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I’ve travelled the world and the seven seas… ok, ok, just North America, but since September of 2007 I’ve had the opportunity to visit nearly 100 community events from user group meetings, code camps, micro-conferences to major tradeshows such as Tech...
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When I’m learning a new technology, I’ll frequently download code samples that help me better understand the concepts. Often though I find myself frustrated by having to deal with formatting and extraneous information before even looking at the code....
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Working on a website in Visual Studio I found myself annoyed again by the extra spaces around <script /> tags when I type Ctrl+K+D (Format Code). It turns out however that this is easy to change. As with most Visual Studio customizations, the answer...
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Just announced, registration is now open for Microsoft Tech·Ed 2010, June 7-10, in New Orleans, Louisiana. Tech·Ed isn’t the only reason you should come to New Orleans though. It has been four years since Hurricane Katrina devastated the gulf coast as...
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I really dislike writing the same code over and over again. For my current project, this involves serialization and I ended up creating the following generic class to handle Xml serialization and thought it might be useful to someone else. using System...
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I’ve been developing software for over ten years now. In those ten years software technology has grown by enormous leaps and bounds. User experience however has not. I’d argue that user experience has hardly improved at all, and I grow more and more frustrated...
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Note: There is still so much more I want to say on this topic, but that will have to wait for another post as I further distill my thoughts. At the end of my three week stint in Redmond, WA in October and November I was thrilled to be able to support...
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It’s official, we’re back again this year. As you may recall, a bunch of tweeps got together last year to organize an online-only co-conference with PDC. The results and reaction where outstanding, and we’ve decided to do it again. Keep an eye on the...
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I’ve been working quite a bit with Team Build lately, and overriding properties is a method of customization I’ve found quite useful in certain scenarios. Along the way, I found Aaron Hallberg’s excellent Team Build 2008 Property Reference blog post,...
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Digging around in Tools > Options today to find the answer to an inquiry I received, I found some stuff I didn’t know existed. If you work with Visual Studio Test Projects, you will want to know about these options. The Test Tools options are found...
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In my last two posts ( jQuery and MVC: JSON and Favorite Image Icons with jQuery and MVC ) I covered some basics of jQuery’s AJAX functionality to improve user experience. One of the scenarios which may not seem particularly asynchronous friendly is form...
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User experience, that’s the name of the game these days. Green screens and console applications are (hopefully) becoming a thing of the past. In the web world, this means a more fluid and asynchronous experience. In my last post , I gave a quick introduction...
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I strongly dislike synchronous browser requests: the request has to be sent to the server, server action is performed, a server response is received, and the page is re-rendered which usually involves reloading images, style sheets, JavaScript files,...
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Back in 2007, I took some SharePoint training from Todd Bleaker (MVP, owner of MindSharp, and SharePoint guru). At one point he posed a question about the performance of the following methods: public string OptionOne() { string str = "Hello World"...
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If you haven’t explored T4 yet, you’re missing one of Visual Studio’s best, and best kept, secrets. T4, which stands for Text Templating Transformation Toolkit, is code generation built right into Visual Studio 2008. It is also available in Visual Studio...
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I ask this question in a bunch of my talks, mostly because most folks aren’t aware of this. What is the bug in the following method? public int Add( int num1, int num2) { return num1 + num2; } Do you see it? In a simple unit test, the method appears to...
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As some astute readers pointed out, this functionality does in fact exist in LINQ. The name isn’t terribly obvious however: Aggregate. I was able to update the original tests to use the Aggregate method. The main difference is that a non-generic IEnumerable...
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If you have built an ASP.NET web forms site of any substance, you have undoubtedly been bitten when code in the web form becomes outdated due to code change. It’s easy to see when the page is open in Visual Studio, as the code has red squiggles and the...
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I’m proud to announce that episode two of Community Radio has been published to http://live.ineta.org/audio In this episode, Steve talks with Heather Kostes, Emily Freet, and Nicole Moser about their roles at Microsoft, the MVP program, MVP benefits,...
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As reported all over the web this week, Microsoft has decided to ship Windows 7 in Europe without Internet Explorer. For a long time, the EU has been complaining that Microsoft has been using their dominant position to hawk IE on unsuspecting computer...
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I’m proud to announce that the inaugural episode of Community Radio has been published: http://live.ineta.org/audio In this inaugural episode, I talk with Richard, Carl and Sara about Speaker Idol, speaking at Tech-Ed, podcasting, .NET Rocks, Richard...
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The contest deadline has come and gone, and I received four submissions. After reviewing the submission I have determined that they were all great, so whoever sends me $500 first… just kidding. I’ve decided that the only satisfactory course of action...
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I think most folks know that I tend to speak at developer events from time to time. Actually in 2008 I gave 48 presentations at 32 events. My goal for 2009 is 52 events and I have 44 confirmed so far. Next year though I thought I’d take it up another...
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I started recording episodes of Community Radio at Microsoft Tech-Ed 2009 in Los Angeles, California. Since coming back home, I’ve been hard at work editing these episodes and creating the intro/outro music. There is still one element missing however...
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I’ve been working on a Windows Forms based project recently, and I quickly became frustrated at how unwieldy it became after just a short while. I have also been working a lot with the ASP.NET MVC framework recently, and I thought this model might work...