.Net

Recently I have been working very hard on getting a new Web 2.0 initiative off the ground. With most new initiatives I like to start out by looking for software development patterns that will help me standardize my structure as well as make the programming experience common for any new members that are brought on the team. However I recently ran in to a structural “pattern” that seems like it is pretty simple and it addresses a common problem in software development. I researched as much as possible on all the common pattern websites that I visit and even went as far as posting on ASP.NET Forums to see if anybody could help me, give it a name. If this “pattern” hasn’t been named yet I am going to be shocked. ...

I previously talked about the importance of using the correct kind of redirect to optimize your website for search engines in an article titled. World Of HTTP/1.1 Status Codes. I just recently decided to create a C# Utility class to help me in this endeavor and to extended the far from complete HttpResponse.Redirect method. I am using a new C# 3.0 language extension called Extension Methods. Basically what the extension method does is, it allows you to, add methods to types that you don’t have the ability to modify, in my case the HttpResponse class. ...

Scott Guthrie has announced that Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 are now available for download and provides a tour of some of the new features. If you are a MSDN subscriber, you can download your copy from the MSDN subscription site (note: some of the builds are just finishing being uploaded now - so check back later during the day if you don’t see it yet). If you are a non-MSDN subscriber, you can download a 90-day free trial edition of Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite here. A 90-day trial edition of Visual Studio 2008 Professional (which will be a slightly smaller download) will be available next week. A 90-day free trial edition of Team Foundation Server can also be downloaded here. If you want to use the free Visual Studio 2008 Express editions (which are much smaller and totally free), you can download them here. If you want to just install the .NET Framework 3.5 runtime, you can download it here.

Sometimes you need to resolve relative url’s without ResolveUrl. If the code is executing outside a Control, for example in an IHttpHandler or business layer code somewhere that has no reference to a Control, you can’t call Control.ResolveUrl. The System.Web.VirtualPathUtility class has some very useful method for converting from an app relative path to an absolute path: string absoluteUrl = VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute(relativeUrl);

As I alluded in a post a couple of weeks ago, I have been a bad blogger. And I have neglected my community of readers. However I would like to tell you what I have been doing in the last couple of months while I have been neglecting my blog. I recently got involved in creating a startup as the lead developer for an online classifieds site called Anything For Sale By Owner. From the ground up this was conceived as a middle-ground between craigslist and ebay where every listing would be charged at a static rate of $1.00/month. The $1.00 is a way to week out the crap from craigslist and the death-by-fees from ebay. ...

Recently I have been diving in to the world of REST and all the great things that come along with that. If you are not familiar with REST and what it means to have a REST Web Service for your site, you can go through the Digg API, which should give you a pretty good idea. My company has been contracted to build the framework for a new Web 2.0 initiative of one of our clients. You cannot do Web 2.0 if you are not using some kind of AJAX/REST combination. ...

It’s official MainSoft developers have too much time on their hands. I personally think so, but if you are one of those coders who always wished they could debug .NET code on Linux using your Wii remote you might disagree with me. Video: Debugging .NET On Linux Using a Wii Remote

One of the things I love to learn about is the history of how things come to be. Specifically my interests have always been in the evolutions of religion and the tech world (yeah I know pretty much polar opposites, but that is what I like to learn about). I came across an interesting article in my MSDN subscription that talked about how language features of C# 3.0 came to be. The features I am talking about are: ...

I haven’t even herd of a new version of SQL Server 2008, coming out, but according to this blog the new version has some very interesting and new data types that will come in useful for geography processing. DATE - ANSI-compliant date data type TIME - ANSI-compliant time data type with variable precision DATETIMEOFFSET - timezone aware/preserved datetime DATETIME2 - like DATETIME, but with variable precision and large date range ...

Recently I read an article from Jeff Atwood, where he basically claimed the brevity leads to better code. Personally I think his example he gave: if (s == String.Empty) if (s == "") Is just plain wrong, and this is the comment I put on his website: I think this is a very bad example using "" and String.Empty. Because essentially "" is a magic number of sorts, I am talking totally theoretical here, I know that "" is never going to change from representing a empty string, but what happens when developers start using “\n\r” instead of Environment.NewLine, not only does it cause a problem if you move to Mono on Linux it also requires a higher knowledge level to understand what “\n\r” means and you even have to remember what order it goes in. ...