May 2006 Entries

CRINETA Presentation: .NET Enterprise Services

I will be presenting an overview of .NET Enterprise Services at the Cedar Rapids .NET User Group (CRINETA) this coming Monday, June 5th.  If live around the Cedar Rapids area, stop by and check out the show. Due to time constraints, I will have to cut short (if not all out) some of the demos I did for the IADNUG meeting this past month.

posted @ Wednesday, May 31, 2006 10:41 PM | Feedback (613)

Baby Blues

I know it's been a while since I've last blogged, but Dominic has been keeping my wife and I pretty busy.  He's a great little guy and we're very fortunate to have him.  A couple of days ago, Dominic turned 2 months old.  Now, that might now sound impressive, but for us it is.  In that time, he's managed to grow two inches and double his body weight!  (Imagine yourself doing that right now!) Also during this time, we've learned to read his signals.  Which is a big plus at 12, 3 and 6 AM when he wants to be feed.  For those readers out there...

posted @ Wednesday, May 31, 2006 10:28 PM | Feedback (611)

WinFX Beta2 Released

That's right, Beta2 of WinFX (components, runtime and VS Add-ons) is out!  Go download it and have fun playing with the new bits. Microsoft Pre-Release Software WinFX Runtime Components - Beta2 Microsoft Windows Vista Beta2 Software Development Kit Microsoft Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” Community Technology Preview – Development Tools for WinFX®

posted @ Wednesday, May 24, 2006 1:27 PM | Feedback (611)

Script#

I'm not sure about you, but this is pretty freakin' sweet.  Nikhil is just amazing.

posted @ Monday, May 22, 2006 11:17 PM | Feedback (538)

CodePlex

Ok, so I'm a day behind!  Having a 2 month old around really takes a toll on your bloggin' time...but he's worth it!! Any way, I just signed to check out CodePlex to see what kind of projects they have out there.  Who knows, if I have time I can start another project with them.  It would be cool to use their TFS from my machine at home.  Just need to wait until they open the creation of projects to the public. 

posted @ Thursday, May 18, 2006 7:35 PM | Feedback (613)

Finding The .NET Framework Path - Version 2

Even shorter... namespace FrameworkPath{    using System;    using System.Runtime.InteropServices;    class Program    {        static void Main(string[] args)        {            Console.WriteLine(".NET Framework Path: {0}", RuntimeEnvironment.GetRuntimeDirectory());            Console.Write("Press <ENTER> to exit.");            Console.ReadLine();        }    }} Stupid me...RTFM.

posted @ Tuesday, May 16, 2006 11:15 PM | Feedback (613)

Finding The .NET Framework Path

I needed to figure out how the directory path to the .NET Framework so I could lauch a process (regasm.exe) from an assembly.  You would think that the System.Environment class or the Environment.SpecialFolder enumeration.  Keith Brown posted how you can find it using P/Invoke with mscoree.dll.  Well, instead of making a P/Invoke call, I wanted an easier way to looking for it.  Here's what I came up with: namespace FrameworkPath{    using System;    class Program    {        static void Main(string[] args)        {            Type objType = typeof(object);            string moduleName = objType.Module.FullyQualifiedName;            string frameworkPath = System.IO.Path.GetDirectoryName(moduleName);            Console.WriteLine(".NET Framework Path: {0}", frameworkPath);            Console.Write("Press  to exit.");            Console.ReadLine();        }    }} Pretty straight forward.

posted @ Tuesday, May 16, 2006 10:56 PM | Feedback (612)

LightBox.NET Source Code

FYI.  I've created a CodePlex project or LightBox.NET.  To find the latest source, please go check it out there! Someone asked if I would post the source code for LightBox.NET.  Well, here it is.  Enjoy!  If you have any ideas for extending it, please let me know!

posted @ Wednesday, May 10, 2006 10:56 PM | Feedback (628)

Hungry, Hungry Studio

While working with VS2005 the other day, I started to notice that things were running a little bit slow.  All I had in my solution was 8 projects (4 code projects and 4 unit tests projects.  2 of these projects have 200+ classes), and needless to say, the VB.NET background compiler was going a little bit nuts... I decided to kill devenv.exe to restore "peace" to my PC. Here's what the graph of memory usage looks like when you kill an application that takes 842 MB of RAM.

posted @ Wednesday, May 10, 2006 10:49 PM | Feedback (617)

LightBox.NET

A while back, I posted that I was working on another side project.  One the cool things features of this website project is the use of the Lightbox JS script used to overlay images on the current page.  I told Nick about me adding this to the site to make the pictures “cooler.”  One of the first things Nick mention was that I had turned off the key-press events for navigating the pictures through a slide show.  I was first confused by his comment since I've done nothing to change the Lightbox script.  Well, it turned out that he thought I...

posted @ Thursday, May 4, 2006 11:57 PM | Feedback (633)

Consolas for VS2005

Can't wait for Vista to get  your hands on their fonts, well now you can download the new Consolas font and use it in VS2005.  I've been using this font for about 2+ weeks (previously I had Lucida Console) under VS2005/Windows and man, it's sweet!  The only requirement is that you have ClearType enabled.  If you don't, or would like to tune your current settings, use the ClearType Tune PowerToy.

posted @ Thursday, May 4, 2006 10:38 PM | Feedback (613)

IADNUG Meeting: Post Mortem

For all you that showed up for the presentation, thanks!  Hope that the information presented, although it was a bit rushed, was to your liking.  I wished I could've had time to cover the security demo.  I'm sure that many of you would have liked it.  If you would like the power point and demo source, you can get it from here. If you have any comments in regards to the presentation, please feel free to use the comments section to share them!  Once again, thanks for showing up!

posted @ Thursday, May 4, 2006 7:41 PM | Feedback (621)

CSS Control Adapter for ASP.NET 2.0

Should it blogged about it last night!  ScottGu has a great post on the new CSS Control Adapter Toolkit for ASP.NET 2.0.  This control adapter gives CSS-friendly capabilities to pre-excisting ASP.NET controls (Menu, TreeView, DetailsView, FormView and DataList). Pretty nice way to hook into the new Control Adapter Architecture for ASP.NET 2.0. Check it out if you got the time.

posted @ Wednesday, May 3, 2006 3:00 PM | Feedback (619)

VS 2005 Web Application V1.0 Release

Just read this from ScottGu.  I'm not sure about you, but I'm pretty excited!  Indifferent about the web project vs add-on?  Check out this post by Rick Strahl and see if you share the same feelings.

posted @ Tuesday, May 2, 2006 10:24 PM | Feedback (611)

IADNUG Meeting Tomorrow: .NET Enterprise Services Overview

That's right!  I will be presenting an overview on .NET Enterprise Services (a.k.a Everything I've learned from Lowy, Vasters and Nagel) to the Iowa DotNET User Group (IADNUG).  For those of you that are interested, here's a list of my demos: Basic Serviced Components Object Pooling and Just-In-Time-Activation (JITA) Transactions Web Services Queued Components Loosely Coupled Events Role Based Security Also, remember if you're attending that we will be giving away a Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite with MSDN Premium Subscription (valued at $10, 939.00) to celebrate our 2nd anniversary!

posted @ Tuesday, May 2, 2006 12:29 PM | Feedback (611)