Brad Abrams has a nice list of ASP.NET 3.5 hosters, check it out!

I thought I'd pass on some link love to Damian Edwards, the resident readify CSS god. Here recently did an RDN presentation on using CSS effectively with ASP.NET and the first of a series of articles on that very subject can be found here.

its a great article and well worth your time to read, especially if you want to make ASP.NET are good CSS citizen.

In a mixed .NET/COM COM+ based environment, one may find a need for a command line tool to deploy COM components in COM+.

This article explains how to obtain automated reports on the unhandled exceptions thrown by your methods, by integrating Exception Hunter – a new analysis tool from Red Gate Software – with CruiseControl.NET.

Access various types of data using LinqDataSource control ASP.NET

We just released the beta of Typemock Isolator 4.2 beta (Previously just named Typemock.NET). You can get it here.

Some of the cool new things:

• Mocked methods will be highlighted in the debugger if you step into them. in the picture below the "DoSomething()" method is being mocked, so stepping through it means nothing. The line around it signifies this status.

• You can evalutate mocked methods in the deibgger and various watch windows without the original test being affected (so if a mocked method should only return "1" on the first call, even if you evaluate it three times in a watch window it will return "1" in the watch window and also will still work in the test and return "1"
• You can now mock a non-value type fields on a class (used to be that you could just mock out properties)
• Supports running along side DotTrace 3.0
• FinalBuilder Typemock tasks (start,stop, set license + auto deploy)

 

One of the features which people didn't realize are possible with Typemock is Mock chaining. You could essentially write the following:

using (RecordExpectations r = new RecordExpectations())
         {
             MyComplexFactory.GetSomeObject().Manager.DoSomething("a");
             r.Return(false);

         }

if you were using something like RhinoMocks, you'd have to have several stubs that return other stubs: the factory, the object it return, and the manager that object returns. with Typemock it's as trivial as just writing the full call chain and it will just work on the end object as if you did all of that.

You can also write it like this:

using (RecordExpectations r = new RecordExpectations())
         {
             r.ExpectAndReturn(
                 MyComplexFactory.GetSomeObject().Manager.DoSomething("a"),
                             false);
         }

http://www.microsoft.com/canada/heroeshappenhere/register/default.mspx

Event Overview

Attend an event in your city to take part in the launch of three new Microsoft products:

• Windows Server® 2008
• Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008
• Microsoft Visual Studio® 2008

With demonstrations and face-to-face Q&A sessions with software experts and development teams, you’ll learn how the new products can help you virtualize your environment, run a more secure IO, and meet your daily challenges more efficiently. Plus, you get to bring home a promotional kit with versions of all three products.

Register

Toronto, February 27th, Register now

Vancouver, March 4th, Register now

Calgary, March 11th, Register now

Edmonton, March 13th, Register now

Winnipeg, March 26th, Register now

Montreal, April 8th, Register now FULL!!

Ottawa, April 10th, Register now

Quebec City, April 17th, Register now

Unfortunately the Montreal event is already full!!!
If you were interested, write to the Canadian team and show them that they should have organized a major event in MTL!!!

You are a .NET professional? C# is your native language? Try to answer these questions and prove it! We have assembled a set of questions around C#, the CLR and Intermediate Language. Even if you are not perfectly familiar with those topics give it a try!

TypeMock (now called) Insulator 4.2 Beta is publicly available. Check out the release notes.

One of my favorite new features is the improved mock chaining.

Take this class to be tested:

public class TestedClass1
{
    public IDictionary<string, object> Dictionary
    {
        get { throw new NotImplementedException(); }
    }

    public object Method(bool cond)
    {
        if (cond)
        {
            return Dictionary["true"];
        }
        else
        {
            return Dictionary["false"];
        }
    }
}

The following test:

[TestMethod]
[VerifyMocks]
public void TestMethod1()
{
    object trueObject = new object();
    object falseObject = new object();

    TestedClass1 target = RecorderManager.CreateMockedObject<TestedClass1>();

    using (RecordExpectations recorder = RecorderManager.StartRecording())
    {
        recorder.DefaultBehavior.CheckArguments();

        recorder.ExpectAndReturn(target.Dictionary["true"], trueObject);
        recorder.FailWhenCalled(target.Dictionary["false"]);
    }

    object value = target.Method(true);
    Assert.AreEqual(trueObject, value);
}

Would simply fail with:

Test method TestProject1.UnitTest1.TestMethod1 threw exception:  TypeMock.VerifyException: 
TypeMock Verification: Method TestProject1.TestedClass1.get_Dictionary() has 1 more expected calls
.

Now, it just passes.

Visual Studio cues are nice too.

This article describes how to integrate Spring .NET enterprise framework with ASP .NET

Reader Georges asked the other day via the Contact link:

Do you have a list of the national standards supported by the various collations that Windows and SQL Server and .NET support?

And similarly, regular reader Ivan Petrov asked in the Suggestion Box:

Hi Michael,

Do you have a list with the supported Keyboard layouts by Windows and the corresponding standard documents in which they are defined with their full document numbers and titles ?

I mean national standards like ANSI (US), DIN (DE), GOST (RU) and etc. or any other Standards like ISO, EN and etc. or Norm documents .

I will be very grateful to you if you post such a list as attachment to a post.

Regards,
Ivan.

Funny having two such similar questions in two areas so completely different from each other, no? :-)

The answer is really the same for both questions (fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view)....

And that is no such list really exists.

Both keyboards and collations are attempts by Microsoft to capture language and market requirements and include them in Windows, and although standards are an important source of inspiration for each, the connection between them is seldom so complete that one could really claim that they are 100% implementations (as an example, some National collation standards tend to specify behavior for punctuation as well as language, while Windows does not tend to change its punctuation-specific behavior for individual locales).

Also (and this is me just speculating), if we documented such a direct connection via a compliance claim, Microsoft could be required to break its own stability guarantees regarding results anytime there was such a difference between the MS implementation and the one in the standard -- and changes in the standard would lead to new sorts and keyboards being needed whether they are used in country or nor....

Instead by using standards as "important, knowledgeable informants" to be considered alongside other sources of information, the appropriate distance is kept that allows the unique technical factors affecting Microsoft platforms to be taken into account without leading to conformance problems....

In addition, I am kind of being polite by implying that National standards for keyboards and collation differ from Microsoft only in such details and that they are completely valid descriptions with no problems in them; there are definitely times where (were I a less polite version of myself) I could easily start blasting countries or regions for flaws within their standards, causing all sorts of incidents.

And of course there are the times (especially in keyboards, especially with MSKLC available) that a government standard is the source for the layout that we ship which differs from their actual standard in some way (we do not do compliance testing on such things since of course it isn't our job to make sure they are following their own standards in such cases!), and putting direct connections on a web page (even a non-official page such as blogs are!) could easily get Microsoft into an uncomfortable support situation.

So I apologize to both Ivan and Georges for not having such lists (or similar lists for code pages that I to put up here). Sometimes the best way to not find oneself holding onto something nasty is to not pick it up in the first place....

 

This post brought to you by dž (U+01c6, aka LATIN SMALL LETTER DZ WITH CARON)

Use the Presentation Model pattern in ASP.NET web site, Windows Forms and WPF

Check out the first Developer Cubed Comic strip "Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows".

To stay up to date with the latest comics, bookmark Visual Studio 2008 Portal.

~ Jen

Yet another article about converting to Excel XML Format, which reduces a programmer's work to the bare minimum

Access various types of data using LinqDataSource control ASP.NET

Environment Variables Manager (EnvMan) is a tool written in C# .Net intended to handle the administration of Windows Shell Environment Variables. It is designed to replace Control Panel System Environment Manager and easily manage long variable values.

www.guvsm.net

Prochaine assemblée: lundi 4 février

Sujet: Nouveautés des langages C# et VB + LINQ

4 février 2008 à 18:15 Conférencier: Guy Barrette, Architecte de Solutions, .NET Expertise, Microsoft Regional Director, MVP ASP.NET Lors de cette présentation vous verrez un survol des nouveautés des langages C# et Visual Basic offerts avec le Framework .NET 3.5 et Visual Studio 2008.  Parmi ces nouveautés on retrouve : Local Variable Type Inference, Object & Collection Initializers, Anonymous Types, Auto-Implemented Properties, Extension Methods, Lambdas Expressions, Partial Methods & XML Literals (VB).  Il est a remarqué que la plupart de ces nouveautés ont été implémentées pour LINQ.  Il va de soit que LINQ et ses variantes (LINQ to Objects,  LINQ to DataSets, LINQ to XML et LINQ to SQL) seront couverts lors de cette présentation. Guy Barrette est un architecte de solutions basé à Montréal, Canada.  Il est le directeur régional Microsoft pour la région de Montréal et un MVP ASP/ASP.NET. Il se spécialise dans les outils de développement Microsoft depuis la sortie de VB 3 en 1994. Guy aide les entreprises à bâtir de meilleures solutions avec Team System et les outils de Microsoft ainsi que l'architecture et le développement d'applications Web.  Il a été conférencier lors d'événements MSDN et lors de conférences comme Microsoft DevDays et DevTeach. Parlant de DevTeach, Guy est responsable de la piste française.  Guy a obtenu les certifications Microsoft suivantes: Solution Developer et Technical Specialist Team Foundation Server. Guy est aussi président du Groupe d'usagers Visual Studio Montréal et il organise le Code Camp à Montréal. Guy écrit une rubrique de critique de livres .NET mensuelle pour le Magazine Level Extreme.  Vous pouvez lire son blog sur guy.dotnet-expertise.com.  Guy co-anime l'émission de radio Internet Visual Studio Talk Show avec Mario Cardinal.

10 easy ways to make ASP.NET and AJAX websites faster, more scalable and support more traffic at lower cost

The good folks at JetBrains have recently announced that Resharper 4.0 Early Access Program will be available in two weeks.  It's like one of those long awaited things like Duke Nukem Forever, but it looks like R# will beat it to the punch, fortunately for me.  For those like me, I can honestly say I haven't been as productive in Visual Studio 2008 as I can say I have been without it.  Many people will use the workaround as stated many times around the blogs, but I've just stayed away until they can get it working just right.  Instead, I've been happy using it with Visual Studio 2005 in the mean time.

The only thing now that keeps me with the Visual Studio 2005 sitting around continues to be BizTalk.  I imagine the next Service Pack of BizTalk 2006 R2 will contain the right templates, but it's frustrating that they haven't come out yet.  Either way, I can't wait until R# 4.0!  Until next time...

Jean-Marc Heneman: Programmation en paire

Nous discutons avec Jean-Marc Heneman de la programmation en paire, une méthode de travail dans laquelle deux développeurs travaillent ensemble sur la même partie de code, en paire sur un même poste de travail. Entre autres, nous discutons des stratégies pour soutenir et favoriser la synergie dans la programmation en paire.

Jean-Marc Heneman, ingénieur, détient un baccalauréat en génie électrique avec une spécialisation en informatique. Il compte 18 ans d’expérience dans le domaine des technologies de l’information. Il est présentement consultant indépendant. Jean-Marc est co-fondateur et co-animateur du groupe d'utilisateur Extreme Programming de Montréal où vous pouvez encore le rencontrer régulièrement. Il y a présenté certaines des pratiques Agile et y a animé plusieurs échanges sur les pratiques d'Extreme Programming. Derniérement, il a également animé une présentation sur la programmation en paire et les arts et habiletés en relation interpersonnelle.

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