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October 2007 - Posts

Tuesday, October 30, 2007 5:35 PM

Check if Unique Constraint will be violated before Insert with LLBLGen

I needed to determine if a unique constraint would be violated so that I could programmatically update the Name of a business object to make it unique today. I use LLBLGen for this project's database layer, and I have a unique constraint (actually a unique
Posted by ssmith | 2 Comments
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Tuesday, October 30, 2007 3:30 PM

Limit Rows In DataTable or DataSet

I wrote some quick and dirty ADO.NET code to go against an RSS feed instead of a flat XML file today. In the process I had to figure a way to limit the number of rows returned by the function, which returns a DataTable. The simplest method I found was
Posted by ssmith | 2 Comments
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Monday, October 29, 2007 11:40 PM

Silverlight Detection and Installation

Tim Sneath just posted some tips for optimizing the Silverlight install experience for your site's end users. I've noticed many people on mailing lists and forums discussing (lamenting) the fact that Silverlight's install process requires the user to
Posted by ssmith | 3 Comments
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Monday, October 29, 2007 5:03 PM

Google PageRank Deductions

There's a great deal of discussion going on this month about recent deductions Google has made to Toolbar PageRank (not real PageRank) in October 2007. ASPAlliance.com , a well-respected developer site (IMHO) with a ton of content, was dropped from a
Posted by ssmith | 6 Comments
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Monday, October 29, 2007 12:00 PM

VaryByCustom Caching By User

Ran into an interesting bug today with one of my applications. A user control that provides messages based on a user's account was showing the wrong information to other users in our testing. The user control was set up with an output cache directive
Posted by ssmith | 1 Comments
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Monday, October 29, 2007 11:49 AM

One Week to DevConnections

The Fall 2007 DevConnections conference is next week in Las Vegas. This is definitely going to be the biggest conference in the United States for developers for the second half of 2007 (TechEd being the only larger one this year, I think), and I'm sure
Posted by ssmith | 0 Comments
Monday, October 29, 2007 9:53 AM

TFS Beta 2 VPCs Expire November First

In case you haven't seen this news from last Friday, the TFS Beta 2 Virtual PC images have an operating system timebomb in them that is set to expire on 1 November 2007 . This is not, however, the end of the world if you have been using these builds for
Posted by ssmith | 1 Comments
Friday, October 26, 2007 3:34 PM

BrowserHawk 11 Released

CyScape recently announced the latest version of their browser capabilities control, BrowserHawk 11 . While I haven't had a chance to review this new product yet, it touts some new features that at least appear to be pretty compelling. I use BrowserHawk
Posted by ssmith | 2 Comments
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Friday, October 19, 2007 1:27 PM

Render User Control as String Template

Scott Guthrie has a great example of how to use an ASP.NET user control as a template which one can dynamically bind to data and then pull the results out as a string . One place this is useful is in AJAX scenarios in which you want to replace the contents
Posted by ssmith | 6 Comments
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Thursday, October 18, 2007 11:45 AM

Hosting Company Breached

Fasthosts, "the UK's number 1 web host" (by self acclamation I'm sure) is in the news today because apparently all of their customers' passwords (in plaintext) were compromised by a security breach . They've asked all of their customers to change their
Posted by ssmith | 2 Comments
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Wednesday, October 17, 2007 1:33 PM

Sharing Resources Between Projects in .NET

ASP.NET has some great support for Resources (for localization and internationalization, mainly), but unfortunately by default they're limited to the same project because they're generated with the internal keyword. I wanted to be able to share common
Posted by ssmith | 1 Comments
Wednesday, October 17, 2007 12:28 PM

Cruise Control Configuration File Editor

One of my developers is doing some work on our Cruise Control setup and found this gem that I'd somehow missed: CCNetConfig . A slick little GUI for editing your ccnet.config file ( screenshots ). Seems to work well enough for most of the common settings
Posted by ssmith | 5 Comments
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Tuesday, October 16, 2007 11:16 AM

ASP.NET Model View Controller Architecture

A little while ago, Scotts Guthrie and Hanselman presented on MVC in ASP.NET (and Dynamic Languages) at the oddly named ALT.NET conference in Texas. I'm with ScottH that "Alt" is a pretty silly name and something like Agile or Pragmatic would be a much
Posted by ssmith | 1 Comments
Monday, October 15, 2007 12:55 PM

Welcome New INETA Speakers

Please congratulate these new INETA Speaker Bureau Members : Todd C. Bleeker Don Demsak Mark Dunn Daniel Egan Markus Egger Caleb Jenkins Nickolas Landry J. Ambrose Little Kevin McNeish Mark Michaelis Mark Miller Jeffrey Palermo John Papa Rod Paddock David
Posted by ssmith | 2 Comments
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Thursday, October 11, 2007 11:15 AM

Caching Talk in Phoenix

Tuesday night I gave a presentation on caching in ASP.NET (with a bit of async performance tips thrown in at the end) to the Arizona .NET User Group in Phoenix, Arizona. A lot of the demos were similar to ones I've given before, including in my recent
Posted by ssmith | 1 Comments
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Wednesday, October 03, 2007 12:46 PM

Open Source .NET in 3.5

ScottGu just made a very exciting announcement - as of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5, the base class libraries will ship with source and debug symbols ! What this means to developers is we'll no longer need to resort to tools like Reflector to see what
Posted by ssmith | 5 Comments
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Monday, October 01, 2007 2:49 PM

Nice Products for Developers

We have a new intern starting with us at Lake Quincy Media today, and in the course of getting him set up, I thought I would mention of a few products we're using that work quite well for us here. The first one relates to training new interns with limited
Posted by ssmith | 1 Comments
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