Wednesday, February 12, 2003

JasonW describes a nice use of namespaces in C#      I didn't know about namespace aliasing before I spotted it in some sample code this morning: using Channels = System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels; This is really nice if you have namespace conflicts and need to disambiguate your type references, or if you're from the school of thought that says that you must always use fully qualified type names, but don't want to obscure your code with giant namespace references. [IUnknown]      Xceed Grid for .NET v1.1 released   Xceed Grid for .NET is an […] Windows Forms grid control designed to combine all the best capabilities of bound and unbound grids […].   Some of the improvements of v1.1 are:   - Optimized drawing code for faster display, scolling and resizing - Dozens of minor improvements (listed in documentation) to make your   grid development even more flexible and trouble-free. - Faster loading object - More efficient memory usage to handle even the bigest datasets - Ability to scroll a grid's view to any cell, row, group or column - Improved flexibility for handling the grids current row and finding   which section of a grid it is located in - Meaningful new edit events for rows and cells.     Take the quick tour or download a 45-day eval at [xceedsoft]      eXtensible C# (XC#)is a complement to Visual studio and C#. XC# provides * obfuscation * code coverage * declarative assertions * partial code verification * and more! This version works with Visual Studio 7.0. [DOTNET-PRODUCTS]      There are already a batch of file diff & merge tools out there (I generally use the ones built into CodeWright myself). Well, here's one more. Visual Comparer offers an interesting set of features that make it worth keeping a bit of an eye on. ... [Larkware News]      Martin Fowler's book Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture has gotten a lot of good press lately (and with good reason; it's an excellent book). Now the author has made available a sort of crib sheet to the patterns online. The information here won't replace the book (about half a page for each pattern, as opposed to dozens of pages), but it does serve as a nice memory jogger or expanded table of contents. If you're not familiar with the book, here's what I had to say about it in Developer Central a while back: PATTERNS OF ENTERPRISE APPLICATION ARCHITECTURE, by Martin Fowler (Addison-Wesley): Many developers will never need this book. It's targeted specifically at those building enterprise-level business applications, and encapsulates Fowler's long experience in the field. When you're building a system that has billions of rows of data and thousands of distributed users, abstractions are a necessity; the framework of patterns in this book will help you think about how to organize such things. Examples in Java and C# supplement much design advice. [Larkware News] My team's copy of the book is on its way from amazon!      Ron Jefferies, one of the inventors of Extreme Programming, and a man I admire very much, is working on an online book, Adventures in C#, of which the latest installment is Adventures in C#: Using NUnit, Be sure to check this out. [Sam Gentile]      AOP ServicedComponents [...]It's an extensible framework that allows writing custom, managed attributes, which are invoked from within the server-side context and allow interception and inspection at the class, interface, method, property, field and argument level. [...] [Clemens Vasters] Very promising!      Microsoft used to ship some "Web Accessories" for IE5, but they've never updated them for IE6. Into the gap steps Paessler, whose IE Booster provides the same functionality and more. Download and install this piece of freeware and you'll get a bunch of extensions to the IE5 or IE6 context menu:, including: ... [Larkware Tools]      I happened to be at Microsoft the last couple of days, meeting with some of their data access folks (to talk about a potential bit of contracting - cross your fingers with me). Notably absent from any meetings were members of the SQL Server development team. That's because they were all beavering away at security issues. One product of this beavering has shown up for download: the SQL Server 2000 Security Tools. ... [Larkware Tools]      Jolt Award Finalist. We're pleased to announce that SOAPscope has has been selected as a finalist for a 2003 Jolt Product Excellence and Productivity Award in the category of Web Services Tools, a new category added this year. For more information, see the official announcement from CMP media, the publisher of Software Development magazine. [Mindreef.blog] Way cool Guys!! This is well deserved. As I have said before, from seeing this at the WebServices DevCon, this tool really rocks and is a must if you are doing Web Services work. [Sam Gentile] These guys deserve it!      With Visual Studio .NET, you can easily build and compile .NET projects that contain any number of sub-projects —- collections of interdependent web pages, executables, DLL assemblies, and so forth — with a single menu command. But relying on a single programmer hitting the "compile" button doesn't always work for large and complicated projects. This article by Jeffrey P. McManus shows you how to use NAnt to build complicated projects. [O’Reilly News] So it unavoidable that a large-scale .NET project would eventually require NAnt?      A VS.NET add-in that provides the following C# refactoring operations: -Encapsulate Field -Extract Method -Inline Temp -Introduce Explaining Variable -Move Method new -Rename Field -Rename Method -Rename Property -Rename Local Variable -Rename Parameter -Replace Magic Number with Symbolic Constant -Replace Temp with Query It seems to be implemented in Java and then ported to .NET via J# and the web site has the coolest little visitor counter control. [Chris Sells]      I have the horrible feeling that this is one of those resources that everyone else but me already knows about. However, I'm going to mention it anyhow, so I don't lose track of it myself. The resource? The Microsoft SOAP Interop Server. ...[ Larkware Tools] Another good find from Mike-we-get-up-early-so-we-don’t-have-to-Gunderloy.      A lot of Web Services advocates argue that you should define your interface first, using WSDL, and then build the service to match that interface. While this isn't the approach taken by Visual Studio .NET, it is a sensible application of some basic design principles. Well, here's an online tool to make the process easier in some cases: the CapeScience Schema to WSDL Converter. ...[Larkware Tools] Many people at WS-DevCon (including speakers) expressed the need for better support of WSDL at the level of development tools.      The ever-prolific Chris Sells has posted a new utility, .NET ResourceExplorer (from his forthcoming WinForms book). This utility is designed to show you what resources are contained in pretty much anything that can contain resources in .NET: assemblies, resx files, and resource files. ... [Larkware Tools] Could be handy. Thanks Chris, Mike!      Microsoft has released a new Windows 2000 tool, Log Parser 2.0. I expect that this amazing command-line tool is going to quickly find a home in sysadmin toolkits. Basically, it lets you run SQL queries against almost any sort of Windows log file, and get the results out to an array of results, from SQL tables to CSV files. For example, here's a Log Parser query that I wrote to extract information from my Web site logs about visits to a particular group of pages ... [Larkware Tools] Hmm… Data mining vs. Metadata mining. Interesting. This tool got me thinking. Access logs to resources (database, server, particular piece of data, etc.) can be very rich type of content. There are many applications of this kind of technology.

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