Last night, I gave my talk on Code Generation and CodeSmith, and I think it went fairly well. I promised I would post the templates I created as well as my slides, which you can get here. The slides are relatively useless. as there's not much details about what I talked about, but there are notes in the powerpoint, so you can get an idea of what I said.There's ......

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Martin Fowler has a post title DesignedInheritence which talks about the reasoning behind only allowing inheritence where the library developer specifies versus allowing inheritence anywhere. The reasoning for only allowing inheritence where the library developer specifies is the argument that library developers are experts and library users aren't. ......

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On Tuesday, I agreed to fill in for a colleague and speak at the next West Michigan .NET User Group meeting, which happens to be next Tuesday (October 10th). It's short notice, but I'm sure I'll have time to throw together a pretty decent presentation on code generation and more specifically, CodeSmith. I thought someone had already done something on ......

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I've been helping a client upgrade from Visual SourceSafe to Team System over the past couple of weeks, and one of our requirements is to ensure that we still have an automated build process. Well, TFS does not have an automated build system out of the box, and finding something has been a challenge. Until now! On Friday, Notion Solutions released TeamCI, ......

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This week, the lead developer on a major open source project, NDoc, resigned. His reasons are valid, if not disappointing (not in him, in the community of NDoc users), but that's not the point. Coming on the heels of this announcement is the announcement about the pending availability of Sandcastle.What's Sandcastle? Well, the preliminary announcement ......

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SSW has a list of 41 rules that they've put out there that can be used as guidelines for running successful projects. I perused the list, and for the most part, they're spot on.One item I hadn't seen was number 5 - about synching up development vs. production web.config settings. SSW uses an approach based on machine name - so if you have a key for ......

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If you've used Visual Studio, and ever switched to SQL Server (Query Analyzer, for example), you've probably wished for Intellisense. I know I have. Now, Red Gate, makers of the best SQL products (besides the server itself) out there, is offering SQL Prompt for free until September 2006. I've downloaded it, and will be installing it soon, considering ......

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Mike Swanson's got the news that all of the sessions from the 72 hour conversation known as Mix '06 is online, and will be for at least 6 months. Time to get the downloaders going. When will Microsoft get on board and start distributing this stuff via torrents?Technorati Tags: Microsoft | Mix06 ......

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Dave Donaldson prodded me this morning to get off my butt and post an update to my previous multi-sorting comparer, and I'm going to do that now. Man, Dave, get off my back!Ok. He didn't prod. He asked if I'd updated it to support Generics, which I had. If you look at the previous one, not a lot has changed, so let's just highlight the changes. First, ......

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And I'll be there! It's at the Watermark Country Club at 6:00 PM. It should be a very good meeting, with Sahil Malik speaking about ADO.NET and John Cripe (of NuSoft) talking about SQL Server 2005.If you're there, say hi. I'll be wearing a black NationalCityHomeLoans.com shirt.Technorati Tags: grdotnet | Sahil+Malik | ADO.NET ......

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If so, then this'll be of interest to you. For those not in the know, Web Content Management is the next version of Microsoft Content Management Server, and should bve a solid replacement.Anyway, if you want to get a look at it before it's released, Andrew Connell will be doing a webcast on April 18th, and he'll go into what's new (everything, it seems!) ......

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I've harped on Visual Studio 2005's website projects quite a bit lately, and I'm going to move to the web application model now that it's been officially released. But, I did want to talk about one last issue I've seen, because it's a doozy.Some background: We have three projects that we're building and deploying. One is at the root of the website, ......

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Mike Swanson is reporting that about 50 sessions from Mix06 will be available online for free - for everyone. Microsoft did the same thing for PDC '05, so I was hoping this was going to happen. Expect to see it in three to four weeks.I spoke with Brian, who was there, and he told me this was the best conference he's ever been to - and he's been to a ......

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We're going through an existing application with an eye on performance. One of the first things we noticed was viewstate. We had quite a few pages that were pretty heavy, so we started looking at what we could do about it.The obvious choice was to reduce the size, but that takes time to determine what can be excluded, and with a lot of pages, that would ......

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After reading my post on how I use virtual machines, Andrew Connell pointed me to an article he wrote about his extensive use of Virtual PC, including how he uses Differencing disks to his advantage. He also says he doesn't see the huge differencing disks that I'd heard about in the past. I'm now rethinking my plan, and when I update my base image to ......

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