General

Source Control for Visual Studio 2008

Stephen Ebichondo — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:52:36 GMT

am looking for source control tool with enhanced integration into Visual Studio 2008 to make life easier for developers in my team.

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

Rad — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:24:32 GMT

The Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is now available. Download it from the following location:

http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/try/default.mspx

Today's Byte #5: Experiencing .NET

Rad — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:22:51 GMT

When .NET comes up, it is invariably interconnected with either VB.NET or C#, the primary languages. However the .NET Framework is a Framework, and this the language is a layer above. You can do .NET development using several languages

Object Pascal (Delphi) language - Prism
C++ - Visual C++.NET
Python - IronPython
Ruby - IronRuby
Cobol (yes, Cobol) - Fujitsu NetCobol
OCAML - F#
PHP - Phalanger

Today's Byte #3: Developing For Oracle Databases

Rad — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:40:24 GMT

If you're doing development against an Oracle database, you can use the built in Oracle client, System.Data.OracleClient. However this is a bad idea for a two reasons:

It will be deprecated in .NET 4.0
Oracle's provider, ODP.NET is better in several ways:
- Faster
- Supports more Oracle features: Associative arrays, server side cursors, etc
- Better support for large character/binary types (LOB)
- Supports caching
- Is updated on Oracle's technology cycle, rather than the .NET framework cycle

Today's Byte #4

Rad — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:07:58 GMT

If you need to restart your .NET application, there are a number of ways to do it. The most commonly ised is to programatically kill the process and then start it, using the System.Diagnosics.Process class. A better way is to use the lesser know System.Windows.Forms.Applciation.Restart() method. The benefits are:

You don't need to work out where the application is
You don't need to know the original command line arguments - these are preserved and remembered

waiting to exhale

gutsboy — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 23:49:15 GMT

hi guys. thank God africadotnet is back again though ive noticed the zest ain't there no more as it used to be. c'mon guys lets make this site an active one by sharing knowledge and challenging problems. Ill be more than willing to offer help in C#, VB.NET, LINQ, Silverlight, ExtJS and Adobe Flex & Adobe Air.

Today's Byte # 2 : Font Manipulation

Rad — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 07:56:18 GMT

In the course of your development, you might find that you need to change the font style of a control to somthing like bold or italic.

Upon investigation, you find that each control has a Font property, that additionally has a boolean Bold property. So you would attempt the following:

   1: //

   2: // Set the font to bold

   3: //

   4: txtName.Font.Bold = true;

This unfortunately, would fail. Why? Because the Bold property of a font is read only.

To change the font to bold, you actually need to create a new font, and specify that the new font be created with the style bold. Like so

   1: //

   2: // Change the font to bold, using the existing font

   3: //

   4: txtName.Font = new Font(txtName.Font, FontStyle.Bold);

The same thing would apply for italics.

   1: //

   2: // Change the font to italic, using the existing font

   3: //

   4: txtName.Font = new Font(txtName.Font, FontStyle.Italic);

An intersting thing to note -- you can also combine the multiple styles. Like so

   1: //

   2: // Change the font to bold, strikeout & italic , using the existing font

   3: //

   4: txtName.Font = new Font(txtName.Font, FontStyle.Italic | FontStyle.Strikeout | FontStyle.Bold);

Today's Byte #1 : Form Management

Rad — Wed, 20 May 2009 08:50:30 GMT

In the lifetime of your application you undoubtedly create several forms and present them to the user. The code will invariably look as follows:

In C#

//Create the form
Form f = new FormUser();
//Show the form
f.Show()

In VB.NET

'Create the form
dim f = new FormUser()
'Show the form
f.Show()

Once you are done with the form, it will be automatcally disposed. Here's something you might be surprised to learn. If you display forms using the ShowDialog method rather than the Show method, you need to dispose of the forms yourself by invoking the Dispose method

In C#

//Create the form
Form f = new FormUser()
//Show the form
f.ShowDialog()
//Dispose of the form
f.Dispose()

In VB.NET

'create the form
dim f as new FormUser()
'Show the form
f.ShowDialog()
'Dispose of the form
f.Dispose()

Alternatively, you can make use of the fact that the Form class implements th IDisposale interface. So you can rewrite the code as follows

In C#

using(f = new FormUser())
{
    f.ShowDialog();
}

In VB.NET

Using f as new FormUser()
    f.ShowDialog()
End Using

Of course the question arises, why?

It's pretty simple actually. When you call ShowDialog, you are generally interested in the form you are showing passing back some value as a property, say the DialogResult, or some custom property. In which case the form must be kept in memory until you harvest the property. Since the runtime has no way of knowing when you have done this and are done with it, the form will be kept in memory until you explicitly call the Dispose method.

Till next time.

Rad.

Ten Must-Have Tools Every Developer Should Download Now

Stephen Ebichondo — Thu, 14 May 2009 05:47:34 GMT

check out these tools

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc300497.aspx

Regular Expression Ninja #1

Rad — Sat, 09 May 2009 14:08:45 GMT

The regular expression is a domain specific language for the manipulation of text. Any programmer doing text processing of any nature would do well to acquaint themselves with this powerful language, that has implementations in all major languages.

In this series of articles I aim to point out some uses of regular expressions tha can make life much easier.

Take for example a situation where you have words with camel case.

For instance:

"ILikeFood", "iPhone" "FaceBook"

Suppose you wanted to print these words readably ... so "I Like Food, "i Phone", "Face Book"

A solution i've seen is to loop through each character and check its ASCII value and if it is above a certain threshold add a space an return a new string.

It may work but it's clumsy and unwieldy.

Another way to do it is to use a regular expression.

The strategy here is very simple.

Identify and capture all capital letters
For each captured letter, add a space before it
Return the new string

This is easily accomplished with the following code

In C#:

using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
public Regex MyRegex = new Regex(
      "([A-Z])",
    RegexOptions.Multiline
    | RegexOptions.CultureInvariant
    | RegexOptions.Compiled
    );
  
  
// This is the replacement string
public string MyRegexReplace = 
      " $1";
  
//// Replace the matched text in the InputText using the replacement pattern
string result = MyRegex.Replace(InputText,MyRegexReplace);

In VB.NET

Imports System.Text.RegularExpressions
  
Public Dim MyRegex As Regex = New Regex( _
      "([A-Z])", _
    RegexOptions.Multiline _
    Or RegexOptions.CultureInvariant _
    Or RegexOptions.Compiled _
    )
  
  
' This is the replacement string
Public Dim MyRegexReplace As String = _
      " $1"
  
  
'' Replace the matched text in the InputText using the replacement pattern
Dim result As String = MyRegex.Replace(InputText,MyRegexReplace)

8 Websites Every Microsoft .NET Developer Should Know About

Stephen Ebichondo — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 05:36:56 GMT

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-web-sites-every-microsoft-net-developer-should-know-about/

Inline Queries VS Stored Procedures

dantoz — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 12:53:19 GMT

Between inline queries and stored procedures,which are the best to use and why.