Codebureau - Matt Simner

I was just looking for a way to witch Visual Studio into 'block select' mode - having assumed that it 'must' be possible, and found this pretty useful (albeit old) Visual Studio Tips blog.

My original question was answered here - can't believe it's a nice as holding down alt while you select...

I've been starting to do some 'various' T-Shirt designs on RedBubble.  It's a great site - similar in some ways to Threadless, but a lot more inclusive and encouraging of participation. 

I've made some updates to mattsimner.com, as I thought one page was probably a little light these days - and I also wanted to do a bit of an SEO experiment with cross referencing on all of the sites I update. 

You can see my T-Shirts and other art...

at

or my RedBubble home page

After an extremely long time I've made an update to the DeleteOld console app and updated the CodeProject article.  The original was .NET 1.1 - this one's now 2.0 (I'm not on 3 yet!)

It still does the same things it did - deletes files of a specified age, but now also:

• Allows files to be deleted 'newer' than a certain age as well as 'older'
• Allows files to be deleted based on an absolute date (overriding the timeframe arguments)
• Allows the 'root' path to be preserved if 'remove empty folders' is selected and the path specified is empty.
• Fixed a bug in Arguments parsing regex as noted by dudik
• Changed output datetime format to 'full' rather than specific dd/mm/yyyy as noted by a.plus.01

I had a need for the absolute date, so thought I may as well cover off a few other things. 

Hope it's of some use...

You can also see my other CodeProject articles.

I've probably glossed past this a few times, but it turns out getting SSL working on your dev machine is less painful than you'd think...

1. install iis60rkt.exe from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=56fc92ee-a71a-4c73-b628-ade629c89499&DisplayLang=en on your local machine. It's intended for IIS 6.0 but it works in IIS 5.1.
2. Select custom install if you only want to use SelfSSL. Otherwise, install all.There's a lot of other useful stuff there.
   
3. Select Programs --> IIS Resources --> SelfSSL --> SelfSSL command prompt
4. In the command prompt, you'll see a list of all possible command parameters..
1. Type 'selfssl.exe /V:60'     This indicates the certificate is valid for 60 days
2. Type Y to answer the question "Do you want to replace the SSL settings for site 1 (default website) ?
3. Type 'iisreset' to restart IIS.

If your browser prompts something like 'Certification Authority not recognised' (in Firefox), just put the url in the exception list or override the warnings when viewing the page.
Thanks to Ricky for getting this info together.

I've only recently started using JQuery, but needless to say - it rocks!

for those that don't know it's a Javascript library that's basically revolutionising how you write client-side code.  My reasons to love JQuery.

1. It's open source, well tested and an open design.  This means you write less code and you can rely on functionality just 'working' in different browsers - or gracefully failing if something's not right.
   
2. It's really light (especially when 'packed' - 31kb)
   
3. It's got a strong community with lots of really cool plugins (just take a look before you start developing that 'widget' in flash)
   
4. It plays well with other libraries and code.  you just use it for what you need and plugins sit with other plugins.
   
5. It's obviously gaining momentum, as Scott Hansleman announced Microsoft are going to ship it with ASP.NET MVC and Visual Studio (that's a pretty amazing move from Microsoft).
   

If you're just getting started with it, and you're familiar with Javascript already I'd start with the tutorials.  Some are better than others, but run through the first couple to understand how it works, then scan down the list to find something related to what you need to do.  Typically you'll be wanting to write a plugin, so I found this one quite good for starters.

You should find everything you need in the Documentation

you'll then spend most of your time in the API section, looking for specifics on how to do things. 

Notepad2 is great - no arguments.  It was only this morning I actually got around to 'replacing' the standard notepad.exe with notepad2.exe.  You'd think it was just a simple rename, but Omar Shahine shows the way...

CSS is great, until you're faced with a deadline and a broken IE6 layout.  You get the cowboy gear out and - 'Welcome to Hacksville!'  

There's been a growing trend of CSS frameworks recently as people are obviously crying out for 'something' to save them from the madness. 

I'm trying out the 960 grid system at the moment, as it's not too prescriptive and gives me the flexibility I need.

There's a great review of the best frameworks on adactio.  I'm sure there's one to suit almost every need.  Remember they're just the starting point if you're doing serious design, but they'll take most of the pain away, because the heavy 'hack' lifting is done for you...   

Also - more on Wikipedia (Update: 17/09) - BlueTrip's the way to go - best of several worlds - nice.

Had some fun this morning as we're trying to get a simple framework set up for a web app, that others can understand, using out-of-the-box functionality if possible.  I tried to avoid the normal tendency to put the 'architecture hat' on and overcook it.  If you can't be bothered to read all of this then just scroll to the bottom for the 'take home' on binding against typed datasets with null values.

We started off the prototype with a typed Dataset (including a couple of DB tables, and key relationships between each), a table adapter for each table, and a DetailsView at the front end, bound to an objectdatasource, which in turn talks to a business object that calls the TableAdapter.  That's a lot for one sentence so from top to bottom...

DetailsView --> ObjectDataSource --> BusinessService --> TableAdapter --> Database

This all sounds pretty straightforward, and it is - unless (as in this case) you decide to have your business object pass back a single (strongly typed) DataRow for your front end to bind against.  This seemed reasonable at the time because I only ever want to show one row here.

You'll basically get a StrongTypingException for every null field you try and bind, because by default a null field value will raise an exception when accessed through its generated property. 

We got distracted for a while exploring this as the natural tendency is to think 'ah - I'll make sure it doesn't raise the exception' - treating the symptom rather than the cause.

It turns out that any non-string field in a typed dataset table can't have a default of null (or anything other than 'raise exception').  If you stuff in a _null value directly in the XSD your fields will disappear from the public properties (rather curiously) when you compile - so that's not an 'enterprise' option.

I tried changing the return type in my business method to a generic DataRow to try and force the data binding to NOT use the strongly typed properties (getting warmer but still no dice.  I knew I was missing something really simple...

I then stumbled across a post (bottom of the page) that illustrated databinding will use different methods to bind based on what interfaces it finds.  The binding mechanism basically has no choice but to use the strongly typed public properties on a strongly typed or generic DataRow, as there's no way for it to successfully enumerate the values.  If you bind against almost anything else you'll most likely have no issues (it appears the databinding doesn't rely solely on ITypedList).  We're now binding against a typed DataTable (rather than generic DataView) and all's fine.  If you want (rather) more info on ITypedList then look here.

So...

Don't databind against a typed (or untyped) DataRow!

Useful reference material if you're trying to get a usability focus in your agile projects

http://www.uie.com/articles/best_practices

http://www.uie.com/articles/best_practices_part2

and a bit more from Smashing Magazine

We start with Windows XP SP2 (doesn't really need to be a 'server').  My requirement is to rely on the .NET framework and open source tools - i.e. not requiring a Visual Studio Licence.  We're using .NET 2.0 so everything will be in reference to that.

I assume here that you'll be familiar with the actual software below and just want to get a Build Server up and running without having to install Visual Studio.  If you're not familiar with Continuous Integration then start by looking at Martin Fowler's Continuous Integration article and then the info on CruiseControl.NET, as that's the tool that pulls everything together. 

There's help on each of the sites below for installing and using each of the tools, so I won't go into detail about each one.  The order of the list isn't critical, but you'll probably have some issues unless all are done.

1. Install IIS from Add/Remove Windows Components (used for CruiseControl.NET) if not already present
2. Open up a command prompt and run C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis.exe -i (to install ASP.NET in IIS)
3. Install CruiseControl.NET (1.4) from http://confluence.public.thoughtworks.org/display/CCNET/Download.  NOTE:  If you're using a remote SubVersion repository (as in my case) then you'll need to run the CruiseControl.NET Service as a domain user that has access to the network location of the repository  rather than LocalSystem.  This is because CruiseControl will be using the SVN client to poll for changes. 
4. Install Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 SP1 from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=029196ed-04eb-471e-8a99-3c61d19a4c5a&displaylang=en
5. Install latest SubVersion (1.5) from http://www.collab.net/downloads/subversion/
6. Install appropriate NUnit from http://nunit.org/index.php?p=download (targeting .NET framework 2.0 - I have 2.4.6)
7. Install latest FxCop from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=3389F7E4-0E55-4A4D-BC74-4AEABB17997B
8. Install .NET Framework 2.0 SDK from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=fe6f2099-b7b4-4f47-a244-c96d69c35dec&displaylang=en (you'll need this to get around a NAnt bug whereby it can't resolve an internal property to load the .NET framework)
9. Download latest NAnt from http://nant.sourceforge.net/
10. Download latest NAntContrib from http://nantcontrib.sourceforge.net/ (You'll need this to run MSBuild)
11. To save getting errors when building Web Projects (and other types) the easiest thing is to copy c:\program files\msbuild from your dev machine to the build server (otherwise you'll have to alter the path of where the targets are in each project).

Once you've got all of these set up then you'll be able to add some builds to your ccnet.config file ( most likely c:\program files\CruiseControl.NET\server\ccnet.config)

Test CruiseControl's happy by going to http://localhost/ccnet It should come up OK but basically show 'no projects'.

I'm not going to go into detail about setting up the builds here but may cover that in a follow up article, as it requires some more setup with SVN and a 'standard' project structure (to get benefit from reuse of build scripts).  If you're still with me then I'll share one last thing which might help... 

Some people choose to have NAnt in a standard place and just reference it from the PATH, but I now use the power of svn:externals to drag in NAnt, NUnit and other common external dependencies like MS Enterprise Library from a shared SVN location to each project.  This means you just get latest of a project and it has 'everything' needed to build - no installations or assumptions about locations of tools.