Recently I have been asked by multiple people what rapid design tools I use, or what types of code generation tools do I use.  Many people are surprised when I tell them that for the most part I don't use any rapid generation tools.  I do use a few home grown tools, such as my Info Class Generator, which is available on this site.  However, that is as far as I go with automated code generators.  However, one thing that I have started using more and more frequently are Code Snippets within Visual Studio.

I have found that creating a few helpful Code Snippets has allowed me to quickly and easily format my code, and build my needed structures in almost no time.  In this blog article I will share two of my most commonly used Code Snippets, if there is a demand I will post future code snippets here as well.

Recently there have been numerous discussions on the DotNetNuke.com Forums regarding hosting providers and who one should go with and who they should switch to because they are unhappy with their current provider. During all of these discussions I have always recommended the company that I use for hosting 3Essentials. Since making this recommendation I have been receiving numerous e-mails regarding the process to actually migrate a live site over to 3Essentials so I thought I would write a short blog article that explains the basics of moving a website over to 3Essentials, in actuality these instructions SHOULD work for most providers, however ther might be some differences.

Recently I have noticed an increased number of questions regarding the upgrade process from DNN 3.x to DNN 4.x and overall I do not think there is very much good documentation available on how to actually complete the upgrade. Therefore with this article I will walk you through the process of upgrading a 3.x site to 4.x, I will try to cover as many of the "gotchas" as possible, but please remember as with all of my other tutorials PLEASE use these at your own risk!

I am sure that most readers of this site have at one point or another noticed my RegularExpression articles.  Well this past week I was looking for a very specific regular expression and thought I would share it with you.  The following regular expresion is used to validate a GUID value for user input.  You can use this to ensure that product keys and other GUID values that you are using are in the proper format. 

^(\{){0,1}[0-9a-fA-F]{8}\-[0-9a-fA-F]{4}\-[0-9a-fA-F]{4}\-[0-9a-fA-F]{4}\-[0-9a-fA-F]{12}(\}){0,1}$

Like many ASP.NET programmers I utilize a third party hosting company to host all of my sites. We have all ran into situations where we have been loosing sessions and other oddities and it would be very helpful to find out exactly what caused the application to restart. Well thanks to this post on DotNetNuke.com by Frankt I have found a way to track this information. In this entry I will provide you with code that can obtain this information

This is the second part of my Regular Expression overview.  In the first article I discussed the basics of creating Regular Expressions and provided a link to test expression patterns using the .NET Framework RegEx classes.  In this article I will discuss the various actions that can be taken to match values in a string using regular expressions.  I will also discuss how you can implement a SQL CLR UDF to allow regular expression validation from your database to provide a strong level of input validation at the database level.

So like many personal development projects, I have a few ASP.NET applications I am working on that have no money backing them and I need to create reports.  So for the past week or two I have been looking for a good free .NET charting component that I can use to create bar and pie charts for my ASP.NET application.

So far, I have found one free control called "WebChart" provided by Carlos Aguilar Mares via his website, a link to the control is here.

Overall I am very happy with his control, however it does take some manipulation to get things laid out correctly if you are using datasets that have large (20+ character) element titles as the legends and row indicators are sometimes rendered in a non visible location.

I found this to be a very helpful tool for creating simple to moderatley complex data charts. If anyone knows of more "Free" chart components please let me know.