.NET 2.0

I am again traveling this week, in Toronto speaking at Tech Days Canada 2009, and as luck would have it I needed to complete some work on a few custom DotNetNuke modules for clients on a "Urgent" basis.  So this afternoon I darted off to the speaker room to get an internet connection, just recently I re-formatted my laptop to move to Windows 7, one of the main reasons that I needed to re-format the system was to create an environment that matched my primary development machine, today was the first true test of this new configuration.  Thankfully everything worked as expected and all issues were resolved.  In this blog post, I'll explain a bit as to why it is important when working on multiple environments to have consistent system configurations.

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I have often found that when debugging applications that a lot of time is spent drilling down into the various custom objects to see what the values are of specific instance methods.  In this blog posting I will demonstrate the default behavior of Visual Studio when debugging a class, I will then show how you can improve the debugging experience with the addition of a simple attribute.

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A very common question that I get asked by people is; what tools do you use to complete your development and what type of system do you use.  Now, I believe I have written a bit about this in the past, but I thought I would take some time to go through and give a bit of a detailed overview of what I use for development and why I have selected the hardware and software that I have.  I will cover this in detail from both the hardware and software point of view.

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My last blog article "Selecting the Right Source Control Provider" touched on the evaluation criteria that I use when looking for a source control system. This article is a review of sorts of SourceGear's Vault product, my preferred source control system. I'll start by reviewing vault as it relates to the criteria from the previous article, I will then provide my overall feedback on my experience with Vault.

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One of the most common questions that I have been getting recently has been "what source control provider do you use and why?".  This article is the first in a series of two articles about source control.  This article takes a quick look at criteria that I believe is important to consider when it comes to evaulating source control systems for use.  The next article in the series will be a review of the source control system that I use, in relation to the evaulation criteria that I list in this article.

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While working through some issues recently with some legacy code writen by someone else I was faced with a horrible case of a shared object that was writing to the file.  This was a "custom" logging implementation and opened a file for append, inserted the line, and then closed the file.  Well in times of heavy load the system would encounter errors such as "Cannot access ___ because it is being used by another process".  So in effect the file was either still open, or the lock was not yet released.  This post goes through a bit of the detail on how I resolved the issue.

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