Moke Blog

Pluralsight On-Demand - LINQ Fundamentals

rmokros@mokesit.com — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 05:52:14 GMT

I just finished the Pluralsight On-Demand - LINQ Fundamentals series today by Scott Allen. Some of my take aways are

it is important to understand difference between IEnumerable and IQueryable
LINQ provides a much better API for working with XML, yippy...
LINQ to SQL looks cool, but I probably will not use it since Entity Framework seems to be the Microsoft supported option going forward.
ADO Data Services makes it very easy to create a Restful webservices layer over your data. Although I am not convinced this is a still a simple solution when you start to operationalize the services with some authentication and authorization.

I am excited about applying LINQ to some projects I have been working on and how LINQ can provide more elegant code.

PluralSight On-Demand

rmokros@mokesit.com — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 04:29:59 GMT

With recession in full swing, what are you doing to maintain your edge? Being a Pluralsight subscriber for sometime, I decided to try the Pluralsight On-Demand product to keep my skills sharp. I especially like the play back speed where I can accelerate the delivery of content essentially doing a session in 1/2 the time.

Visual Studio CollapseAll Macro

rmokros@mokesit.com — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 17:14:11 GMT

I found this macro on CodeProject, and I use this macro extensively for collapsing complex solution structures. The version I use is a modified version found in the comments rather than the article itself. This macro collapses all elements in a solution. You might find it as handy as I did.

To use the macro, in VS goto View-> Macro Explorer. Create a new module by copying the contents of the macro below, then add a toolbar button that executes the macro.

Imports System
Imports EnvDTE
Imports System.Diagnostics

Public Module CollapseAll

Sub CollapseAll()

        ' Get the the Solution Explorer tree
        Dim solutionExplorer As UIHierarchy
        solutionExplorer = DTE.Windows.Item(Constants.vsext_wk_SProjectWindow).Object()

        ' Check if there is any open solution
        If (solutionExplorer.UIHierarchyItems.Count = 0) Then
            Return
        End If

        ' Get the top node (the name of the solution)
        Dim rootNode As UIHierarchyItem = solutionExplorer.UIHierarchyItems.Item(1)
        rootNode.DTE.SuppressUI = True

' Collapse each project node
Collapse(rootNode, solutionExplorer)

        ' Select the solution node, or else when you click
        ' on the solution window
        ' scrollbar, it will synchronize the open document
        ' with the tree and pop
        ' out the corresponding node which is probably not what you want.

rootNode.Select(vsUISelectionType.vsUISelectionTypeSelect)
rootNode.DTE.SuppressUI = False

End Sub

Private Sub Collapse(ByVal item As UIHierarchyItem, ByRef solutionExplorer As UIHierarchy)

For Each innerItem As UIHierarchyItem In item.UIHierarchyItems
If innerItem.UIHierarchyItems.Count > 0 Then

' Re-cursive call
Collapse(innerItem, solutionExplorer)

                ' Collapse
                If innerItem.UIHierarchyItems.Expanded Then
                    innerItem.UIHierarchyItems.Expanded = False
                    If innerItem.UIHierarchyItems.Expanded = True Then
                        ' Bug in VS 2005
                        innerItem.Select(vsUISelectionType.vsUISelectionTypeSelect)
                        solutionExplorer.DoDefaultAction()
                    End If
                End If

End If
Next

End Sub

End Module

Visual Studio CollapseAll Macro

rmokros@mokesit.com — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 16:27:45 GMT

I found this macro a while back on CodeProject. I use this macro extensively for collapsing complex solution and project structures in Visual Studio. This macro collapses all elements in a solution. You might find it as handy as I did.

To use the macro, in VS goto View-> Macro Explorer. Create a new module and paste the contents of CollapseAllMacro as the module. Then, add a toolbar button that executes the macro.

Imports System
Imports EnvDTE
Imports System.Diagnostics

Public Module CollapseAll

Sub CollapseAll()

        ' Get the the Solution Explorer tree
        Dim solutionExplorer As UIHierarchy
        solutionExplorer = DTE.Windows.Item(Constants.vsext_wk_SProjectWindow).Object()

        ' Check if there is any open solution
        If (solutionExplorer.UIHierarchyItems.Count = 0) Then
            Return
        End If

        ' Get the top node (the name of the solution)
        Dim rootNode As UIHierarchyItem = solutionExplorer.UIHierarchyItems.Item(1)
        rootNode.DTE.SuppressUI = True

' Collapse each project node
Collapse(rootNode, solutionExplorer)

rootNode.Select(vsUISelectionType.vsUISelectionTypeSelect)
rootNode.DTE.SuppressUI = False

End Sub

Private Sub Collapse(ByVal item As UIHierarchyItem, ByRef solutionExplorer As UIHierarchy)

For Each innerItem As UIHierarchyItem In item.UIHierarchyItems
If innerItem.UIHierarchyItems.Count > 0 Then

' Re-cursive call
Collapse(innerItem, solutionExplorer)

End If
Next

End Sub
End Module

Internet Explorer "Operation Aborted" when testing with WatiN

rmokros@mokesit.com — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 18:52:38 GMT

This article talks about how to fix the "Operation Aborted" error that occurs sporadically when testing ASP.NET applications with WatiN.

Unit testing ASP.NET applications with WatiN links

rmokros@mokesit.com — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:25:41 GMT

This article references some important links found while attempting to leverage WatiN for unit testing an ASP.NET application.

TortoiseSVN ignore list

rmokros@mokesit.com — Wed, 21 May 2008 13:55:52 GMT

Here is my Tortoise SVN configuration and ignore list.

*.cache bin obj *.suo *.obj *.pdb *.exe *.dll *.csproj.user

Here is a snapshot of my current configuration. Notice, I also selected to use _svn instead of .svn. This just works better with Microsoft tools.

Faster builds when using TortoiseSVN

rmokros@mokesit.com — Fri, 16 May 2008 00:21:13 GMT

On my current project, we are using subversion and, naturally, TortoiseSVN. One thing that bugged me was that it slows down the build process in Visual Studio to an unacceptable level. I have excluded the root of my c drive like so c:\* but performance is still unacceptable.

So, I found myself killing the TSVCache.exe process before each build. So, my quick fix was to add this command as a pre-build event in my project.

taskkill /T /f /fi "imagename eq TSVNCache.exe"

This command kills the TSVNCache process and any associated child processes. Don't worry about Tortoise not working, the next time you checkout or commit some changes, TSVNCache will restart.

In my scenario, killing the TSVNCache process prior to building made my builds significantly faster.

Using SED to convert ASP.NET 1.1 pages to 3.5

rmokros@mokesit.com — Mon, 12 May 2008 12:52:00 GMT

Using SED to drive your ASP.NET 1.1 to 3.5 upgrade

VS2005 - Customizing Code Snippets

rmokros@mokesit.com — Wed, 23 May 2007 17:48:00 GMT

In Visual Studio 2005 when you right-click on a method and select "Generate Method Stub" the following code is generated.

public bool IsDogLoose()

{

throw new Exception("The method or operation is not implemented.");

}

Wouldn't the generated code look 'nicer" if it just threw a "NotImplemented" exception like this...

public bool IsDogLoose()

{

throw new NotImplementedException();

}

Although this might seem petty, it is pretty cool to note that you can customize any of the standard code snippets by opening the appropriate code snippet in your favorite xml editor. You can find the code snippets here

c:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC#\Snippets\1033\Refactoring\

The code snippet for GenerateMethodStub is called MethodStub.snippet and looks like this.

http://schemas.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/2005/CodeSnippet">

            Method Stub - Body
            Snippet for generating method stub with a body
            Microsoft Corporation

                Refactoring

                    signature
                    signature


                    Exception
                    SimpleTypeName(global::System.Exception)


                {
  $end$throw new $Exception$("The method or operation is not implemented.");
}]]>

Ah, I think I can figure this out now. Change $Exception$ to $NotImplementedException$.

There you go... Customize the snippets to your liking...