in .NET (or Java for that matter...(read more)
Clay: malleable C# dynamic objects – part 1: why we need it Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT When trying to build the right data structure in Orchard to contain a view model to which multiple entities blindly contribute, it became obvious pretty fast that using a dynamic structure of sorts was a must. What we needed was a hierarchical structure: a page can have a list of blog posts and a few widgets, each blog post is the composition of a number of parts such as comments, comments have authors, which can have avatars, ratings, etc. That gets us to the second requirement, which is that multiple entities that don’t know about each other must contribute to building that object graph. We don’t know the shape of the graph in advance and every node you build is susceptible to being expanded with new nodes. The problem is that C# static types...(read more)
Buttons with Mouse-Over Behaviors – Redux Mon, 16 Aug 2010 14:50:14 GMT I recently posted some CSS and HTML snippets for a buttons collection I was using for a Menu style UI Scott Koon from www.LazyCoder.com posted a comment with a better way (thanks Scott). This way I don’t have to set the CSS Class for each button. Just contain them in a div. Here is the [...] Read More......(read more)
“Unplugged” online chat with me this Wednesday Mon, 16 Aug 2010 13:24:59 GMT I just got back from my trip to India and the UK last week – and will be returning to more regular blogging shortly. This Wednesday (August 18th) I’m going to be doing another online LIDNUG chat session . The chat will be from 10:00am to 11:30am Pacific Time. I do these chats a few times a year and they tend to be pretty good. Attendees can submit any questions they want to me, and listen to me answer them live via LiveMeeting. You can learn more about it here and join the chat and ask questions at the appropriate time with this link . Hope to get a chance to chat with some of you there! Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com...(read more)
More Versioning Fun With Optional Arguments Thu, 12 Aug 2010 21:26:23 GMT In my last blog post , I covered some challenges with versioning methods that differ only by optional parameters. If you haven’t read it, go read it. If I do say so myself, it’s kind of interesting. ;) In this post, I want to cover another very subtle versioning issue with using optional parameters. At the very end of that last post, I made the following comment. By the way, you can add overloads that have additional required parameters. So in this way, you are in the same boat as before. However, this can lead to subtle bugs. Let’s walk through a scenario. Imagine that some class library has the following method in version 1.0. public static void Foo( string s1, string s2, string s3 = "v1" ) { Console.WriteLine( "version 1"...(read more)
The Weekly Source Code 56 - Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit - Code Contracts, Parallel Framework and COM Interop Thu, 12 Aug 2010 09:07:55 GMT Do you like a big pile of source code? Well, there is an imperial buttload of source in the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit . It's actually a 178 meg download, which is insane. Perhaps start your download now and get it in the morning when you get up. It's extremely well put together and I say Kudos to the folks that did it. They are better people than I. I like to explore it while watching TV myself and found myself looking through tonight. I checked my blog and while I thought I'd shared this with you before, Dear Reader, I hadn't. My bad, because it's pure gold . With C# and VB, natch. Here's an outline of what's inside. I've heard of folks setting up lunch-time study groups and going through...(read more)
We are Hiring!! Tue, 10 Aug 2010 21:23:01 GMT Our team is focused on delivering the ASP.NET framework as well as the tools required for web development including Visual Web Developer Express and web application development part of Visual Studio. If you have the skills and the passion, want to work on web based technologies, and you’re looking for challenge in a fun and fast environment you should consider joining us! The Web Platform and Tools team is looking for smart, highly motivated and experienced testers who can help our team test the next generation of tools and runtime technologies. The candidates who fill these roles are expected to become an expert at building, testing and using web based technologies. The ideal candidate should be a self-starter and have the ability to...(read more)
Versioning Issues With Optional Arguments Tue, 10 Aug 2010 17:32:11 GMT One nice new feature introduced in C# 4 is support for named and optional arguments . While these two features are often discussed together, they really are orthogonal concepts. Let’s look at a quick example of these two concepts at work. Suppose we have a class with one method having the following signature. // v1 public static void Redirect( string url, string protocol = "http" ); This hypothetical library contains a single method that takes in two parameters, a required string url and an optional string protocol . The following shows the six possible ways this method can be called. HttpHelpers.Redirect( "http://haacked.com/" ); HttpHelpers.Redirect(url: "http://haacked.com/" ); HttpHelpers.Redirect( "http...(read more)
How to Post Code To Your Blog and other Religious Arguments Tue, 10 Aug 2010 00:28:41 GMT If you've got a programming blog, chances are you'll want to post some code snippets. Posting code sounds easy but it's surprisingly tricky if you consider all the ways that people will be reading your blog. There's a number of ways. Here's a few and their pros and cons . Copy Paste from your IDE (like Visual Studio, for example) If I copy paste directly from VS into my editor of choice, Windows Live Writer, I'll get a <pre> section. using System; namespace WindowsGame1 { #if WINDOWS \|\| XBOX static class Program { /// <summary> /// The main entry point for the application. ...(read more)

August 29th Links: .NET, ASP.NET, IIS Express, Silverlight, Windows Phone 7
Mon, 30 Aug 2010 06:23:36 GMT

Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my VS 2010 and .NET 4 series and ASP.NET MVC 2 series for other on-going blog series I’m working on. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] .NET/WPF/EF 5 Little C#/.NET Wonders that Make Code Better : Nice blog post from James that highlights 5 nice language/framework tips you can take advantage of within your apps. I’m betting a lot of people didn’t know about the StopWatch class. WPF Ribbon Control Released : The WPF team recently released the final V1 release of the WPF Ribbon control. This makes it easy to build ribbon-based applications. Also read this WPF team blog post...(read more)

Patch for VS 2010 Find and Replace Dialog Growing
Mon, 30 Aug 2010 04:57:22 GMT

One of the top reported Microsoft Connect issues with VS 2010 has been an issue with the Find and Replace dialog – which grows 16px each time you use it (which is pretty annoying). The Visual Studio team recently released a patch that fixes this issue. You can download and apply it here . Hope this helps, Scott P.S. A few people reported issues installing the patch if they had an older version of the Silverlight 4 tools installed. If you see an error message that says you need an update to Visual Studio to support Silverlight 4, you can fix it by installing the latest Silverlight 4 tools release . Read More......(read more)

Search and Navigation Tips/Tricks with Visual Studio
Tue, 24 Aug 2010 07:24:57 GMT

This is the twenty-seventh in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. Today’s blog post continues on from the Debugging Tips post I did last week, and covers some useful searching and navigation tips/tricks you can take advantage of within Visual Studio. These tips were ones that my friend Scott Cate (who has blogged dozens of great VS tips and tricks here ) recently recommended to me as good tips that most developers using Visual Studio don’t seem to know about (even though most have been in the product for awhile). Hopefully this post will help you discover them if you aren’t already taking advantage of them. They are all easy to learn, and can help save you a bunch of time. Ctrl + i - Incremental...(read more)

Hanselminutes Podcast 227 - Inside Expression SuperPreview with developer Mike Calvo
Fri, 20 Aug 2010 20:15:33 GMT

Scott talks to Mike Calvo, a Microsoft Lead Developer based out of Minnesota (!) about Expression SuperPreview. SuperPreview helps developers and designers with cross-browser CSS and HTML issues. How'd they build it and with what? What's inside? How does the cloud fit in and how do they support Safari? I played with SuperPreview a bit last year, but started looking at it again last month when I noticed that version 4 has introduced support for Safari on Mac via a Cloud-based Remote Service. I fired up Expression SuperPreview 4, and saw this: Then I signed up: Which enabled Mac Safari for this initial beta. I assume they'll add a pile of other browsers. If I don't see immediate browser support for ALynx, the Amiga port of Unix...(read more)

Tip #107 Did you know … How to improve debugging performance for MVC2 application in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate?
Thu, 19 Aug 2010 18:40:58 GMT

VS2010 Ultimate included IntelliTrace functionality by default. IntelliTrace captures events (e.g. exceptions), and can affect performance of debugging. The typical performance hit is about 5% in the default mode (collection can be increased to...(read more)

Debugging Tips with Visual Studio 2010
Thu, 19 Aug 2010 04:48:46 GMT

This is the twenty-sixth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. Today’s blog post covers some useful debugging tips that you can use with Visual Studio. My friend Scott Cate (who has blogged dozens of great VS tips and tricks here ) recently highlighted these to me as good tips that most developers using Visual Studio don’t seem to know about (even though most have been in the product for awhile). Hopefully this post will help you discover them if you aren’t already taking advantage of them. They are all easy to learn, and can help save you a bunch of time. Run to Cursor (Ctrl + F10) Often I see people debugging applications by hitting a breakpoint early in their application, and then repeatedly...(read more)

Clay: malleable C# dynamic objects – part 2
Wed, 18 Aug 2010 14:00:00 GMT

In the first part of this post , I explained what requirements we have for the view models in Orchard and why we think dynamic is a good fit for such an object model. This time, we’re going to look at Louis ’ Clay library and how you can use it to create object graphs and consume them. But before we do that, I want to address a couple of questions. 1. If we use dynamic, aren’t we losing IntelliSense and compile-time checking and all the good things that come with statically-typed languages? And is C# becoming overloaded with concepts, and trying to be good at everything but becoming good at nothing? Hush, hush, everything is going to be all right. Relax. Now think of all the XML/DOM styles of APIs that you know in .NET (or Java for that matter...(read more)

Clay: malleable C# dynamic objects – part 1: why we need it
Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT

When trying to build the right data structure in Orchard to contain a view model to which multiple entities blindly contribute, it became obvious pretty fast that using a dynamic structure of sorts was a must. What we needed was a hierarchical structure: a page can have a list of blog posts and a few widgets, each blog post is the composition of a number of parts such as comments, comments have authors, which can have avatars, ratings, etc. That gets us to the second requirement, which is that multiple entities that don’t know about each other must contribute to building that object graph. We don’t know the shape of the graph in advance and every node you build is susceptible to being expanded with new nodes. The problem is that C# static types...(read more)

Buttons with Mouse-Over Behaviors – Redux
Mon, 16 Aug 2010 14:50:14 GMT

I recently posted some CSS and HTML snippets for a buttons collection I was using for a Menu style UI Scott Koon from www.LazyCoder.com posted a comment with a better way (thanks Scott). This way I don’t have to set the CSS Class for each button. Just contain them in a div. Here is the [...] Read More......(read more)

“Unplugged” online chat with me this Wednesday
Mon, 16 Aug 2010 13:24:59 GMT

I just got back from my trip to India and the UK last week – and will be returning to more regular blogging shortly. This Wednesday (August 18th) I’m going to be doing another online LIDNUG chat session . The chat will be from 10:00am to 11:30am Pacific Time. I do these chats a few times a year and they tend to be pretty good. Attendees can submit any questions they want to me, and listen to me answer them live via LiveMeeting. You can learn more about it here and join the chat and ask questions at the appropriate time with this link . Hope to get a chance to chat with some of you there! Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com...(read more)

More Versioning Fun With Optional Arguments
Thu, 12 Aug 2010 21:26:23 GMT

In my last blog post , I covered some challenges with versioning methods that differ only by optional parameters. If you haven’t read it, go read it. If I do say so myself, it’s kind of interesting. ;) In this post, I want to cover another very subtle versioning issue with using optional parameters. At the very end of that last post, I made the following comment. By the way, you can add overloads that have additional required parameters. So in this way, you are in the same boat as before. However, this can lead to subtle bugs. Let’s walk through a scenario. Imagine that some class library has the following method in version 1.0. public static void Foo( string s1, string s2, string s3 = "v1" ) { Console.WriteLine( "version 1"...(read more)

The Weekly Source Code 56 - Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit - Code Contracts, Parallel Framework and COM Interop
Thu, 12 Aug 2010 09:07:55 GMT

Do you like a big pile of source code? Well, there is an imperial buttload of source in the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit . It's actually a 178 meg download, which is insane. Perhaps start your download now and get it in the morning when you get up. It's extremely well put together and I say Kudos to the folks that did it. They are better people than I. I like to explore it while watching TV myself and found myself looking through tonight. I checked my blog and while I thought I'd shared this with you before, Dear Reader, I hadn't. My bad, because it's pure gold . With C# and VB, natch. Here's an outline of what's inside. I've heard of folks setting up lunch-time study groups and going through...(read more)

We are Hiring!!
Tue, 10 Aug 2010 21:23:01 GMT

Our team is focused on delivering the ASP.NET framework as well as the tools required for web development including Visual Web Developer Express and web application development part of Visual Studio. If you have the skills and the passion, want to work on web based technologies, and you’re looking for challenge in a fun and fast environment you should consider joining us! The Web Platform and Tools team is looking for smart, highly motivated and experienced testers who can help our team test the next generation of tools and runtime technologies. The candidates who fill these roles are expected to become an expert at building, testing and using web based technologies. The ideal candidate should be a self-starter and have the ability to...(read more)

Versioning Issues With Optional Arguments
Tue, 10 Aug 2010 17:32:11 GMT

One nice new feature introduced in C# 4 is support for named and optional arguments . While these two features are often discussed together, they really are orthogonal concepts. Let’s look at a quick example of these two concepts at work. Suppose we have a class with one method having the following signature. // v1 public static void Redirect( string url, string protocol = "http" ); This hypothetical library contains a single method that takes in two parameters, a required string url and an optional string protocol . The following shows the six possible ways this method can be called. HttpHelpers.Redirect( "http://haacked.com/" ); HttpHelpers.Redirect(url: "http://haacked.com/" ); HttpHelpers.Redirect( "http...(read more)

How to Post Code To Your Blog and other Religious Arguments
Tue, 10 Aug 2010 00:28:41 GMT

If you've got a programming blog, chances are you'll want to post some code snippets. Posting code sounds easy but it's surprisingly tricky if you consider all the ways that people will be reading your blog. There's a number of ways. Here's a few and their pros and cons . Copy Paste from your IDE (like Visual Studio, for example) If I copy paste directly from VS into my editor of choice, Windows Live Writer, I'll get a <pre> section. using System; namespace WindowsGame1 { #if WINDOWS || XBOX static class Program { /// <summary> /// The main entry point for the application. ...(read more)

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