.NET 3.5

As a web developer one common request is to make sure that the interfaces we build out for users look the best that they can and also provide users with the best experience both via the keyboard and mouse.  As part of this we will often have areas of conflict.  This post is going to cover one common scenario that will impact users that mi...

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In an effort to start blogging more about the "helpful" items that I have encountered over the years this is one of my first "Quick Tips" related to improving the life of the developer.  We all have had those times where we are tracking down a complex problem within an application and all along the way we have to spend endless time mousing over individual classes to find out what their values are when most commonly we just want to know about one or two key values.  Well in this post, I'll show you a neat trick using the "DebuggerDisplay" attribute to help make this process easier.

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Now first of all, before I get into the true content of this blog posting I do NOT want to start another round of the religious war that always seems to happen when you start talking about the usage of Visual Basic or C#.  The purpose of this blog posting is to put a little perspective into why I choose to work with a specific language for different projects, and the evaluation criteria that I use when making the choice for individual projects.  Yes, I'm a C# MVP, C# is my preferred .NET language, but I'll be the first to admit that there are times and places where VB is a necessary language.  In this article, I'll start out by providing a bit of background as to WHY I'm blogging about this, the evaluation criteria that I use when looking at a project and some other general information that I've found over the years.  Keep in mind the disclaimer found at the bottom of this posting, these are my thoughts, and mine alone, if you don't like them, which I'm sure many of you will not that is fine, but I wanted to put a bit of perspective on my take for the common argument.

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Recently when I was presenting at Tech Days Canada I was preparing some examples of how LINQ could be used to do in-memory manipulations of data to help avoid repeated database calls. In the presentation I showed some quick code samples, and I thought that I would follow this up with a few simple examples here in a blog post. Before I start I wanted to share that the code shown here is actual production code that is being used to run the reporting on MyWebKeepAlive, the keep alive service offered by my company IowaComputerGurus.

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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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