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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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6/6/2008 2:03:00 PM
I gave my Tech Ed presentation, ASP.NET Black Belt Performance Techniques, yesterday afternoon. The talk was well-attended, with about 300 372in the audience. I gave the talk last month in Cleveland and it was very well-received. I promised attendees the slides and demos would be available on Tech Ed's CommNet, and right now the slides are but I'm having trouble getting the demos uploaded so I'm also posting everything here: Download Demos Download PPT I w ... [ read more ]
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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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6/2/2008 7:39:36 PM
The Ha recently wrote about his desire to get away from NorthWind and perhaps start some community driven effort to come up with something else , mainly, it seemed to me, for the sake of being something else . I must humbly disagree with this, but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here. The first stated requirement for NotNorthWind is this: Complex enough to be called Real World but simple enough that someone could "get it" in 5-10 minutes That alone is enough for me, as ... [ read more ]
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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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5/17/2008 5:31:30 PM
Doug Seven of Microsoft is hosting a party at Howl at the Moon during TechEd on June 3rd. He has some details on his blog and the party will include (and require for admission) a rubber duck competition. You'll need to pick up your duck for admission at the Teched Technical Learning Center at the Developer Tools & Languages information desk. One duck will admit two people so bring a friend!
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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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5/14/2008 2:51:22 PM
Microsoft has published a set of white papers which provide a good technical overview of the features available in Visual Studio Team System 2008. They're available individually for download: Visual Studio Team System 2008 Capabilities White Papers . The papers cover the following subjects, corresponding to features sets and design goals of VSTS 2008: Communicate and Collaborate Drive Predictability Ensure Quality Early and Often Integrate Work Frequently Making Real-Time ... [ read more ]
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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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3/21/2008 3:49:03 PM
The ASP.NET MVC library's source code has been made available on CodePlex , ScottGu announced today . The project itself is still very much a work in progress, but with this you should be able to get a much better idea of how everything is laid out and working. I think it's great the Microsoft is being this transparent with their development efforts, and the amount of community feedback they are accepting and acting on with this project is outstanding. For a variety of legal ... [ read more ]
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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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3/18/2008 2:35:01 PM
I was doing a bunch of Silverlight last night on a new machine and once again set up my shortcut to basically arrow left in order to let me type in attributes without taking my fingers off of the keyboard and go hunting for arrow keys. I described this shortcut (and the reason for it) here , and I have to say it increases my speed in typing XAML tremendously. Whenever you find yourself within quotes and you really want to jump to the next attribute (which happens, oh, every 5 secon ... [ read more ]
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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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1/29/2008 5:05:36 PM
Sadly, Microsoft decided that with the addition of the Title attribute on the @Page directive, it would make sense to include it by default with some text that one would absolutely never want to use as the title, "Untitled Page". They could have named it "Customer Reporting" or "My Britney Fan Page" and it would have been correct some small amount of the time - but instead they chose something about as likely to actually be useful as Class1.cs or WebForm1 (th ... [ read more ]
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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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12/14/2007 7:19:00 PM
Recently on the Regional Director mailing list, the topic of Theater Glasses like these came up, which led me to express my wish for a high-res version of such goggles that would be sufficient for writing code and otherwise being productive as a developer. The ultimate goal, of course, would be to enable working in locations where even a laptop generally fares poorly, such as on a beach, sipping a cocktail, getting a tan, and wiring up some wicked code. In my experience with a ... [ read more ]
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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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12/12/2007 3:28:00 PM
Scott Hanselman has posted a very well done screencast on getting started with Model View Controller for ASP.NET , which I watched and did all the code for last night. There was only one hangup in the code portion, which has to do with changes that were made post-production to the MvcToolkit . The code given in the screencast doesn't work, but this simple fix does: <% using (Html.Form<ProjectName.Controllers.HomeController>(x=>x.Update(ViewData.ProductID))) { % ... [ read more ]
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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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12/2/2007 12:09:00 AM
Yesterday, Microsoft released a CTP for Web Deployment Projects for Visual Studio 2008 . I don't use these in my own projects, having built a robust system that revolves around CruiseControl.NET and PyroBatchFTP, but it sounds like they have fixed some of the pain points with the new release, which has these new features: Full migration support from WDP for VS 2005 WDP output is replaced only if the WDP build succeeds IIS7 Support There is a fairly extensive walkthrough with ... [ read more ]
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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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11/29/2007 8:18:22 PM
ScottGu today announced what many of us have been wondering and hoping would happen with regard to the next shipping version of Silverlight, which is that it will in fact be dubbed 2.0 rather than 1.1. My personal feeling on this is that it's a very smart move, expecially given the long period of time between the releases (which most people did not realize when 1.0 Beta and 1.1 Alpha were previewed earlier this year at MIX) and the huge difference in the capabilities of these two platfo ... [ read more ]
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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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11/13/2007 1:53:50 PM
I've learned a few new acronyms this year and thought I'd start this post to let others share their favorites as well. Some of these are new to me, and some are classics that I thought were worth including even though they certainly predate 2007. Where possible I've included a link to find more information on the acronym/topic. AJAX - Asynchronous JavaScript and XML CAPTCHA - Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (Carnegie Mellon) CI - ... [ read more ]
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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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11/10/2007 9:02:40 PM
I got back from DevConnections yesterday at 7am (took the redeye flight), after being gone since Saturday. I'm glad to be home, and I know it will be a few days before I'm even close to caught up on everything that fell behind while I was in Vegas. The show was great, though, and this is sort of my summary of the last week. I flew in early for DevExpress's TechSummit, which included about 20 other guests and about a dozen members of the DevExpress team. It was great to get ... [ read more ]
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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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11/10/2007 6:40:32 PM
In my session this week on Membership and Personalization in ASP.NET, I mentioned a commercial control for this but couldn't recall the name or URL. Well, here it is, the ASP.NET Membership Management control from Quality Data. I have not personally used the control, but it looks like it has all the features one would need. It's currently $59 per web server, which seems pretty reasonable.
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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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11/5/2007 6:54:43 PM
ASPAlliance SimpleCMS plugin is now available on CodePlex . You can use CodePlex to submit your feature requests and such now, which will help guide future releases of the plugin. Also, if you're interested in contributing to the project, let us know. You'll find SimpleCms here now.
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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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10/19/2007 5:27:27 PM
Scott Guthrie has a great example of how to use an ASP.NET user control as a template which one can dynamically bind to data and then pull the results out as a string . One place this is useful is in AJAX scenarios in which you want to replace the contents of a region of the page with the rendered output of a user control. I'm using this very successfully in Lake Quincy Media AdSignia for our dashboard pages, to enable me to load the page instantly and then dynamically fetch th ... [ read more ]
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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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10/1/2007 6:49:47 PM
We have a new intern starting with us at Lake Quincy Media today, and in the course of getting him set up, I thought I would mention of a few products we're using that work quite well for us here. The first one relates to training new interns with limited real world programming experience ( Kent State University doesn't do us any favors here - no Microsoft technology, no SQL technology, and no web technology has been covered for most of their computer science graduates, much less st ... [ read more ]
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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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10/1/2007 12:25:17 AM
I'm on dnrTV this week with a show about Caching in ASP.NET, one of my favorite topics . I think the whole show is a bit under an hour and I go through a bunch of demos and show off some of the less-well-known features of caching, such as cache profiles, programmatic output cache invalidation, and the Substitution control that lets you have dynamic contents on a fully output-cached page. I also cover SQL Cache Invalidation and Micro Caching , the demo that helped win me Speake ... [ read more ]
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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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9/21/2007 7:45:02 PM
The AJAX Control Toolkit just released a new version for September 2007. You can get version 10920 now from CodePlex. This release is meant to improve the stability and quality of the controls and includes a bunch of fixes both at the general and control-specific level. There are no new controls in this release. You can view live demos of the toolkit controls on the AJAX Control Toolkit Sample Site .
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9/5/2007 3:38:13 PM
For an admin application I've been working on, we're using a third party reporting tool to serve up reports to our users over the Internet. The reports have a nice designer that works with XSD files in Visual Studio. Not particularly fond of XSDs as a means of data access, I thought I would limit the damage by having only one of them (and worse yet, the XSD file(s) have to be in the root of the website). Unfortunately, by the time we were up to our 5th or 6th report and we had ... [ read more ]
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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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9/4/2007 6:52:27 PM
Adding a new web service to an application today so that I can delay loading some web user controls and ran into this 500 Error when calling the web service: Request format is unrecognized for URL unexpectedly ending in /GetHtml Found this KB article with the fix: Add the following to web.config since GET and POST are disabled by default in ASP.NET 2.0 and greater: <configuration>
<system.web>
<webServices>
<protocols>
<add name= &quo ... [ read more ]
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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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8/25/2007 5:58:58 AM
I had a situation where I was using a DataSourceControl (actually an LLBLGenProDataSource2,which inherits from DataSourceControl) bound to a grid, and I wanted the grid to refresh its contents whenever I added or deleted an item from it. I discovered a neat trick noted here, which is that if you touch the SelectParameters collection of the DataSourceControl, it will cause it to DataBind in its PreRender stage. So in my case, wherever I wanted it to rebind my grid, I would simply do ... [ read more ]
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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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8/21/2007 2:31:00 AM
If you're working with Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas) Beta builds, of which there are now two, you may have run into problems if you tried to install Beta 2 on the same machine on which you had installed Beta 1. While this is generally not advisable with any beta, I'm told it's working for a great many people. Nonetheless, one behavior you may see is that after installing Beta 2 certain portions of Visual Studio continue to reference the Beta 1 settings under Visual Studio C ... [ read more ]
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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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8/3/2007 3:56:37 PM
I'm in the midst of wrapping up a multi-year long project to replace the advertising engine used to host sponsored ads on a few dozen .NET web sites . This system traces its "lineage" back to an old ASP application written in 2001 (it served its first 207 impressions on 31 March 2001), and has since been upgraded to ASP.NET 1.0 and 2.0 both as incremental ports, not full revisions (for instance, the database remained constant between these ports, and there was never any decent UI fo ... [ read more ]
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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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7/29/2007 3:57:40 PM
I've run into this before but forgotten about it. I wrote an HttpHandler recently and was trying to access the Session object from the passed in HttpContext context object with context.Session["foo"] = "bar"; and I encountered a NullReferenceException . Some searching quickly yielded the answer, which is that in order to access Session from an HttpHandler you need to add a marker interface (meaning an interface with no implementation requirements) to your HttpHandler class. ... [ read more ]
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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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7/26/2007 9:38:14 PM
Start your downloads .
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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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7/13/2007 7:33:38 PM
I recently heard about a set of controls that is being made freely available via CodePlex with the goal of improving the usability and consistency of medical software applications. The Microsoft Health Common User Interface (CUI) includes a suite of rich controls and guidance for building user interfaces that follow a standard approach to user interface design. The CodePlex Project for MSCUI includes the controls library. The controls are freely available and open source, ... [ read more ]
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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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6/28/2007 4:56:01 AM
Peter Bromberg recently wrote an article on refreshing the ASP.NET cache , which referenced my ASP.NET Caching Best Practices article on MSDN . In my original article, I lamented the general uselessness of the CacheItemRemovedCallback feature, and wished for a CachedItemExpiredButNotRemovedCallback. Sadly, this feature is still lacking despite the release of .NET 2.0 and 3.0 since my article was published in 2003. Peter's approach is a simple and effective one, and works we ... [ read more ]
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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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6/17/2007 5:12:00 AM
Plenty of others have written about this so I'll keep it brief. I needed to sort some objects based on a string property. Some quick searching led me to this post which got me close to what I wanted. My final code was this: myThings.Sort( delegate (Thing x, Thing y) { return String.Compare(x.Name,y.Name); });
myThings is a List<Thing> collection. String.Compare done in this fashion will sort them alphabetically - reverse its parameters to sort in rev ... [ read more ]
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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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6/12/2007 8:46:41 PM
Matt Winkler posted some very cool stuff regarding using Windows Workflow and ASP.NET on his blog a few days ago. I’m just getting around to commenting on it myself. Incidentally, there are live bits to install this time.
Naturally I haven’t had a chance to play with this myself (or much of anything else that’s come out in the last few months), but I definitely am looking forward to being able to easily use Workflow within ASP.NET applications. Hopefu ... [ read more ]
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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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5/12/2006 3:09:00 PM
http://www.practicaldot.net/en2/main.htm Have you ever wanted to run some metrics on your code base, to try and gauge its quality or to try and find bad practices? There are some tools out there for such static analysis, such as FxCop and the built in tools in VSTS , as well as SSW's regular expression based Code Auditor Tool . However, another approach, using a Code Query Language , seems to have a lot of potential. You can read the specification here:
http://www.nde ... [ read more ]
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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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11/6/2005 11:39:00 PM
Juval Lowy has recently published a series of FAQs on Generics on MSDN. Find them here:
· Fundamentals
· .NET Framework
· Tool Support
· Best Practices
There's over 100 pages of content there with code sa ... [ read more ]
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Steven Smith - Visual Basic
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10/4/2005 8:44:00 PM
I was a VB developer for several years (VB5/6) before .NET came on the scene, and I started doing most of my work in C# (though I still can do VB in a pinch, and often need to translate to/from it for articles, etc.). I've been learning all about LINQ this summer at Tech Ed, PDC, MVP Summit, etc. and it's largely being pushed by Anders and the C# team, which kind of implies that it's mainly a C# oriented technology (although they do say it will "also" work on VB). Today I saw LINQ o ... [ read more ]
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