Blogs @ IRM

When you are developing both the service and the client it can many times be good to not use the “Add Service Reference” in Visual Studio. Instead the service and data contracts can be defined in a shared class library. There can be many reasons for this, on popping up immediately is that such a solution removes the need to always update the ...

I have an existing web application that contains a couple of WCF services, but today I also wanted to add some pages and decided that I wanted to create them with ASP.NET MVC2. This is the steps I took to get the MVC pages to run just fine in my existing application. First of all I added references to System.Web.Mvc and System.Web.Routing ...

In an add-in for Outlook that I’m developing I wanted to show the built in Color Categories dialog so that the user could choose categories in a familiar way. The categories should be set on an object that is unique for the add-in (aka not for a mail or calendar item). I couldn’t find any way to show the dialog itself and when searching Internet I ...

I hade a really strange problem with a LINQ to SQL diagram today. I added an association between two classes and everything looked perfectly fine in the designer, but there were no code generated for the association. After some frustrating hours I found a blog post written by Bart Lannoeye that saved me. Read it since he also has very claryfing ...

David Hayden has a great Visual Studio 2008 tip about how to organize your using statements and a new setting that let you get rid of the region that default is created around interface members. The region has always irretated me and in previous version I have more than once organized my using statements.

We've been using the static code analysis in Visual Studio in a couple of projects by now, but I have always coded the SuppressMessage attribute myself and totaly missed that it can easily be done by right-clicking on the message. This is great news because doing it by yourself is very errorprone. Read more at the very useful Visual Studio Code ...

The other day I discovered a great new feature in Visual Studio 2008 and that was the Advanced button in the "Add Service Reference" dialog. There are some great possibilities in this dialog as for example to control what type of collection or array taht will be used. In previous versions it have been very difficult to reuse classes ...

Microsoft have updated their artwork in Visual Studio 2008. I blogged about it when they finally started to ship some quality icons that we could use in our applications and now they have added more new good looking icons. If you haven't found the image library it can be found under Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7.

I started to use Visual Studio 2008 for some development when it was released in Beta 2. The projects still targets .NET 2.0 and 3.0, but one nice thing with using VS 2008 is that it is possible to use some of the new compiler goodies. For example there is a new short version of writing properties.public string Context { get; set; }By writing a ...

First time I heard about XAML (pronounced ''Zammel'') was when I first heard about Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Then I also heard about it when Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) entered the scene at the PDC 05. I never understood how XAML was related to WF, since I thought it had to do with the presentation (WPF) somehow. Recently I've ...

The XmlSerializer has some minor, but great new features. A while ago I blogged about how it is possible to affect serialization by creating a class that inherits from SchemaImporterExtension. Another useful feature is the possibility to create an XML serialization assembly in advance, instead of that assembly being created in run-time by the ...

In .NET 2.0 there is a great extensibility point for the wsdl.exe and xsd.exe called schema importer extension. By writing a class that inherits from SchemaImporterExtension and overrides the ImportSchemaType, you can affect how the tools generates the code. This is useful if you have created a class in your service that you want to share with the ...

Back in 1.0 and 1.1 of .NET Framework there was support for having the appSettings configuration in an external file by specifying the file attribute. This was a great feature during development, because it allows each developer to have it's own configuration, for example each developer could control which database (server or local) they would ...

I have seen a lot of developer that only uses the Command Window in debugging to evaluate expressions and variables. The Command Window is somewhat limited in it's feature set for debugging purposes and the Immediate Window is more powerful. You can easily reach the Immediate Window from the Command Window by typing immed. Worth mentioning too, is ...

When upgrading from VS .NET 2003 to VS .NET 2005 the project files get changed, which all of you who have upgraded probably have noticed. VS 2003 will not be able to open VS 2005 project files (at least not VB and C#). What is really cool about the new project files is that they are actually MSBuild project files. The consequence of this is that ...

Most of you might know this already, but I have had a hard time to find it. The shortcut for getting the SmartTag to show in the editor is  Alt+Shift+F10 (same as in Office). Notice though that the SmartTag choices is also available in the right click menu, and for me it's quicker and easier to remember to hit the right click menu key on the ...

Each windows forms control now has a property UseCompatibleTextRendering, that determines if GDI+ or GDI is used to draw text. Setting the property to false will make the control use GDI for drawing text which should lock better and localize better. The Application.SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault(bool) method is a utility function that sets the ...

The RowState property of the DataRow object in ADO.NET is read-only, but from 2.0 of the .NET Framework it is possible to change the state of the row, with two new methods: SetAdded and SetModified. Note though that it is only possible to use this methods of rows where the current RowState is Unchanged or Added.

I have never liked the way VB forced you to write the check for if an object is nothing: If Not obj Is Nothing Then. I think that it is much harder to read, but from now on I can instead write: If obj IsNot Nothing Then.   Speaking about checking if objects are nothing. VB has done a lot of catch up on the functionality offered by C#. One of ...

In the version 1.1 it was a little bit of hassle to get the cursor to be a WaitCursor on all controls in a windows form. Now days it couldn't be easier: myForm.UseWaitCursor = True