Paul Laudeman

December 2003 - Posts

• New MSDN article: A Programmer's Introduction to Visual Studio .NET "Whidbey"

  This article gives a brief overview of "Whidbey" and what we can look forward to in the next release. One statement, in particular, jumped out at me and I couldn't resist a quick quip: Auto-Save and Restore: With the Whidbey release of Visual Studio .NET, you can have your projects automatically saved as you work on them. If Visual Studio freezes or is aborted, you can recover your work. [emphasis added] So all I have to say about that last statement is that, gee, it looks like Microsoft developers are actually starting to dog food Visual Studio .NET to come up with a feature like that! :-P Happy New Year!  Posted Dec 31 2003, 05:51 PM by paul.laudeman with no comments

• .NET Debugging Resources

  I've created a new Debugging category for tips relating to debugging and troubleshooting .NET applications. Since my current project is a Winforms based app, my first two posts cover breaking on unhandled exceptions and troubleshooting deployment runtime errors. Look for more soon!   .NET General How To: Breaking on unhandled exceptions How To: Troubleshooting deployment runtime errors MSDN: Production Debugging for .NET Framework Applications Code Project: A Treatise on Using Debug and Trace classes, including Exception Handling Posted Dec 29 2003, 06:15 AM by paul.laudeman with no comments

• Changes to Functionality in Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2

  Changes to Functionality in Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 This document focuses on the changes in Windows XP Service Pack 2 and its implications for developers. Examples and details are provided for several of the technologies that are experiencing the biggest changes. Future versions of this document will cover all new and changed technologies. [via Microsoft Download Center] Posted Dec 28 2003, 12:13 PM by paul.laudeman with no comments

• CodeSmith 2.5 Release Candidate Available!

  If you haven't heard of CodeSmith before, it's a great code generation tool that you can use to automate about any type of code that follows a similar pattern. For more information about this tool, Mark Bonafe put together a presentation on CodeSmith for the Hampton Roads WeProgram.NET user group. Click here for the materials. CodeSmith 2.5 is getting close to being released and I would like to ask all of you to help out and give as much feedback as you can. I want to make this a really solid release and need your help to do so. Please download the release candidate and if you find any issues either post them in the support forum or send them to me in an email. Thanks for your help! Download CodeSmith 2.5 Release Candidate [via Weblogs @ ASP.NET] Posted Dec 24 2003, 09:04 AM by paul.laudeman with 3 comment(s)

• ASP.NET and J2EE Struts compared

  MSDN recently released an article on ASP.NET and Struts: Web Application Architectures. Good read. Posted Dec 24 2003, 08:09 AM by paul.laudeman with no comments

• Rotor "Whidbey" SSCLI to be released

  Rotor Whidbey here we come.. Joel confirms there will be a Rotor (SSCLI) release for Whidbey… What are you hoping to see with it?  I just noticed that at least one of Eric’s readers uses it as opposed to our product documentation… What do others use it for?  What would you like to use it for if only we’d add xxx? [via Brad Abrams]   Spelunking through the SSCLI is a very interesting journey, indeed. It's very educational to see the source of framework classes and learn how all the important pieces fit together. To complement your adventure, consider checking out O'Reilly's Shared Source CLI Essentials book. Posted Dec 22 2003, 01:46 PM by paul.laudeman with 1 comment(s)

• C# Cookbook's Regular Expression chapter

  C# Cookbook's Regular Expression chapter The long-awaited 'phantom' C# Cookbook from OReilly will be available in Jan '04. It has a sample chapter on 'Regular Expressions'  available for download.. something to read during the cold Norwegian evenings ;-)   [via WebLogs @ ASP.NET]   Using Regular Expressions in your apps can be a huge productivity boost from manually writing string parsing, comparison, and replacement routines. This skill is a *must have* for any serious developer. Also recommended is O'Reilly's Mastering Regular Expressions and their Regular Expression Pocket Reference. Another handy online reference is RegExLib.com and of course the documentation available in the MSDN Library. If you're looking for a tool that you can use to build regular expressions, you might want to check out Expresso over on Code Project (source available). Posted Dec 21 2003, 05:53 AM by paul.laudeman with 2 comment(s)

• Security checklists for .NET code

  Srinath Vasireddy, Program Manager of the Patterns & Practices group at Microsoft, recently mentioned a few good links to security checklists available on MSDN: Arch & Design security review: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnnetsec/html/THCMCh05.asp Security code Review: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnnetsec/html/THCMCh21.asp Index of Checklists (related to security): http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnnetsec/html/CL_Index_Of.asp Be sure to check out Srinath's weblog for some other good Patterns & Practices related posts. Technorati Tags: security, checklists, code review  Posted Dec 20 2003, 12:24 PM by paul.laudeman with no comments Filed under: .NET General

• Survey on handling long running operations from ASP.NET - interesting answers!

  HOWTO - deal with long running operations from ASP.NET web pages (.aspx)? We asked this question sometime back at our workspace; check out the answers. Please share your experience and tips/techniques/resources that you have come across. [via WebLogs @ ASP.NET] Posted Dec 20 2003, 12:12 PM by paul.laudeman with no comments

• New! Adventures in Visual Basic .NET: A Simple Business Rules Manager

  Adventures in Visual Basic .NET: A Simple Business Rules Manager Rocky Lhotka shows how you can use delegates to build a simple rules engine to centralize the validation logic in your application. [via MSDN: Visual Basic] Posted Dec 20 2003, 12:08 PM by paul.laudeman with 1 comment(s)

• Developer survey for Longhorn testers

  Ed Kaim has announced a survey available over at BetaPlace to complete if you are testing and demoing the Longhorn bits released at the PDC. If you have an opinion and want to be heard, this is a good opportunity. Posted Dec 20 2003, 12:06 PM by paul.laudeman with 1 comment(s)

• New Feedsters tool helps blog searches

  For those of you who haven't taken a look at Feedster, it is a search engine for blogs. Scoble reports on a new tool to help searches: One more: Feedster has come out with a web based aggregator. Scott is doing some interesting stuff over there. I track what all the blogs are saying about various things (like Longhorn, or Linux) through Feedster. Why? Because I can perform a search, and Feedster will make that search into an RSS feed that I can subscribe to. You know how you felt when you first saw a killer application? (For me, it was Pagemaker). This is a killer service. The idea that a search term can then be a syndication feed is going to change the world. You watch, if Google and MSN are smart, they'll do that for all search terms. Feedster has dramatically changed search for me. Has it for you yet? [via The Scobleizer Weblog] Posted Dec 20 2003, 12:02 PM by paul.laudeman with 1 comment(s)

• Finally, a CSS like styling approach for your Windows applications using XAML

  I'm truly surprised that no one has really come up with a good solution for consistently applying the same look and feel through a Windows Forms application. Sure, you can derive controls and then override the construction of them to provide that look and feel, but doesn't that seem like more than a kludge as opposed to a more elegant solution such as a stylesheet? Application Global Resources In XAML Nathan Dunlap points out that resources can be defined at the application level in XAML. This enables the resources to be used across all “pages” in an Avalon application. He then makes the analogy between this technique and using a base CSS file for your web application. Finally, he wraps up by mentioning the BasedOn property of the Style class. This property allows you to create a new style by deriving from an existing style and overriding or extending the base style definition. The great thing about styles in Avalon is that they're much more than just decorating an element. You can completely re-define the internal composition of a visual. You can also define a set of visual triggers that alter the visual based on dynamic property notification. The more time I spend studying styles in Avalon, the more impressed I am with the implementation. [via Drew's Blog] Posted Dec 19 2003, 04:59 AM by paul.laudeman with no comments

• Keeping abreast of the latest news: free tools to do the legwork for you

  Are you hard pressed to stay abreast of all the latest news? Do you want to know when a web page changes so you don't have to visit it on a regular basis to check for changes (think MSDN's Developer Tools Roadmap)? Here are a few free tools you can use to do the legwork for free: Google's News Alerts allow you to specify key search terms that the Google news crawler will use to find matches as it crawls popular news sites across the web and email you the results on a daily basis. Yahoo's News Alerts via RSS feeds (via Jeremy Zawodny's blog) allow you to create RSS subscriptions to do the same so you can catch up on the matches in your favorite news reader ChangeDetection.com allow you to monitor web pages for changes and receive email notifications when the contents change. Posted Dec 19 2003, 04:55 AM by paul.laudeman with no comments

• Don Box tries the dogfood and finds it not so palatable

  Don Box argues that giving up his Emacs habit for writing .NET code in Emacs is forcing him to dogfood VS.NET and find ways to improve the editor to the point where he'd gladly give up his old hat. Luckily, Don has a direct line of communication to the internal teams at Microsoft to be heard and fortunately, when he offers suggestions people tend to listen. Now if I only had that same bat phone to use in my daily VS.NET battles.... Posted Dec 19 2003, 04:50 AM by paul.laudeman with no comments