rails

My Affair with Ruby on Rails

As I’m sure most of you know, I’m a hardcore C#/.NET guy. The majority of my work as been on the web, and I’ve been using ASP.NET since the earliest betas. ASP.NET’s profound effect on web development is still going strong to this

ajax

Getting ActiveTabChanging Functionality from the AJAX TabControl

I have always considered myself to be quite client-side challenged. Having been soured to the thought of JavaScript by all the browser specific code I used to have to write years ago I swore off it and took to server-side development and never looked back. After a year’s hiatus

silverlight

Silverlight 3 ElementName DataBinding Problem

I’ve been using Silverlight 3 heavily for the past few months, and during that time have discovered many things to love and hate. One problem I faced with Silverlight 3 (that I should have blogged about earlier) is something I think many developers may have faced. In the application

c-sharp

Book Review – Manning The Art of Unit Testing

To some, “unit testing” is a four letter word. While it’s unfortunate, the feeling is justified by poor experiences, lack of knowledge, and so on. Personally, I’ve had mixed experiences with unit tests. I’m sure many of you have encountered similar situations. After reading The Art of

silverlight

Silverlight 3 NavigationCacheMode To The Rescue

I’ve been lucky enough to work on a new project for a client involving Silverlight 3 and the Silverlight Virtual Earth CTP. One reoccurring issue that keeps coming up is performance, and I’m always looking for ways to balance functionality with speed. In the app we are loading

ajax

ASP.NET 4.0 AJAX Issues

I’ve been using ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 quite a bit lately in ASP.NET 3.5 applications.  I encountered two issues tonight, and I hope this post saves someone some grief. The first problem has to do with referencing the ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 library within an

ajax

ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 and the ScriptManager Control

I have been using ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 quite a bit lately, as I’m sure most of you are aware from my recent posts. In those posts, I used standard HTML script references to show that ASP.NET AJAX is not reliant upon ASP.NET. I realize that

ajax

ASP.NET 4.0 AJAX - Preview 4 - Data Binding

Throughout the course of my introductory posts on ASP.NET AJAX 4.0, we looked at the new [DataView control][1] as well as the [Sys.Observer class][2], which brings the Observer pattern to plain JavaScript objects. The new ASP.NET AJAX release is very exciting offering powerful new

ajax

ASP.NET 4.0 AJAX – Preview 4 – JavaScript Observer Pattern

In my last post on ASP.NET AJAX 4.0, we took a look at the new DataView ASP.NET AJAX control. We saw that by using a DataView, we could easily bind data with JavaScript or declaratively with a few attributes. In this post, we’ll look at another

asp.net

How To: Adding MVC items to an ASP.NET Web Application

I’ve been experimenting with using ASP.NET MVC inside a standard ASP.NET Web Application (Web Forms).  I really like what’s been released with MVC 1.0 and can see places where existing apps would benefit from the features.  Plus, having just finished Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.

asp.net

Book Review - Wrox Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0

Working primarily on web applications, I’ve focused most of my time on ASP.NET Web Forms since the very early betas. Web Forms were truly a great revolution in the web world. Once I saw the functionality when it first came out (when I was using ::shudder::  “classic” ASP)

ajax

ASP.NET 4.0 AJAX - Preview 4 - Client Templates

A little over a month ago, Microsoft released the fourth preview of ASP.NET 4.0 AJAX. This is the new release of the Microsoft AJAX Framework that will be released with ASP.NET 4.0. We’re getting closer to the RTM release of .NET 4.0 (hopefully later

microsoft-sql

SQL Express 2008 x64 Integration with Visual Studio 2008 SP1

Yesterday I was trying to add a database to the App_Data folder of a simple web application I was creating. During one of my computer re-installs, I didn’t install SQL Express since I normally use a full blown SQL instance, so I really had no need for it.

ajax

My Wrox Blox Books – Now on Amazon!

I just happen to be browsing Amazon today and noticed that my Wrox Blox books are available for purchase on Amazon.com. Pretty cool stuff! They were listed up there before, but weren’t available directly through Amazon until now. For a full description and the table of contents of

virtualbox

How To: Install Windows 7 on VirtualBox 2.1 – Fix Sound, Video and Network adapter

On my previous blog posts, I covered the installation of VirtualBox 2.1 and I went over the step-by-steps to create a virtual machine to host Windows 7. * How to: VirtualBox 2.1 Installation Guide * How To: Install Windows 7 on VirtualBox 2.1 - Create a virtual machine * How

virtualbox

How To: Install Windows 7 on VirtualBox 2.1 – Installation details

On my previous blog posts, I cover the installation of VirtualBox 2.1 and I go over the step-by-steps to create a virtual machine to host Windows 7. * How to: VirtualBox 2.1 Installation Guide * How To: Install Windows 7 on VirtualBox 2.1 - Create a virtual machine I

virtualbox

How To: Install Windows 7 on VirtualBox 2.1 - Create a virtual machine

Today, I will go through the step by step instructions to setup VirtualBox for Windows 7. First of all, You will need to install VirtualBox. Follow my VirtualBox installation guide from a previous blog post if you need the step-by-steps. 1. Clicking on the “New” button in the user interface

virtualbox

How To: VirtualBox 2.1 Installation Guide

In this step-by-step guide, we will install VirtualBox 2.1. This article is the first in a multi-part series on installing Windows 7 beta on a VirtualBox virtual machine. Let’s get started… 1. Get the virtual box binaries and its source code from http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads.

asp.net

ASP.NET 3.5 Charting Control - Formatting Tooltips as Date

I’m sure you all have heard that there is now a free ASP.NET charting control that is an add-on to ASP.NET 3.5. If you haven’t or need one of the bits, check out ScottGu’s blog. I recently started using the component and it’s

review

Gift Ideas for the Geek

Christmas is fast approaching, and often I’m asked what to get a fellow tech geek. There is an infinite amount of things I could write about, but I’ll pick a few items from some popular categories. In this post, we’ll look at three categories, books (“serious” gifts)

.net

jQuery and Visual Studio

Cool Stuff! Microsoft has announced that they will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio going forward. For more information on this announcement, you can refer to Scott Guthrie’s or Bertrand Le Roy’s announcement. It will be licensed under the MIT license (as it is now) and will not

.net

Microsoft Announces Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0

Yesterday, Monday, September 29th, Microsoft announced the next version of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. For even more information on this, September 29th - October 3rd is Visual Studio Team System 2010 week on Channel 9. Microsoft has been busy this week announcing exciting changes, and Visual Studio 2010

.net

Get and Set Properties using .NET Reflection

Introduction I would like to set the text value on a textbox control. It sounds easy enough. First, I would like to create a textbox web control then I would like to access one of its properties “Text” and set the text to “Hello World”. Well what do you need

asp.net

ASP.NET AJAX Page Methods

If you’ve read things of mine, such as my Wrox Blox Hands On ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, or posts on the ASP.NET Forums, you may have noticed I talk about using ASP.NET AJAX Page Methods lots of the time. Lots of developers using ASP.NET AJAX

review

Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 Review

I have been using what can only be described as a wonder in the quest for a paperless office.   Here was my problem, I have countless documents that I consume/produce, for example, bills, invoices, receipts, contracts, etc.  All of these documents end up in various file folders, and things