Net

Testcontainers is a relatively new library that can help a lot with working with resources like databases by using containerization. From the website: "Testcontainers is an open source library for providing throwaway, lightweight instances of databases, message brokers, web browsers, or just about anything that can run in a Docker container."

I just wrapped up my CodeStock presentation on a Brief History of (.NET) Threading. I attempted to cover the last 10 years of threading in .NET starting from .NET 1.0 all the way to today. So, think Thread, BackgroundWorker, ThreadPool, IAsyncResult moving forward to Task and async/await.

So, I've been playing around with ASP.NET vNext... which sounds funny, because I haven't actually written any ASP.NET code yet. It's all been straight console applications so far. I guess it'd be more fair to say that I've been digging into the new KRuntime that ASP.NET vNext will be running on.

Microsoft has made strides in the realm of multithreading in the last few years by introducing things like the Task Parallel Library and now async/await support in C#. I thought it would be interesting to share some of my experiences in converting an existing WPF application over to use async/await.

Ah, timeouts. At my previous job, I wrote quite a bit of code that dealt with threading. When dealing with threads, asynchronous operations, and performant UIs, you can't always rely on callbacks to get you the results of some asynchronous operation. Sometimes you also have to throw in some waits, particularly if the UI gets to a point before the callback has happened. Whenever I did have to write any code to wait for something (usually off an AutoResetEvent or a ManualResetEvent), I never wanted to actually specify a timeout. What would my application do if it timed out? Would I retry again? Would I just show the user an error? Instead of dealing with that question, I just made the wait last for the default... which in most cases is INFINITE.

I know what you're thinking... "did he just say 'binary data'? Like, 1's and 0's?" Well, yes, yes I did. If you're like me, the last time you actively had to do anything with straight binary data was in college when you were learning how to convert between binary to hex to decimal and back again. I would imagine that most of us run into hex somewhat frequently, but that we don't actually have to deal with binary data as often.

I don't usually do blog requests, but then again, I don't usually get blog requests. I've got a few friends that I email back and forth with regarding technology, programming languages or whatever else piques our interests. This particular time, my friend was complaining about the switch statement in C# versus VB.NET.

Almost 2 years ago a few guys in the Fort Smith area decided we needed a .NET User Group here. We've fairly consistently had a good 20 to 30 people show up to every meeting since then.

In-depth real world walkthrough of WinDbg to solve an issue I ran into at work.

I've been attempting to learn NHibernate lately. One of the big draws for me was the ability to write unit tests that did hit a database, but an in-memory one.

If you've been writing .NET applications for a while, you're likely aware that you're not supposed to just throw Exception.

Article on how to add design-time data to WPF.

Just sharing a LINQ statement I wrote to move newer files from the network to a local directory

How to programmatically add EventSetters in WPF

This will be my first time to go to Tech Ed, so I'm excited. I've only been

A series of code snippets showing how I learned that I was incorrectly using Mutex

I've found myself wishing that I could pass in more than two arguments to Path.Combine.

I couldn't find this information anywhere (yet), so I thought I'd share this. If you're already using the \_NT_SYMBOL_PATH setting to download symbols from Microsoft and you want to download the symbols and source for the .NET Framework, you can set the environment variable up like so

VB.NET does not support multi-line lambda expressions.

I'm close to finishing up some work on one of my first true TDD projects and it has gone great for the most part. It did take a long time to get started though. The hardest part for me was fighting the urge to just open the designer and start dropping controls.

Rhino.Mocks 3.3 has been released

Supporting Windows 2000 and some oddities encountered

I'll be going to the .NET Roadshow 2007 in Dallas!

I was messing around with some unit tests this week and I came across an unexpected benefit while working on code that worked with a COM object. When you add a reference to a COM library in .NET, you'll get an interface as well an implementation of that interface that forwards the calls to the COM objects.

Read the docs. Pay attention to what you're doing.

IronLisp, IronRuby, IronPython, IronXSLT, etc.

I work with the WebBrowser control that was introduced in .NET 2.0 (as well as the ActiveX browser it is based on) a lot at work. As a result, I've come to learn a lot about some of the various intricacies that Internet Explorer has as well as the browser control in general.

Be careful with remoting calls... you might end up blocking threads

Silverlight won't be using CAS, but a more simplified security model

XML Serialization can occur at runtime on demand or at compile time depending on a setting

Notes from using the WebBrowser control (new in .NET 2.0) and issues with the IDocHostUIHandler interface

Remoting, serialization, and cross .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0 communication issues

The actual output for Double.NaN if you ToString it

How to pull image metadata with WPF

The difference between BrowsableAttribute and DesignerSerializationVisibilityAttribute.

Hawkeye, which lets you attach to any running .NET process and inspect .NET controls.

I wanted to put out a quick post to say thanks to Dave Reed and his Infinities Loop blog.

How to create a thumbnail with .NET

In one of my projects at work, I ran into a situation where Visual Studio 2005 didn't recognize my designer files (i.e. MainForm.Designer.vb) so all of the serialized designer code was getting stuck in a new InitializeComponent in my code file (i.e. MainForm.vb). Of course, because my Designer code was a partial class, I got an error out of it. In my experience, this behavior is sort of obscure, but here is an easy fix.

How to read image metadata programmatically

Bugs in your code can result in errors in Visual Studio... but you can check it with DesignMode

NDoc 2005 is up on SourceForge and supports .NET 2.0

A short summary of BindingList

System.Threading.ManualResetEvent provides an easy way to allow cross-thread communication and to let other threads know when something has completed. Most of the time that I've needed it, I have a property in a class that is loaded in another thread, but I want to prevent access to the property until it is loaded. From what I've seen, this is a great time to use the ManualResetEvent.

We were working with partial classes recently at work and we came up with a best practice usage for naming them, at lease for our needs, and I thought I would share it with you.

Updates to Outlook 2007 mean that the Trusted Access dialog goes away

Simple app I wrote to learn XPath a bit

Using the Object Browser in Visual Studio to find the right exception to throw

A short discussion on the .NET error, "Object does not match target type"

A short post on checking for visual style support when porting from .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0

A short discussion on the Visual Studio error, "The designer loader did not provide a root component but has not indicated why."

Some notes on using BackgroundWorker

Example of a custom MSBuild task

How to use ShellExecuteEx from VB.NET code using PInvoke

I had a disk crash at work

Complaining about VB.NET and its predicate and closure support.

Another release of FileHelpers

Sharing links to explain how event validation works.

Visual Studio and lots of time in Garbage Collection

More notes on the FlowLayoutPanel

Sharing how ActiveControl works in .NET.

Notes on coding against Exchange, MAPI and more from .NET.

Sharing links to resources that show examples of using generics in .NET 2.0.

Various approaches to accomplishing thread-safe GUIs.

I've been experimenting with the FlowLayoutPanel. There are a few catches to using it that can cause some confusion. In my case, the confusion came from anchoring and/or docking.

Issues Using FtpWebRequest and FtpWebResponse

Here is a little gotcha with some changes to the way that .NET 2.0 handles COM interoperability.

Short introduction to FileHelpers

Introduction to FileHelpers library

Infragistics Installation Error around "Tools.InstallCommunityControls" is not valid

Discovering how I was misusing ManualResetEvent and property getters from the Windows Form designer.