Bonnie Berent's Tips [April 15, 2009 15:47] Inheritance and Constructors Here's a common scenario: say you have a base class that does some work (in the example I'll show, it is a generic class to fill a DataSet from SQL, based on the TableName property of the class). Each sub-class of this base class will provide it's own TableName property, because each sub-class will be filling it's own table. First attempt at creating these two classes, looks like this: public class BizObj { protected string TableNam...
Image manipulation in .NET [April 7, 2009 23:58]This article describes some basic techniques to manipulate some images in .NET. It covers image resizing, image cropping and the ability to save an image into a JPG high resolution format. Introduction Recently, I have been involved in a new project which was dealing a lot with image manipulations. The basic process was in regards to be able to upload an image to a Web server and resize it after. Then, we found out the resizing, as is, was giving a new image but not properly in ratio a...
What’s an Interface and Why Should I Care? [January 31, 2009 15:15]Interfaces are an integral part of .NET, yet a lot of new .NET developers (especially those coming from weakly-typed languages, or languages where interfaces aren't supported) have difficulty in understanding why they're needed and how (and when) they're used. If you find yourself in that group you're in good company. It's not a difficult concept but it can be a bit foreign to developers new to them. Let's get the textbook definition out of the way, then take a look at what it really means ...
Creating a MHTML file from a URL [January 25, 2009 03:11]There is not always someone behind a keyboard when comes time to surf the net. In some of those cases, a robot application might be used to retrieve specific pages from various Web sites. This article describes the use of CDO.Message to gain the ability to retrieve a URL as a MHT file. It also covers an interesting approach to retrieve a URL even if this one requires a login. Overview The ability to save a Web page into a MHT format is interesting. First of all, you can do the same in ...
Using the ConnectionStrings section of the configuration file [April 17, 2008 11:22]Would you believe that some programmers still hardcode their connection strings in their application? This month topic is useful to both Windows and Web developers. This month column is about a special section of the configuration file (app.config for Windows developers or web.config for web developers). This section is named ConnectionStrings. The code is exactly the same whatever the platform you are working on. This section was introduced with the .Net Framework 2.0 but remained hidden...
The Alternative Role [April 17, 2008 11:22] I’ve been involved lately on the birth of our regional ALT.NET community. This is a group of people that get together to talk about the platform that get us all together, which is loosely referred as .NET, but it spans beyond Microsoft territory and into third parties, both commercial and open source, and even operating systems other than Windows. At first it seemed more like a bunch of disgruntled people fighting the status quo and Microsoft domination, but as the group grew and mature...
Data-centric applications with Silverlight 2.0 [April 11, 2008 08:02] As you should know by now, Silverlight is a browser add-in enabling Rich Internet Applications (RIA). One can even say it is a full-blown runtime platform for client-side web applications, as it fits in about 4.5 Mb a good part of the .NET Framework including the CLR, the DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime), a huge part of the Base Class Library (including networking, generics, LINQ, etc), a self-contained media player supporting high definition video and audio, a graphic engine (a subset of Window...
Back to the tribe [March 10, 2008 22:57] Universal Thread Magazine Team Publisher Level Extreme Inc. Editor in Chief Martín Salías In this issue Writers Éric Moreau Andrés Vettori Martín Salías Contributors Bonnie Berent Martín Salías Reviewer Guy Barrette It is interesting to see, with the later emphasis in communities, groups, associations and now social networks, how we found ourselves as parts of several different -only sometimes related- tribes. People always ha...
Community News [March 10, 2008 22:57] DevExpress updates its DXperience suites DXperience v2008 vol 1 is available and provides more visual components and IDE tools for Visual Studio .NET. The latest release adds a Rich Text Editor, a TreeView-Grid Hybrid, and a Spelling Checker for ASP.NET 2.0, and a new set of visual styles for its suite of web controls. Of course, there are many enhancements in existing controls, too, like XtraCharts, ASPxGridView and Editors Suite, XtraGrid and XtraEditors. Several of these compo...
Microsoft Visual Basic Power Packs 3.0 [March 10, 2008 22:57] The latest version (3.0) of the Microsoft Visual Basic Power Packs includes a DataRepeater control. The previous version was containing the Line and Shape controls, the PrintForm component and the Printer Compatibility Library. This article will introduce you to the DataRepeater control, the Line and Shape controls and the PrintForm component. You can use the controls and the components of the Power Pack in any of your .Net Framework 2.0 (or higher) Windows application. Installatio...
Guy Barrette's Book Reviews [March 10, 2008 22:57] Learning WCF Author: Michele Leroux Bustamante Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc. ISBN-10: 0596101627 ISBN-13: 978-0596101626 Retail Price: $44.99 US, $58.99 CDN Publication Date: May 2007 Softcover: 582 pages Online information: Table of contents, source code URL: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596101626/ Book URL: http://www.thatindigogirl.com/ Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a set of .NET technologies for building and running connected...
Bonnie Berent's Tips [March 10, 2008 22:57] Interesting Clipboard Functionality Did you ever need to copy an instantiated class to the clipboard, retrieve it and access a property or method on it? Well, here's how to do it: Clipboard.SetData("MyClassFormat", new MyClass("42")); if (Clipboard.ContainsData("MyClassFormat")) { MyClass o = Clipboard.GetData("MyClassFormat") as MyClass; if (o != null) { // do stuff here, such as execute a method // o.MyMethod(); // or set a property // o.MyProperty = "...
Fitting LINQ to SQL in an Application Framework [March 2, 2008 19:49] The greatest feature in Microsoft LINQ set of language extensions is allowing a common syntax for handling all kinds of collections in a consistent way, instead of testing our expertise (or lack of it) in each particular API. This magic is done behind the scenes by the LINQ providers for each type of collection: LINQ to XML, LINQ to objects, LINQ to SQL, and so on. This is a perfect case of separation of duties: let the experts build each provider, let us mere mortals use them happily. Wh...
Building an UI Automation client application [February 25, 2008 08:36] Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) provides a new Accessibility API called Microsoft UI Automation. This API allows programmatic access to most user interface elements on the desktop, addressing the needs of assistive technology products and also for UI test automation. The framework provides solutions for both accessibility providers and clients. The intention of this article is to show the client API that can be used to obtain information of an application's UI and automate it. Auto...
Wiki-based help system [February 13, 2008 17:10] What are the fun parts of our job? If you are a regular reader of my articles, you will surely answer something like writing code, debugging an existing application (yes I like it when I find that one little bug that was so obvious now that we know what it is), building the architecture of the next application, trying newest versions of developers’ tools, and so on. What do you hate the most? Well your answer may vary but for most of you it would likely be something around the documentati...
Community News [February 13, 2008 17:10] Free IDEs for IronRuby and IronPython If you are interested in Ruby in .NET, Ruby In Steel For IronRuby has a preliminary release of the IDE for this tool based on the Visual Studio Shell. This IDE is free by now, but it seems it will become a commercial product at the official release. Meanwhile, you can find on CodePlex a truly free IDE for IronPython, also based on the VS Shell. It seems we will be seen a lot of IDEs from now on. Get Ruby In Steel For IronRuby at: http://w...
MIXed emotions [February 13, 2008 17:10] Universal Thread Magazine Team Publisher Level Extreme Inc. Editor in Chief Martín Salías In this issue Writers Éric Moreau José Marcenaro Soledad Pano Contributors Bonnie Berent Martín Salías Reviewer Guy Barrette Just a few days ago the MIX 08 conference finished in Las Vegas. It was a much awaited event and the news released there were truly amazing, way beyond my expectations, at least. The main attraction was, as expected...
Bonnie Berent's Tips [February 13, 2008 17:10] Stopping a Windows Service before it starts I created a Windows Service that reads values from a config file at startup. If these values are not valid, I don't want the service to start at all. How can I achieve this? Quite simple actually ... in the OnStart method, simply throw an exception. from a solution provided by Alexandre Palma in Message #1187639 DataRow Iterating You can't modify a collection with an iterator like foreach. T...
Workflow Foundation Custom Activities [February 8, 2008 08:45] Apart from the activities that Workflow Foundation (WF) offers, we have the chance of creating our own activities extending the functionality of the activity base library. This way, we're allowed to adapt WF to different specific scenarios. For example, for a request workflow, activities such as "send request to provider" or "verify existence in catalog" could be useful. There are 3 main motivations to use Custom Activities: Reusability: when the need comes to make a change, you...
Understanding Windows Communication Foundation Extensibility [January 29, 2008 13:35] Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is the new unified communication programming model for building service-oriented applications. It's one of the three pillars of the NET 3.0 platform that's part of the new Windows Vista operating system, and it also runs on Windows XP and Windows 2003. The relevance of this new technology is that it unifies all previous methods for building distributed systems: ASMX, Remoting, Enterprise Services (COM+), WSE (Web Service Enhancements) and MSMQ (Messa...
Syndicating lifes [October 1, 2007 12:29] Universal Thread Magazine Team Publisher Level Extreme Inc. Editor in Chief Martín Salías In this issue Writers Éric Moreau Andrés Vettori Mariano Sanchez Contributors Bonnie Berent Martín Salías Reviewer Guy Barrette First of all, welcome back to the magazine! It's been about 6 months since our last issue, and I am the only one to blame. A new job plus several personal problems took all the available time I had to run the magazine...
Community News [October 1, 2007 12:29] Another Alt.NET Conference is coming! The non-compliant .NET crowd will gather again at Seattle from April 18th through 20th, keeping their OpenSpace format, to talk and debate about Open Source .NET technologies and practices. Remember not anything is non-Microsoft. Last time Scott Guthrie did the first preview of the ASP.NET MVC Framework, so you see anything can happen here. The event got sold out (although it is free) in just a couple days, but you can still register and get...
Embedding a font into an application [October 1, 2007 12:29] Have you ever needed to distribute a font with one of your application and got blocked to install it into the Fonts folder? Or do you have a private font that you want to use in your application without having to other to be able to use it elsewhere? The solution: embed it into your application. Sounds easy? It is easy if you have the right set of instructions. Read on. I had to do it a long time ago (in the VB6 era) for a barcode font and had many problems. If only I knew that trick! ...
Bonnie Berent's Tips [October 1, 2007 12:29] Debugging With Parameters Usually when you run and debug your application, you just hit F5 to compile and start debugging. But, what do you do if you require input parameters? Right-click on your Startup Project in the Solution Explorer and choose Properties. Then, on the Debug page you can enter command line arguments. from a solution provided by Viv Phillips in Message #1241577 Does Column Exist If all I have is a DataRow, how can I d...
Guy Barrette's Book Reviews [October 1, 2007 12:29] Murach's SQL Server 2005 for Developers Authors: Bryan Syverson and Joel Murach Publisher: Murach ISBN-10: 1-890774-39-1 ISBN-13: 978-1-890774-39-4 Retail Price: $52.50 US Publication Date: December 2006 Softcover: 702 pages Online information: Table of contents, sample chapter, source code URL: http://www.murach.com/books/sql5/iguide.htm Almost every application built on the planet has to access some kind of data. Most of the time, that data is stored...
LINQ to SQL - When the Query Language Meets an OR Mapper [September 30, 2007 23:05] LINQ is undoubtedly one of the greatest highlights of the next version of the .NET Framework (3.5), and the support given by the C# and VB languages by means of Query Expressions makes working against collections of objects a breeze. The raw version of LINQ, also known as LINQ to Objects, is capable of working with collections of in memory objects. The only pre requisite is that these collections implement the IEnumerable<T> interface. Microsoft will also release two specialized versions of...
Rich Internet Applications with Silverlight [August 28, 2007 14:34] At the end of 2006 Microsoft unveiled version 3.0 of its .NET Framework, including among other new features Windows Presentation Foundation. WPF represents a real revolution in the way of building desktop applications. With WPF a new language called XAML was introduced; a declarative language, XML-based, which allows specifying the content as well as the behavior of the user interfaces on the desktop (formerly winforms). With XAML all the graphic content of the user interface can be speci...
Using System.Net.Mail [August 7, 2007 22:10] Sending an e-mail with classes of the .Net Framework is pretty easy. Michel Fournier wrote an article titled Sending email from VB.Net in the April 2006 edition of the Level Extreme .Net magazine providing you a good wrapper that does most operations you need when an application needs to send an e-mail. I want to cover some topics that were not covered at that time. A note on the namespace In the era of .Net Framework 1.0 and 1.1, the namespace that developers needed to use to se...
Going back to simpler terms [August 7, 2007 22:10] Universal Thread Magazine Team Publisher Level Extreme Inc. Editor in Chief Martín Salías In this issue Writers Éric Moreau José Selesán Fábio Vazquez Contributors Bonnie Berent Martín Salías Reviewer Guy Barrette Software architecture is mostly about reducing complexity. To able to efficiently solve complicated matters, we need to apply partitioning schemes smartly, keeping several levels of simple stuff adding up to the whole sol...
Community News [August 7, 2007 22:10] Mono 1.2.5 adds tons of stuff The latest release just added a mere 1,907 methods, and the Mono team is targeting some .NET 3.5 stuff, especially in the language area: Some fixes to fully support the Dynamic Language Runtime and IronPython Many C# 3.0 features like type inference, anonymous types, object and collection initializers and automatic properties. The LINQ syntax is in progress and coming soon... Many improvements in the Runtime, Security, Corlib, most namespaces a...
Guy Barrette's Book Reviews [August 7, 2007 22:10] Visual Studio Team System: Better Software Development for Agile Teams Authors: Will Stott & James W. Newkirk Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional ISBN-10: 0321418506 ISBN-13: 978-0321418500 Retail Price: $49.99 US, $61.99 CDN Publication Date: May 2007 Softcover: 819 pages Online information: Table of contents, sample chapter URL: http://www.informit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0321418506 Book's Website: URL: http://www.bettersoftwaredevelopment.org ...
Bonnie Berent's Tips [August 7, 2007 22:10] Getting the EXE FileName The Application.ExecutablePath provides you with the full path to your EXE. The static System.IO.Path provides you with lots of options for retrieving parts of that FileName: System.IO.Path.GetDirectoryName(fileName) System.IO.Path.GetExtension(fileName) System.IO.Path.GetFileName(fileName) System.IO.Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(fileName) System.IO.Path.GetPathRoot(fileName) from a solution provided by Çetin Basöz in Message #124491...
Delegates and events [August 2, 2007 13:15] This article explains what Delegates are, how they are used, and how events are related to them. What are Delegates We are so used to storing data in variables that the idea of storing methods in a variable sounds strange; but this is what a delegate is. A delegate is simply a variable pointing to a method (or a list of methods). A delegate has all the information to call that method, which includes: The type and number of parameters required by the method The type return...
COM Interop [August 2, 2007 13:13] The Microsoft .NET Framework offers several mechanisms which facilitate the modernization of legacy code. These mechanisms are collectively known as: Interoperability. In this article, I will attempt to demystify some of the complexities surrounding Interoperability as well as anticipated difficulties. Focus will be given to the COM Interop model while a future article will focus on the Platform Invoke (PInvoke) model. Interoperability - A Primer Interoperability, or the process ...
Community News [July 9, 2007 23:52] IronRuby is out! Yes, the first drop of the Microsoft implementation of Ruby has been released. It is indeed an open source project licensed under the Microsoft Permissive License, which is quite close the BSD license, one of the more liberal conditions allowing you to do virtually anything including repackaging and redistributing in both free or commercial products. You may look about all details on this blog post from its own father John Lam, or get right to the code by downloading...
An Action List component [July 9, 2007 23:52] A couple of months ago, I was introduced to the Action List component and I found it very useful. It allows us to save a lot of code we need to write when we are trying to keep properties and/or react to events of some controls in sync. This control is apparently well known from Delphi developers (as it comes out of the box) but .Net Framework developers don’t have anything similar to this. This is why some programmers (probably working with both environments) created an equivalent componen...
Seamless Integration? [July 9, 2007 23:52] Universal Thread Magazine Team Publisher Level Extreme Inc. Editor in Chief Martín Salías In this issue Writers Éric Moreau Giovanni Palmiotto Vinod Parwani Contributors Bonnie Berent Martín Salías Reviewer Guy Barrette Integrating applications -at least at the enterprise level- is today generating the same amount of work, or even more than building new ones. In fact, it can be argued that as far as corporations keep exposing their...
Bonnie Berent's Tips [July 9, 2007 23:52] Proper use of Encoding You should use Encoding.Default to get properly localized data. Encoding.ASCII should be used only if you're dealing with true ASCII (lower 128 or 255 with default ASCII encoding) which is rarely the case. If you need to do a two-way convert always use the Default Encoding which will use your machine's configured codepage to convert to and from Unicode. An example where this might make a difference (two-way conversion) is for encryption/decryp...
Guy Barrette's Book Reviews [July 9, 2007 23:52] LiveLessons: Developing Applications with Windows Workflow Foundation Author: Brian Noyes Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional ISBN-10: 0321503139 ISBN-13: 978-0321503138 Retail Price: $69.99 US, $86.99 CDN Publication Date: June 2007 Softcover: 62 pages + 3 hours DVD-ROM Online information: Table of contents URL: http://www.mylivelessons.com Sample chapter: http://www.youtube.com/livelessons Let’s face it, learning a new tech...
Going LINQ: Anonymous methods [July 6, 2007 11:30] In the first two articles in this series we reviewed how Iterators and Generics are implemented in .NET 2.0, and how they can provide great value in handling collections of items, separating their internal structure from the way we navigate them, and keeping type safety for good. In this third and final installment I want to present another important piece of the LINQ puzzle, which brings a more functional programming style to .NET. Improving Delegates Delegation in Object Orien...
Symmetric Key Encryption [July 6, 2007 10:22] Encryption: The art and science of encoding data so that a key is required to decode and restore the original data. In this first of two articles, I will introduce and explore Symmetric Key Encryption as implemented in the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0. What is Symmetric Key Encryption? Symmetric key encryption is a cryptography technique that uses a shared secret key to encrypt and decrypt data. Symmetric encryption algorithms are very efficient at processing large amounts of info...
Extending the My namespace [June 10, 2007 22:58] This is the second (and last) article on the My namespace. Last month, I showed you what is the My namespace and how to use it. This month, I will show you how to extend it with your own methods. As you will soon discover, it is as simple as adding 2 lines to a class that you might already have written. Why extend this class? You surely built many helper functions over the years. Most of those functions are probably declared as static so that you don’t have to create an instance of t...
Of Mice and Men [June 10, 2007 22:58] Universal Thread Magazine Team Publisher Level Extreme Inc. Editor in Chief Martín Salías In this issue Writers Éric Moreau Giovanni Palmiotto Martín Salías Contributors Bonnie Berent Martín Salías Reviewer Guy Barrette We seem to be in the verge of an important change on computer interfaces. The mighty keyboard dominated the human-to-computer interaction from the last 50+ years. Indeed, since its beginning, in the form of a telety...
Community News [June 10, 2007 22:58] Updated ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit This new release adds: A new ToolkitScriptCombiner control which allows replacing the default <asp:scriptmanager> control behavior, and supports the ability to dynamically merge multiple client-side Javascript scripts into a single file download. More than 125 bug fixes Extended client side event support - new client side event handler extensibility points are available with common toolkit server controls ASP.NET Validation Con...
Guy Barrette's Book Reviews [June 10, 2007 22:58] Programming WCF Services Author: Juval Lowy Publisher: O'Reilly ISBN-10: 0596526997 ISBN-13: 978-0596526993 Retail Price: $44.99 US, $58.99 CDN Publication Date: February 2007 Softcover: 610 pages Online information: Table of contents, sample chapter, index URL: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596526993/index.html Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is Microsoft unified platform for developing service-oriented (SO) applications and it is part of the ...
Bonnie Berent's Tips [June 10, 2007 22:58] Determine Mime Type for Server Side Files Joe had a problem. He had a restricted folder from which he was allowing authorized downloading through a response.binarywrite. It is fairly straight forward stuff. But, he didn't want to write a big switch statement based on the various file extensions in order to determine the file type for the Response.ContentType = "xx" statement. 5 and a half hours later he answered his own question: System.Runtime.InteropServices.DllI...
Going LINQ: Leveraging Generics [June 6, 2007 13:49] In the first article in this series we reviewed how Iterators are implemented in .NET 2.0 and how they can provide great value when we need to be able to traverse a list of items, no matter what this list actually looks like internally, or if this list even physically exists or is it just an algorithm or a service to fetch some data at runtime. In this second installment I want to review how Generic support was added to .NET 2.0, as this is another very important feature enabling LINQ. Fo...
The New features of C# 3 and VB 9 compilers [May 4, 2007 07:30] The next version of Visual Studio, codename “Orcas”, will bring lots of new features and innovations both for the IDE and for the C# and VB programming languages. One of the main highlights of Visual Studio Orcas and the accompanying languages C# 3.0 and VB 9 is LINQ (Language Integrated Query). LINQ is going to bring new capabilities for C# and VB, allowing the programmer to access collections of objects by means of an integrated query language that will be incorporated into the programming l...
Blurring lines [April 11, 2007 23:03] Universal Thread Magazine Team Publisher Level Extreme Inc. Editor in Chief Martín Salías In this issue Writers Éric Moreau Fábio Vazquez Martín Salías Contributors Bonnie Berent Martín Salías Reviewer Guy Barrette Some time ago I wrote about some limitations still blocking the scope of things like web applications. I was seeing how many different players in the industry were taking a new look at the problem of disconnected browser...
Community News [April 11, 2007 23:03] Tidbits from TechEd 2007 Here is a short -and partial- list of things Microsoft announced at TechEd The next versions of Visual Studio and SQL Server will be finally named "Visual Studio 2008", and "SQL Server 2008" (how creative!). VS 2008 will come with a Visual Studio Shell, “a new offering that enables developers to create and distribute their own custom tools built on top of the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE).” Windows Server 2008 will hav...
