Recently when I was presenting at Tech Days Canada I was preparing some examples of how LINQ could be used to do in-memory manipulations of data to help avoid repeated database calls. In the presentation I showed some quick code samples, and I thought that I would follow this up with a few simple examples here in a blog post. Before I start I wanted to share that the code shown here is actual production code that is being used to run the reporting on MyWebKeepAlive, the keep alive service offered by my company IowaComputerGurus.
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Posted by Mitchel on Friday, October 09, 2009
I have often found that when debugging applications that a lot of time is spent drilling down into the various custom objects to see what the values are of specific instance methods. In this blog posting I will demonstrate the default behavior of Visual Studio when debugging a class, I will then show how you can improve the debugging experience with the addition of a simple attribute.
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Posted by Mitchel on Friday, July 03, 2009
A very common question that I get asked by people is; what tools do you use to complete your development and what type of system do you use. Now, I believe I have written a bit about this in the past, but I thought I would take some time to go through and give a bit of a detailed overview of what I use for development and why I have selected the hardware and software that I have. I will cover this in detail from both the hardware and software point of view.
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Posted by Mitchel on Friday, May 22, 2009
My last blog article "Selecting the Right Source Control Provider" touched on the evaluation criteria that I use when looking for a source control system. This article is a review of sorts of SourceGear's Vault product, my preferred source control system. I'll start by reviewing vault as it relates to the criteria from the previous article, I will then provide my overall feedback on my experience with Vault.
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Posted by Mitchel on Thursday, April 16, 2009
One of the most common questions that I have been getting recently has been "what source control provider do you use and why?". This article is the first in a series of two articles about source control. This article takes a quick look at criteria that I believe is important to consider when it comes to evaulating source control systems for use. The next article in the series will be a review of the source control system that I use, in relation to the evaulation criteria that I list in this article.
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Posted by Mitchel on Wednesday, April 08, 2009
While working through some issues recently with some legacy code writen by someone else I was faced with a horrible case of a shared object that was writing to the file. This was a "custom" logging implementation and opened a file for append, inserted the line, and then closed the file. Well in times of heavy load the system would encounter errors such as "Cannot access ___ because it is being used by another process". So in effect the file was either still open, or the lock was not yet released. This post goes through a bit of the detail on how I resolved the issue.
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Posted by Mitchel on Thursday, January 22, 2009
Recently I have answered a number of questions regarding an easy way to export datagrid contents to excel format. In this blog post I will share a static class that I have created called "ExportHelper" which I use quite often to generate quick Excel exports of datagrid data. I will outline the process and the code below. It should be noted that this solution is NOT a DotNetNuke specific solution, I use this for both DotNetNuke and standard ASP.NET solutions.
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Posted by Mitchel on Thursday, May 22, 2008
Today I have released an updated version of my Blank C# Module Without DAL. There were a few bugs with template token replacements with previous versions that were causing errors on build and exectuion. These errors have been resolved and have been fully tested. If you have the current version installed, you can simply install this new version and Visual Studio will ask you if you want to overwrite it, simply select yes and you will be set to go.
I have also released a new development template "Blank C# Module With DAL Classes", this is another blank module but all classes for DAL are there, you simply need to implement your methods, and start working on your module. This should be a welcomed addition to all regular module developers out there.
Please share any comments or suggestions for future templates in my Templates forum discussion.
Posted by Mitchel on Friday, April 04, 2008
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.
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Posted by Mitchel on Sunday, March 02, 2008
A question I have been asked many times recently is how do you debug a DotNetNuke module that has been developed using the WAP (Web Application Project) development model. This is a question that I have known the general answer to for quite some time, but I have never actually had a need to truly debug one of my custom modules. During the course of helping a client with an issue today I actually took the time to document all steps necessary to debug a WAP DotNetNuke Module within Visual Studio 2005. This article will walk you through all steps necessary to debug your project.
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Posted by Mitchel on Thursday, December 20, 2007
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