As I mentioned in a blog last week, I downloaded two refactoring tools: .NET Refactor and ReSharper. I had some really horrible experiences with refactoring tools in the past, so I was a bit skeptical going in. It has been a week so here are a few more thoughts about the tools. While .NET Refactor has some nice features, like the how...

OK, so it has taken me a long time to give in and join the growing group of developers who use 2 or more monitors. Some of my colleagues have been using them for years and touting the incredible convenience that it is to have 2 monitors. I don’t really have a good reason why I never did it other than the cost of the second monitor. Now that...

In the past I have been skeptical of the refactoring tools purely because my experiences have been such that they are buggy, can slow down my IDE while they are processing and have even crashed my IDE at times. Well, its been a year or so since I have tried them so I figured I would give them another shot last week. After all, the idea behind...

There are several ways to convert and cast values in .NET. For example, DirectCast versus System.Convert and if you are a VB.NET'er, you have the CInt, CBool, Cxxx functions. It is along these lines that I offer this quiz: What are the differences between the following ways to cast an object?   Casting quiz/// Technique #1 object item...

The June 2005 issue of MSDN Magazine is now available online. With all of the press that SQL Server 2005 gets, I thought it would be nice to discuss in my Data Points column how to tackle several XML scenarios when using SQL Server 2000 and show how to send and receive XML data to and from a .NET application. In this issue I discuss how to use...

For a look at a non ADO.NET solution ... Dino Esposito wrote an article called Collections and Data Binding in a recent MSDN Magazine issue. Its a good read and addresses how to bind collections to controls, as opposed to using ADO.NET objects for binding. I believe he is going to follow this up with a discussion of collections vs DataSets in a...

A few days ago Raymond Lewallen blogged about refactoring some VB.NET code using interfaces, and abstract classes. I followed up with a C# example of the same code in a blog. I thought this would be interesting to see how it looks in a VS.NET Beta 2 class diagram. One of the nice features that I like about the tool is that it lets me export an...

ASPSOFT has released Trailer #2 for Project Rally, which will be unveiled at Tech Ed (June 5–10 in Orlando, FL). And in case you missed it, you can check out Trailer #1 for Project Rally here, as well. It is going to be awesome!  

OK, I don't want to leave out the C# developers from this VB.NET OOP example that Raymond posted recently. So here is one way to accomplish this code in C#.   Inheritence, Interfaces, and OOP (oh my!)public class foo { public static Int32 GetNumberOfRequiredTokens(IPerson person) { return person.GetNumberOfRequiredTokens(); } } public...

I've recently had a flurry of email asking how to navigate up to a grandparent table using ADO.NET. Assuming that it is not preferable to export all of the data to Xml and use an XPath, ADO.NET offers a few other ADO.NET based solutions. One solution is to use expression based columns. (If you want more of an explanation of how to use...

I am happy to announce that I am joining ASPSOFT (aka the haven of the angrycoder, Jonathon Goodyear). I ran across Jonathon somewhat by accident when I was exploring the job market in southwest Florida, we started talking and after a few weeks I was on board with ASPSOFT. (It's funny that Jonathon and I have never actually met before since we...

Scott Stewart gives a good overview of Delegates and Event Handlers in his recent blog. He has some good points regarding how to define events and some of the implications of not using some forethought in designing events.

I was just poking around in Visual Studio.NET 2005 Beta 2 and I noticed that in my VB.NET project there is now the option to create build events! This is a feature that I have used a lot in C# WinForm projects to copy my Enterprise Library configuration files to the targe directory (release or debug). I am glad it is now available in VB.NET (at...

Tom Hollander, Product Manager of Enterprise Library, announced that a new patch is out for Ent Lib. It patches a memory leak in the Enterprise Library Configuration Application Block, which is used by all of the other blocks. I downloaded it, installed it and was done within minutes. Testing several apps that use Ent Lib showed that everything...

I’ve been using BlogJet for a few weeks now to post to my blog and while it has not overwhelmed me, it has proven to be a useful tool. Here are some quick observations that I have made regarding the pros and cons that are important to me: Pros: It is nice to be able to post to my blog without having to go to my blog’s web page I can...