As the end of year holiday season approaches, it's fairly common for some web sites and products to re-skin their logos and applications to make them a little more festive or seasonal.  Google has long been known for their creative variations of their logo in response to various holidays throughout the year.  This year, at least one ...

I'm in Vegas a few days early (before DevConnections) to attend DevExpress's TechSummit2007, where they've invited a bunch of MVPs, authors, speakers, etc. to come and learn more about their controls and tools.  Yesterday we saw some of what they're working toward in the WPF space, with some charts and grids that are not quite ...

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 strings for things like Exception messages, format strings, and default messages between ...

If you haven’t seen them already, there are a bunch of sample applications available for SQL 2005 from Microsoft.  These include: Internet Explorer Favorites Manager Skills Manager Survey Manager Help Desk Web Reports Windows Reports In addition, there are also a number of Starter Kit apps available.  I’m not sure ...

Frans announced yesterday that LLBLGen 2.0 has been released!  I’ve been using LLBLGen happily for several years now.  It is a very solid ORM tool and I’m looking forward to using the new version going forward.  You can read a list of new features and enhancements here.  If you haven’t used LLBLGen before, I ...

http://www.practicaldot.net/en2/main.htmHave you ever wanted to run some metrics on your code base, to try and gauge its quality or to try and find bad practices?  There are some tools out there for such static analysis, such as FxCop and the built in tools in VSTS, as well as SSW's regular expression based Code Auditor Tool.  However, ...

Axosoft is doing a social marketing experiment (blogs, Digg, etc.) where they're selling a $500 copy of their OnTime Small Team (5 users) bug tracker and project management tool for just $5 and donating the proceeds to the American Red Cross. The experiment expires Friday Feb. ...

I've recently been learning more about code snippets in VS 2005, and I've found some nice resources online.  Basically, if you haven't done anything with Code Snippets, they are a simple, extensible way for you to perform a relatively complex task within the IDE with just a few keystrokes.  For example, let's say you want to write a ...

Those of you who subscribe to the ASPAlliance Times weekly newsletter already know that Cache Manager 1.0 was released earlier this week.  You can download it from ASPAlliance.com here: ASP.NET Cache Manager This plug-in allows for the viewing and removal of any Cache API entries or output cached ASP.NET pages within an ASP.NET ...

The next DevConnections conference will be held April 2-5, 2006 in Orlando, Florida at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress Resort (where it has been a couple of times in recent years -- very nice hotel).  I will be hosting three sessions, and for the first time I'll have two sessions in the Visual Studio Fundamentals Track (normally I'm strictly ...