.NET 4.0
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
Some of the big additions to the .NET Framework in .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 were the Charting Components that give a rich, out-of-the-box solution for displaying charts in your application. However, one thing that I've always found very hard is locating information on how to control the look and feel of the individual charts. In this posting I'll show you how to style the following elements of a chart: Title, Legend, Independent Axis, and Dependent Axis. This will show the key areas of styling.
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Posted by Mitchel on Wednesday, April 20, 2011
I was recently debugging an issue with a form where the user wanted the "enter" button when pressed in a textbox to trigger a specific ASP.NET button to postback to the server. I have done similar things in the past with a method that changes for the pressing of Character 13 which is the enter key, then finding the buttion by id and then continuing on. Well recently I found out that depending on the structure you can still get some "interesting" results. So I went looking for a different method, and came up with the following.
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Posted by Mitchel on Monday, April 18, 2011
So as I have mentioned in previous blog postings and on Twitter, I have been working a lot more recently in WPF than in recent months due to a big project I had been completing. One of the final "Client Review" items that I had to resolve was that they didn't like the way that the textboxes worked. The default behavior for textboxes in WPF when tabbing into them was to put the cursor at the beginning of the field. I agree that the usability was not good, but I had over 400 textboxes and didn't want to have to change all of them. SO I went digging for a solution....
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Posted by Mitchel on Sunday, April 17, 2011
Over the past few months I have been working on more projects using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and I have ran into numerous fun "learning experiences". Of of these recent ones prompted me to put up a "Quick Tip" posting. The quick tip in this posting is around formatting of custom font structures within a WPF TextBlock. Specifically around sub-scripting, super-scripting, and internal font variants.
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Posted by Mitchel on Monday, April 11, 2011
I teach introduction and advanced .NET development courses for a local community college and one item that I always cover in each class is a discussion around Memory Management and Garbage Collection. I am often asked by my students if this is something that they really should be concerned about and my opinion has always been yes, but I know that many developers feel that having an intimate understanding of how Garbage Collection is completed is unnecessary. Finally after a number of constant reminders from students, I thought I would actually put out my "simple" version and explaination out here that I give my students each semester and gather some feedback from my blog readers on their thoughts on the manner.
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Posted by Mitchel on Saturday, April 09, 2011
I have been spending quite a bit of time recently working with Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0, working to keep up to date with the rapid additions to the .NET framework. In this blog posting I'll share one fun new addition to the .NET framework that can be very helpful when creating applications and looking for a method to log all exceptions for logging purposes. Starting with .NET 4.0 there is a new event available from the AppDomain object "FirstChanceException". The following explains a bit about this new feature and how it could be helpful.
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Posted by Mitchel on Friday, March 26, 2010
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