Discussion of .Net ecosystem and development platform, Visual Studio, C# and other .Net languages. General programmer related content is also included, such as career development topics. Occasional humor as well.
darrenstokes
http://blog.darrenstokes.com 
Discussion of .Net ecosystem and development platform, Visual Studio, C# and other .Net languages. General programmer related content is also included, such as career development topics. Occasional humor as well.
Displaying 1 to 25 of 54 archived entries.-
Published on 17 Dec 2007 by Darren Stokes
Most .Net project deployments are made up of multiple assemblies and it is common to version all assemblies in a given release with the same version numbers. Since changing each AssemblyInfo.cs file can be time consuming and error prone, most projects take one of two approaches to solving the proble
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Published on 17 Dec 2007 by Darren Stokes
I love ReSharper. I am using Visual Studio 2008 and Jetbrains does not have a released version of ReSharper that completely works with the new language features in C# 3.0. This morning I was looking at the ReSharper newsgroup to see if there is any discussion about the upcoming 4.0 release and I did
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Published on 17 Dec 2007 by Darren Stokes
This is the third of my series of ridiculous people and happenings that I have come across in my career. If you have been following along, you know that my career (at least paid career) started at a large company I refer to as Ubber-IT Company. My first role at Ubber was in a support [...]
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Published on 15 Dec 2007 by Darren Stokes
This morning I was attempting to create a patch, using TortoiseSVN, that contained new files within newly added directories. When I selected the files to include in the patch, I was met with the following message: You’ve selected added folders. The patch won’t contain added files within
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Published on 14 Dec 2007 by Darren Stokes
I read this story on Redmond Developer News this morning. This quote basically summarizes the complaint: We are filing this complaint on behalf of all consumers who are tired of having a monopolist make choices for them I am wondering why these frustrated consumers don’t just use the monopolis
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Published on 13 Dec 2007 by Darren Stokes
This is the second in my series on ridiculous things that have happened to me in my career. As you may recall, I started off my career at a large IT company that I will call Ubber-IT Company My position was in a support group for other development teams. However, my team was not the [...]
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Published on 13 Dec 2007 by Darren Stokes
The ASP.net MVC CTP as been out for a few days and I have read quite a number of good posts about using the framework and extending the available functionality. Keep an eye on the MVCContrib project over on CodePlex. I can already see that many good things are going to come from this project, [...]
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Published on 10 Dec 2007 by Darren Stokes
I first read the news from Brad Abrams, but there are several links in my rss reader this morning. Microsoft has released the preview of ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions, which includes the much anticipated (at least by me) MVC framework. Also included are Astoria, which is apparently officially named ADO.NET
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Published on 09 Dec 2007 by Darren Stokes
With the release of Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft also released C# 3.0. The new language version includes some nice programmer productivity features like Anonymous Properties, Lamda Expressions, and Extension Methods. I will be concentrating on Extension Methods for this post. Extension methods allo
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Published on 09 Dec 2007 by Darren Stokes
I read the article on InfoQ about the various blog posts that have been going back forth concerning the pros and cons of Dependency Injection (DI). A very interesting read for certain. I think there are excellent points made on both sides. Ultimately, there are pluses and minuses to all software arc
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Published on 19 Dec 2007 by Darren Stokes
This is number 4 in my series of ridiculous happenings in my software development career. I had just left my first paying job at Ubber-IT Company to start a new job at a small consulting firm specializing in the new paradigm of "Client-Server" development. I will call this company Upstart Co
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Published on 01 Jan 2008 by Darren Stokes
This is number 5 in my series of ridiculous happenings in my software development career. I had left Upstart Consulting and gone out in to the world as an independent consultant. My first project was fairly uneventful but I had just started a new project for a small energy trading company that I wil
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Published on 01 Jan 2008 by Darren Stokes
I am back, after a pause for the flu and the Christmas whirlwind tour. Jetbrains has released ReSharper 3.1. Although it does not contain the C# 3.0 functionality, it does contain some speed increases. Release notes can be found here. If you have recently purchased 3.0, this is a free upgrade. If yo
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Published on 01 Jan 2008 by Darren Stokes
This is number 5 in my series of ridiculous happenings in my software development career. The project for the railroad company was now going full steam ahead but it was becoming quite clear that initial estimates were not close to reality. Interesting technology choices were made like writing the ba
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Published on 06 Jan 2008 by Darren Stokes
Agile development methodologies have become the in vogue thing in software over the last few years. Hardly a month passes when an article concerning agile development does not appear in a major software development magazine or journal. An entire career path has even sprung up - the "Agile Coach&
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Published on 08 Jan 2008 by Darren Stokes
Zed Shaw was a contributor to Rails and Mongrel. I say "was" because Zed has decided that he wishes to distance himself from that development community. Here is his post about it. It is quite long but entertaining. Somehow "Burning a bridge" just doesn’t seem to capture the ess
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Published on 22 Jan 2008 by Darren Stokes
This is number 7 in my series of ridiculous happenings in my software development career. I had been at Tiny Trader for less than a month when the CTO called a meeting to discuss a scheduled upgrade to the accounting system. The plan was that the MS SQLServer instance would be upgraded and the new v
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Published on 26 Jan 2008 by Darren Stokes
Today I am at the BarCamp Texas conference in Bryan, Texas. In contrast to the standard tech conference that you have attended before, BarCamps are attendee driven. The attendees decide what sessions they want to present the day of the conference and nothing is decided in advance, other than the sta
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Published on 27 Jan 2008 by Darren Stokes
The sessions were quite diverse and interesting on the first day of BarCamp. Since most sessions were only 30 minutes, it was difficult for the presenters to go in to much depth. However, 30 minutes is good enough to give a good introduction to a topic you might not know very well and give direction
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Published on 08 Feb 2008 by Darren Stokes
Lately I have been suffering from a severe lack of internet connectivity. I live in a fairly rural area outside of Houston on some property (not in a neighborhood). Living on property has many advantages like neighbors are not right on top you, plenty of room for the kids to play without worrying ab
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Published on 08 Feb 2008 by Darren Stokes
This link comes courtesy of Scott Riggins. I like the part where the guy jumps over the conference table and starts beating on the guy who was talking too loud on the phone. It reminds me of an instance recently when I was in an office where two people just down the hall from each [...]
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Published on 08 Feb 2008 by Darren Stokes
StickyNotes is a VS.net 2008 package that adds notes to solutions, projects, and project items. The information is stored in the solution and project files. This is functionality that I have always thought would be nice to have in Visual Studio. The coolest part of this is that the tool window is no
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Published on 09 Feb 2008 by Darren Stokes
I forgot to include this in my post yesterday but John Robbins, from Wintellect, has announced version 1.1 of.Net Mass Downloader. This handy tool allows you to download all available source code for the .Net framework, all at once. VS.net 2008 will download the code once it is configured, but only
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Published on 15 Feb 2008 by Darren Stokes
Microsoft Patterns and Practices has released a CTP (Community Technology Preview) of Unity, a new DI container. So far, documentation is lacking but hopefully will be forthcoming. It appears future versions of Enterprise Library will utilize this container. P&P is having a workshop next week fo
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Published on 15 Feb 2008 by Darren Stokes
This is the first post in what I am hoping will be a weekly recurring theme to aggregate interesting topics I come across concerning Visual Studio. Koen Verheyen created a macro for optionally attaching debugger to IIS or the web server that ships with Visual Studio. Quite handy. Sara Ford does a VS
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