General Development In DotNet

"DPack is a FREE collection of Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 tools. DPack is designed to greatly increase developer's productivity, automate repetitive processes and expand upon some of Microsoft Visual Studio features. DPack includes various browser tools that allow the developer to quickly find solution files, types, particular type members, methods or properties for instance, or quickly find and reference standard .NET framework types. DPack includes greatly enhanced numbered bookmarks feature, various code navigation tools as well as streamlined surround with feature, and much more. See screenshots and learn more about individual features using Features menu. Major features included: Code Browser File Browser Solution Browser Framework Browser Numbered Bookmarks Surround With Code Navigation Solution Statistics Solution Backup All features support C#, VB, C++ and Ruby In Steel based projects."

"A lot of tutorials have already been written about TPL and the new .NET 4.5 async-await features, the most prominent examples are Task Parallel Library: 1 of n, Task Parallel Library: 2 of n, Task Parallel Library: 6 of n and Threading in C#, PART 5: PARALLEL PROGRAMMING. Here I present my own version of a TPL and async-await tutorial trying to emphasize why TPL and async-await functionality is so useful and how to apply it to some well-known problems. "

"MiniProfiler is a tool created and used by the StackExchange group of websites and is used for profiling your .NET and Ruby applications. Whilst in your development environment you can use it to get an overlay on your page detailing the code execution of your Application. For those of you that have ever tried to identify bottlenecks in your applications you can immediately see how useful this can be. Take a look at this screenshot from the Jambr blog page."

"The WiX toolset builds Windows installation packages from XML source code. The toolset integrates seamlessly into build processes. "

"Every couple of weeks on one of the forums someone will ask a question about how to restore a backup from SQL 2008 to SQL 2005. The answer to the question is always, you can't restore a backup to a lower version of SQL Server. If you need to migrate backwards it is an entirely manual process. I learned this unfortunate truth a few years ago after upgrading a development server to SQL Server 2005 ahead of upgrading the production server for testing by the developers of our eCommerce application. At the time there was a new database for another web project in development that didn't exist in production, which was on SQL 2000 still, and when I had to move it to QA, also on SQL 2000 still, what was originally planned as a backup/restore turned into a "What do I do now?" moment."

"Recently I mentioned this.Log. Given the amount of folks that were interested in this.Log, I decided to pull this source out and make a NuGet package (well, several packages)."

In the course of IIS7 development, the team and I have answered an infinity of questions about IIS7 on any possible topic imaginable.Ironically, neither I nor anyone else I know on the team has ever answered the most basic question - what is the minimum set of steps necessary to get a website running with IIS7? This post answers this exact question, and explains the key IIS7 concepts of sites, applications, and virtual directories (vdirs), which must be created before your IIS7 server can serve a single request.

"One of my favorite creations over the past year has been this.Log(). It works everywhere including static methods and in razor views. Everything about how to create it and set it up is in this gist. How it looks public class SomeClass { public void SomeMethod() { this.Log().Info(() => "Here is a log message with params which can be in Razor Views as well: '{0}'".FormatWith(typeof(SomeClass).Name)); this.Log().Debug("I don't have to be delayed execution or have parameters either"); } public static void StaticMethod() { "SomeClass".Log().Error("This is crazy, right?!"); } } "

F# is ideal for data-rich, concurrent and algorithmic development: "simple code to solve complex problems". F# is a simple and pragmatic programming language combining functional, object-oriented and scripting programming, and supports cross-platform environments including PC, Mac, and Linux. We'll provide the tutorials, resources and tools you'll need to begin working with F# right away.

"As a result of writing the post: Edit Test Case properties directly from the test runner of Microsoft Test Manager I asked one the ALM MVPs, Terje Sandstrom, to also look at one of the most requested Visual Studio Update 1 features - but an area I didn't have a post on yet: Grouping in the new Unit Test Explorer. He takes a look and by morning sends me this post and indicates he wants to do three more in this series! "

"ThoughtWorkers are passionate about technology. We build it, research it, test it, open source it, write about it, and constantly aim to improve it - for everyone. Our mission is to champion software excellence and revolutionize IT. We create and share the ThoughtWorks Technology Radar in support of that mission. The ThoughtWorks Technology Advisory Board, a group of senior technology leaders in ThoughtWorks, creates the radar. They meet regularly to discuss the global technology strategy for ThoughtWorks and the technology trends that significantly impact our industry. "

"Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) includes several projection operators but none that allow multiple items to be created from each item in a sequence. This article describes a custom operator that allows several selections to be made per item."

(Better than the official TopShelf documentation) "I am creating windows services using Topshelf for a while and I forget how "hard" (not that hard but harder) it was to create a windows service without Topshelf."

"The latest version of the C# Yellow Book is now available for free download. You can get it here, or you can press the spiffy new short cut on this page. "

"Productivity is the hallmark of programming with managed code. So often productivity boils down to figuring out why something isn't working - diagnostics. The CLR provides one of the best foundations for diagnostics. In this post, Richard Lander - a program manager for the Common Language Runtime - shows how more than just developers can now track down root causes for problems. -- Brandon"

"Mighty Moose is from this point forward free. Not "free in beta" or "free with a bunch of functionality turned off" but free (license is being updated as I write this). We announced this rather quietly at NDC."

"Learn how to use log4net without fear. Stop copying config files and figure out how to make log4net do exactly what you want."

We abandoned Log4Net in favour of NLog a couple of months ago. Ran into some issues where we just couldn't get it running in production under some circumstances. Can't remeber exactly what the issue was. NLog worked perfectly.

"Visual Studio 2012 comes with a lot of enhancements. One of the significant one is the Solution Explorer enhancement and it has many. Solution Explorer looks like a build from scratch. The new Solution Explorer is the combination of Object Browser, Class View, Find All References etc. Ideally you do not need to go to any other Window to work"

"Returns information from, or expressions based on, each row affected by an INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, or MERGE statement. These results can be returned to the processing application for use in such things as confirmation messages, archiving, and other such application requirements. The results can also be inserted into a table or table variable. Additionally, you can capture the results of an OUTPUT clause in a nested INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, or MERGE statement, and insert those results into a target table or view."