.NET 3.5
In an effort to start blogging more about the "helpful" items that I have encountered over the years this is one of my first "Quick Tips" related to improving the life of the developer. We all have had those times where we are tracking down a complex problem within an application and all along the way we have to spend endless time mousing over individual classes to find out what their values are when most commonly we just want to know about one or two key values. Well in this post, I'll show you a neat trick using the "DebuggerDisplay" attribute to help make this process easier.
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Posted by Mitchel on Friday, August 12, 2011
Now first of all, before I get into the true content of this blog posting I do NOT want to start another round of the religious war that always seems to happen when you start talking about the usage of Visual Basic or C#. The purpose of this blog posting is to put a little perspective into why I choose to work with a specific language for different projects, and the evaluation criteria that I use when making the choice for individual projects. Yes, I'm a C# MVP, C# is my preferred .NET language, but I'll be the first to admit that there are times and places where VB is a necessary language. In this article, I'll start out by providing a bit of background as to WHY I'm blogging about this, the evaluation criteria that I use when looking at a project and some other general information that I've found over the years. Keep in mind the disclaimer found at the bottom of this posting, these are my thoughts, and mine alone, if you don't like them, which I'm sure many of you will not that is fine, but I wanted to put a bit of perspective on my take for the common argument.
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Posted by Mitchel on Tuesday, March 23, 2010
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 am again traveling this week, in Toronto speaking at Tech Days Canada 2009, and as luck would have it I needed to complete some work on a few custom DotNetNuke modules for clients on a "Urgent" basis. So this afternoon I darted off to the speaker room to get an internet connection, just recently I re-formatted my laptop to move to Windows 7, one of the main reasons that I needed to re-format the system was to create an environment that matched my primary development machine, today was the first true test of this new configuration. Thankfully everything worked as expected and all issues were resolved. In this blog post, I'll explain a bit as to why it is important when working on multiple environments to have consistent system configurations.
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Posted by Mitchel on Tuesday, September 29, 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
One item that many people find unusual about my DotNetNuke installation guides is my insistance on NOT using the Database.mdf, dynamically attached database file for the creation of a DotNetNuke database. In my tutorials I have quickly dismissed the topic by noting that "issues" come up when trying to use a dynamically attached database and I...
Posted by Mitchel on Monday, November 24, 2008
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